Martha Smith and Dr. Stephanie Jenkins join Nana and Kali to talk about their work with Universal Design for Instruction and how to create accessible, creative learning environments for all students.
Martha Smith and Dr. Stephanie Jenkins join Nana and Kali to talk about their work with Universal Design for Instruction and how to create accessible, creative learning environments for all students.
Nana Osei-Kofi 00:08
Welcome to Transforming the College Classroom. This is a podcast for anyone who is interested in taking up teaching and learning in higher education from a social justice informed perspective in ways that are centered on a deep commitment to teaching all students. My name is Nana Osei-Kofi. I'm Director of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination program at Oregon State University. And I'm also Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Kali Furman 00:32
I'm Kali Furman, I'm a postdoctoral scholar with the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program.
Bradley Boovy 00:39
And I'm Bradley Boovy, associate professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State. And co-facilitator with Nana of the DPD Summer Academy, where we work with faculty who are developing and teaching DPD courses.
We're recording this at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, located within the traditional homelands of the Mary's River or Amphinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today living descendants of these people are a part of the Confederated tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated tribes of the Siletz Indians.
Nana Osei-Kofi 01:13
Welcome. Kali and I are here today with our guests, Martha Smith and Stephanie Jenkins. Martha and Stephanie, would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves?
Stephanie Jenkins 01:24
Hi, I'm Stephanie Jenkins. Thanks so much for having us here. I started at Oregon State University as an assistant professor in 2012 after receiving a dual doctorate at Penn State University. So that means that while writing the article that we're discussing today, I was on the tenure track. I am a white woman who experiences multiple disabilities that are intermittent and not very well understood, including reflex sympathetic dystrophy, which is a chronic pain condition and a rare endocrine condition. My teaching and research interests include disability studies, feminist philosophy, and ethics.
On a personal level, in relationship to this article, my interest in disability studies started as a graduate student, as my health was declining in ways that were not understood at the time. I, in a philosophy class, encountered Susan Wendell's text, The Rejected Body. And in this text in which she describes her experience with chronic illness and pain was the first time that I had encountered any philosophical description and analysis of the disabled body.
And I remember not just reading the book and engaging with it and understanding with it, but also sitting with it and crying with it because I felt seen. And so it was in that moment that I decided that I needed to learn more about disability studies. I experienced a significant amount of academic ableism as a graduate student and as an undergraduate student, I didn't understand what those things were until later on in my career. And I gained the language and the conceptual tools for understanding it. But once I did, I took a vow upon myself that I would not permit my students to have those same experiences. So when I became a faculty member, I committed myself to the principles of Universal Design for Instruction, and thankfully met Martha.
Nana Osei-Kofi 03:32
Wonderful. Thank you for such a rich introduction. So many questions already, but first let's hear from Martha.
Martha Smith 03:41
Hi, like Stephanie, I really appreciate being here and being able to talk about our chapter. My name is Martha Smith and I'm the director of Disability Access Services at Oregon State University. And I've been in that position since 2013, but I've been working in the field of disability services for about 30 years. I started in the field when the ADA passed. So my education in part has grown with the development and the evolving nature of the ADA and what it means to provide access and equity to students with disabilities in higher education.
I'm a white woman. I do not experience a disability myself. So my journey has been not only about how to better serve students with disabilities, but also my own journey of how to check my ableism, how to listen to, and be a good ally and be a good collaborator. And I've worked in a variety of higher education settings from small regional college, OSU is a land grant university; I worked at a health sciences university. And so working with students and faculty in a variety of settings.
In all those settings, a constant refrain for those of us on the disability services side is how can we have better relationships with faculty and how do we support students and support faculty because we ourselves are not in the classroom and that relationship between the student with the disability and the faculty is so important. We want it to be a good supported relationship, but we also want to have great relationship with faculty so that when we're not there, and it's not a matter of providing an accommodation, that faculty are still engaging and being creative about how they engage disabled students and all the students in their class for that matter. So it was just such a treat to meet Stephanie and for us to forge this bond as we were both learning about how to better provide access to all students and grow in the universal design concepts. And for me to see somebody actually using those concepts and how they teach and how they operate in their classroom.
Nana Osei-Kofi 06:23
Thank you. And just in listening to your introductions, it's so clear that this was such a powerful collaboration given what you each bring to the project. So thank you.
