Teaching

Disability Issues – In the classroom and online

2017 – 2020

This course examines disability issues within a socio-political context. Such a perspective contends that it is not the specific type of disability condition which is the major source of disadvantage to the individual but the response that this condition evokes from the larger society. This course will challenge some of the traditional (and damaging) assumptions made about the needs of people labelled as being disabled and will present a framework for policy and practice designed to promote empowerment and inclusion.

Writing Bodies Differently

2017-2018, Updated course for online delivery 2020

This interdisciplinary course brings together novice and experienced learners from various backgrounds to explore disability/the body, and to experience response writing, social media writing, creative writing, and creative nonfiction. This course attends to writing as a form of investigation, expression, inquiry, resistance, and solidarity. Students explore how writing changes depending on context, and engage in the experiential actions of investigating their topic of choice, re-writing, editing, and exploring different representational forms as an activism method.

Disability Discourse: The Experienced Life

2018 – 2020, some sessions co-taught with Fran Odette

This course invites students to explore disability and identity, through the social and political lens that goes beyond impairment. Disability and identity are concepts that relate to the everyday lives of disabled people and people with disabilities. Students will examine the impact of power inequities, inclusion/exclusion and marginalization using an intersectional, social justice, socio-political perspective. Students will examine the ways that disabled people people with disabilities are disadvantaged in society, not because of their particular impairments, but because of the ways in which social institutions define and respond to their conditions.Through the analysis of first-person narratives, students will be able to reflect on the lived experience of disabled people, in order to critically examine the intersection of how we, as a society, view disability and identity. A key component of this course is the reflection on the histories of disability and its comparative position in social, economic, and civil movements. Students will learn about resistance, advocacy, arts, cultural liberation, and empowerment.