Kali Furman 06:34
Yeah, absolutely. We're so excited to have you both here to talk with us today about your chapter, which is called “Universal Design for Instruction and Institutional Change: A Case Study.” And so in this chapter, you both talk about how you came to know each other and to work with each other around Universal Design for Instruction. And your chapter offers so many valuable insights for really anyone who's interested in trying to create a more accessible teaching and learning experience. And so could you just say a little bit more about your work together and what you talk about in the chapter in terms of your relationship and working in designing Universal Design for Instruction in the classroom experiences?
Martha Smith 07:14
Absolutely. So this is Martha again, and one of the things that really started the connection for Stephanie and I, was Stephanie contacting me about a student in her class, a student with a disability, a student who received accommodations through our office. And in the course of that conversation, I asked Stephanie a question that I ask lots of faculty, which is, essentially, how do you know a student is competent in what you want them to be competent in by the end of the class, and is there only one way for that student to show that competency? And so often in a class or in a syllabus, there's a test or there's a paper or there's a presentation. And the student only gets a choice of that one thing to show their competency. And so the conversation was, can the student show you another way that they are competent, that they are expressing that they understand the material, they've incorporated the material, they've done the critical thinking of the material, can they only show you that by doing the test or doing the paper, are there other ways that they could do that?
And through that conversation, Stephanie really started to, I would say internalize this universal design way of thinking. And I used that language when I talked to her. And then over the years, we just connected in other areas on the campus and kept growing that relationship. And then she became an example for me that I could direct other faculty to and say, "Here's a faculty member who's really done some great work around this in how she set up her syllabus and how she has given options to students as a way to show their competency and the way she thinks about building her class." And ultimately she and I then partnered on presenting about this to the DPD Academy that's held in the summers. So it was just a great start, and then building of this creativity on both sides. And I think I've learned a lot from her of how I can then give examples and give more oomph when I share with other faculty, because sometimes the power comes from faculty speaking to faculty, not coming from disability services. So having her as a resource has just been a really great option for me.
Kali Furman 10:07
Wonderful. Thank you, Stephanie, would you like to chime in?
Stephanie Jenkins 10:10
Yeah, I'd love to. So those questions that Martha asked me really blew my mind. And part of this is that I'm a philosopher, right, because it really gets to the core of what it means to do philosophy, right, my discipline, when you ask, right, how do you know that a student has met the core competencies of a class? And when I was trained as an undergraduate and a graduate student and to be a professor, right, usually it comes in the form of a long essay, right? At the upper level, you submit a 20-page paper at the end of the term. And then at the lower levels, you have smaller versions of those papers. But when Martha sparked that fire in my brain, I started thinking about, well, why, what's the point of that paper, especially when we haven't necessarily prepared our students for that level of writing, right, or when a lot of the students are coming into the class and English is not their first language, right, are there other ways for them to express the conceptual content? That is the whole point of the class.
So I started having final assignments in which there were options, right, there was the standard essay. There was an alternative assignment that I offered to them. And then there was a third assignment that was a creative assignment in which the students could propose their own final in which they came to me with what they wanted to do. And it had to meet the same requirements for the assignment. Usually, it's that they have to incorporate what I call five conceptual tools that they work into the assignment.
And I have had students submit graphic novels. I've had a student write and record an album about the content from the class. I've had students do painting, short stories, all sorts of things, which if you actually think about it, it is more work to do that kind of engagement with the course content than it is to do the standard end of term essay, right, or exam. And so it wasn't just that one class, right, that Martha got me to mess around with. Now is infected all of my other classes and my students are doing better work and they're learning more because of that universal design intervention. And I think this is one of the best arguments for UDI, is that it's not about students malingering, it's not about them making exceptions for them, it's not about reducing standards. It really is about offering opportunities for students to shine and do their best work. Everybody wins under these scenarios.
Kali Furman 13:13
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing some of those examples. I love that one of your students made an album based on the class. That's fabulous.
Nana Osei-Kofi 13:21
Yeah, definitely. And I have a follow up question to that. Well, first of all, the question of what's the point has stuck with me and it feels like that if we can always have that at the forefront of our minds, we'll be doing better work. What I'm curious about is how your students reacted to this amount of choice or there being a really co-creating their own learning and their own assignments. And I'm asking from the perspective of having seen students at times initially be excited by the freedom that they essentially are being given, but then being socialized in ways where they're so used to the traditional format that there's some fear around doing something different and how it will be evaluated, and if it will be good enough. And so I've seen sometimes when there are choices, even though there's an initial excitement about multiple options where students will at in the end do what seems to feel most comfortable or what seems to be most familiar. So, just curious about how your students have reacted.
Stephanie Jenkins 14:38
That's an excellent question. I have learned through experience that it is very important to give them one very clear, familiar option, right. This is the standard final exam, which is in my class a take home essay because there are students who need that and because it's what they know and it's what they thrive at. And sometimes it's what they want to do, right, that they want to write that 20-page essay, right, they want to write that 10-page essay. Because either it's because it's what they're comfortable with or because they're students who are thinking about going to graduate school and they have an idea that they want to explore. And there's a very specific paper that they want to write.
And then there are students who do get anxious if you give them too much choice. So I've found, right, no more than three options, but the third one is always the this is the proposal. And then I give them a criteria for how they put the proposal forward to me. It has to be done no more than two weeks before the deadline so that they're not rushing at the end of the term. I want to set them up to do well. And I've never had a student do poorly choosing that option because it's clear that choosing it is a choice to do more work. And when they choose it, they're doing it because they have something they're passionate about.
Nana Osei-Kofi 16:17
That's exciting. Great. Super helpful. Thank you. So thinking about your chapter, it has a lot of valuable information, a lot of practical information. And as you both know from having been a part of working with faculty on this campus, through the DPD Academy, there are still a lot of faculty who are not familiar with Universal Design for Instruction. So what I am wondering is, if there are listeners that are not familiar with it, but are excited to engage and or maybe they've read the chapter, but it's still new to them. What are some of the most important aspects of Universal Design for Instruction that they should be thinking about as they embark on this venture, if you will?
Stephanie Jenkins 17:10
This is Stephanie jumping in. So Universal Design for Instruction is a set of principles that build off of universal design, which was originally an architectural concept. And so if you read through our essay, you can get the full list of all of the different principles. But for now I think what I would like to point our audience to is think of Universal Design for Instruction as a value of flexibility and open mindedness towards inclusive education. So if you are looking at something like your attendance policy, ask yourself what role is attendance playing in your course and how is it helping students meeting the requirements and fulfilling their ability to learn the content, right, could it be done in a different way?
And this is also something that we're learning over in the course of the pandemic, right, with everything needing to be so flexible, that maybe attendance doesn't need to be so concrete as we were raised to think that it is. Or in the essay, we talk about a paper assignment that I did in my philosophy 360 course, which is philosophy of art and music. This was a class in which I had a long form paper. And when Martha asked me what role is that paper playing, I realized that maybe my students didn't need to write a long paper. The whole point of that paper was to demonstrate their ability to understand, synthesize and translate a concept from the reading. So I redesigned that assignment into what I now call the conceptual tool kit assignments. And you can find that new assignment in the essay itself if you're interested in it, right, and so just kind of flexibility and open mindedness towards creating a more inclusive classroom is what I would say.
And then the next point that I would say is that if you look at our action points, action point number five is actually just pick one thing and do it, right, it's very, very easy when you're looking at lists of Universal Design for Instruction and interventions that you can make to get overwhelmed and to get so overwhelmed that you do nothing. Pick one thing each term and just do it. And then over time you will find that you have completely transformed your pedagogy. And I'll pass it off to Martha.
Nana Osei-Kofi 20:28
Yeah. Martha, but do you want to add anything?
Martha Smith 20:31
Yeah, I will reiterate that pick one thing. I think over all the years I've worked with UDI, sometimes what happens for faculty is a deer in the headlights kind of experience where the overwhelmingness of it all like, "Oh my gosh, I have to do this all at once." And you don't, you pick one thing. I think the piece I would focus on also is UDI is also about how do you serve the diverse array of students that are already in your class? It came through from a disabilities focus, but really it is about how to better serve all students in your class, some of whom may have disabilities, some of whom will not, but will come from different experiences, life experiences, as a result of different identities that they bring to the classroom.
And so Universal Design for Instruction allows students to better represent themselves in classes and it allows faculty to, as Stephanie said, give some of that flexibility to really see and experience our students truly understanding what it is you want them to understand. And Stephanie is a philosophy professor, so some of the choices and flexibility she gives may look different in other kinds of classes. So in a STEM class, where you have to do some labs, you may not have some of that same flexibility around attendance, but you may have some flexibility in some other things in terms of, for instance, how students present a lab report or how a group works together. So that's where it relies on some of the creativity of faculty.
And the examples in the book are really meant to spark for faculty, here's some ideas to get you started. It's not the end all and be all. UDI is a process, it's not an end point. There's always something you can do from a universal design perspective to make your course or your activities more inclusive. So if you think, well, if I just do this one thing, I can check the box, I've done universal design. It's like, yeah, you've done one piece, but it's an ongoing process. Just like the pedagogy process of learning in faculty learning and learning how to teach better, it's an ongoing process. It's a journey. So I think when people jump on the journey for UDI, just understand it is a journey and pick one thing and dive in. Not to the deep end of the pool, but just right at the beginning so you can have success and feel like you did something which will support you and encourage you to try something else the next term.
Nana Osei-Kofi 23:49
Fantastic. Yeah. I appreciate how much it allows for creativity, which is exciting as an educator.
Kali Furman 23:48
Stephanie, you mentioned the pandemic and thinking about the ways that people have had to adapt and have some flexibility. And I'd love to pick up on that in a follow up question. We've obviously been living underneath the pandemic for the past two years and there was a rapid shift to online learning and hybrid learning over the last year as well. So lots of changes and people having to shift the way that they've really traditionally taught and thought about teaching and learning. And so I'm wondering if you both could talk a little bit about how the pandemic has impacted faculty, particularly around these ideas of UDI and accessibility in the college classroom.
Martha Smith 24:40
Yeah. So I'll take it from the disability services side. Obviously I didn't teach directly in a classroom or over Zoom over the past two years, but some of the observations from faculty and from students, I think some wonderful things happened and some very frustrating things happened. So from a UDI perspective, I think some of the things that were encouraged, like for example, in Zoom, where having the ability and really encouraging faculty to turn on the live transcripts for everybody. And what a difference that made for a lot of people.
It obviously for students who are hard of hearing or deaf, they need that as part of access. But then for students who are single parents and at home, and they had children in the background and not having to squint and just focus on what someone was saying and knowing that the information was there, that they could read it, or when faculty would take those transcripts and post them for everyone in the class, that's a great UDI practice. Because some students need to see those words later and to revisit them and it's information that was shared with everyone. So everyone still has access to the same information, and it's not like it's an unfair advantage for someone or not. It's just access to the information in a different way.
I think the other boundary it pushed was this idea of exams. Are exams the one and only way, again, to check competency? And when everything went to zoom and remote, it really pushed faculty to think about instead having someone sitting in Canvas or in front of a camera doing an exam, what's another way that they could demonstrate to me or to their classmates that they have an understanding of the material? And so I think people got more creative around how could someone show competency because exams didn't work so great in a Zoom remote environment. The attendance issue came up. Did someone have to have their camera on or not, what did that look like?
For some students, the Zoom environment was great and very freeing because they felt like they could participate more. They didn't have to have their camera on. They didn't have to be at their 100% best to walk out of their bedroom, walk across campus and sit in a class, that if they weren't feeling up for that, they could still actually participate in a Zoom environment or a remote environment. For other students, it was awful because they really needed that direct contact with other folks. And Zoom just became a way to space out and it killed the routine of having to get up and walk across campus and how much that helps some of our students. So it, again, reinforced one size does not fit all. And so how could faculty get creative? But a lot of the ways they got creative were actually UDI pieces. They just didn't know that's what they were doing.
Kali Furman 28:18
Great. Thank you, Martha. Stephanie, do you have some thoughts from the faculty side of things?
Stephanie Jenkins 28:22
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I think it's really important to emphasize the point that Martha made, which is that the response to the Zoom world, is and has been mixed and it's individual and disability specific. But one of the things that I really noted is that within the disability studies and advocacy and mutual care communities that I am a part of were the parts of my life that were the least disrupted by the pandemic because there were already ways built in terms of, right, communicating through online environments of having what we would tend to call built in flexible attendance and things along those lines. But then what happened in academic environments is that we had this overnight rapid push to take a face-to-face environment and throw it into a remote environment. And that it's really important to note it was difficult for everybody, but it was an enormous burden on faculty with disabilities in particular.
In addition to the physical and, right, emotional strain of that, one of the things that's important to note, right, and not just for faculty, but also for students, is that a lot of people with disabilities have been asking for things like accommodations for the ability to work from home, to have flexible attendance and have been denied that for a long time. And then all of a sudden when able bodied people needed it, it just happened overnight, right, so there was some disjunction with that.
And then the other thing that happened was increased demand for our expertise, right, because all of a sudden now that the world had been pushed into this environment, faculty with expertise in universal design became an increased need. And so a lot of us experienced a significant burnout, especially in the early stages of the pandemic. Things have leveled out a little bit more now that everybody's become a more confident within Zoom.
But in terms of this broader question about the long-term impacts of the pandemic, right, this is our new normal, right, it's everybody knows how to use Zoom now. Well, not everybody, right, relatively in terms of the higher education within the United States. And now faculty with disabilities, students with disabilities, right, now have the expectation that we can have things like remote participation and attendance. And there's this question of, well, maybe we don't have to go back. [laughter] That's not the only question. There's a lot of them, right, but it's when we go back face to face, what is going to happen to Zoom, right, are we going to continue with the expectation that there's going to be a computer in the classroom and some people will continue in this hybrid environment? That has yet to be seen.
Kali Furman 31:58
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that multifaceted approach to that question from both of you.
Nana Osei-Kofi 32:05
Yeah, and I'm going to pick up actually where you left off continue in the theme of the pandemic, if you will. You were talking about the long-term impact and the ways in which our expectations have changed and starting to reflect on what the future might look like. And so that's actually my question, because there's a lot of talk in the university world today about students now having experienced what was possible during the pandemic, demanding greater flexibility. And so I think the conversations that are happening, especially among administrators is what do we do and how will we respond to this demand for greater flexibility? So if you had to guess or if you were to theorize a little bit, what do you think will happen going forward as a result of these expectations?
Stephanie Jenkins 33:06
I don't have a crystal ball, so I'm hesitant to try to predict the future. But I am an ethicist, and I can tell you what I think should happen, which is that I know that here on OSU's campus that we now have in every classroom, there's a computer that is Zoom capable. And I think that we should continue to have ... this is really going to be unpopular with [laughs]
Nana Osei-Kofi 33:35
Go for it.
Stephanie Jenkins 33:36
That we should continue to have a computer that's running with Zoom while an in-person lecture is taking place. And the reason for that is that that enables flexible attendance to take place in every single classroom on campus with relatively minimal work on top of what is already done to have the regular classroom running.
Early on in my relationship with Martha, I had a student who wanted to record all of my lectures on just on his phone. And it freaked me out. It felt very surveillancy. And then I thought about it for a minute and I realized every single student in this classroom has a smartphone. They could do it without my permission. So how about I just do it myself? I'm in a smart classroom. If I pre-record it myself, I have a copy of the full recording, so if I say something ridiculous and is taken out of context, because I say silly things all the time as a philosophy class, right, I'm always playing the devil's advocate. At least I have something to protect myself and then I can make it available to every student in the classroom. And that's what I did. As I recorded all of my lectures, I put them up on Canvas. And then what I found is that the students actually listened to them.
They used them to study for the assignments, but it also made flexible attendance possible for the students who missed class for work, because they had a sick family member, because they had irritable bowel syndrome, right, I didn't realize how many students were missing class for reasons that I couldn't even comprehend until I looked at the Canvas analytics and realized that they were listening to lectures, right, and that convinced me that it was worth recording them. And then I had them and could make them available for future classes. I've never done this with Zoom, right, this is kind of a new reality. But if we recorded stuff in Zoom, made it available for students in Canvas, imagine the possibilities, right, the pedagogical possibilities that we're creating for our students to learn. Even if they're not just recording that they could log in and listen from home if they're in bed and sick and not able to come, they at least get to feel like they're a part of the class.
Nana Osei-Kofi 36:16
Yeah. Definitely. It's we're creating something to meet students’ needs rather than asking students to fit into arbitrary thing that we've created.
Stephanie Jenkins 36:27
Yeah! It's going to take a little bit of work on our parts because it takes a little bit of a divided attention to get the Zoom up and running, right, but once we learn how to do that, it will become second nature. And then we don't have to worry about it anymore.
Nana Osei-Kofi 36:49
Right. Yeah. Martha, your predictions.
Martha Smith 36:53
Like Stephanie, I'm not sure I'm going to predict, but one of the things I've noticed is we went from one extreme to the other. We went from being all in person to remote. And now we're back to what might an ongoing hybrid model look like. And from talking to faculty who teach in our ecampus division, which is remote learning, but not in real time, that faculty talk about how they had to learn how to teach differently in an ecampus environment. They couldn't just solely rely on I'm going to record myself lecturing and I'm going to post it and then students will engage with that. So I think to Stephanie's point, and I think where Universal Design can really help is this idea of if hybrid becomes the new norm, we actually have to prepare faculty and students for that.
So if you're used to in person and breaking up into groups for students to chat with each other, that's not easy to do if you have half the class in person and half the class in Zoom. You have to learn how to do that, how do you create those interactions for students, which means there has to be support and training for faculty about how to be effective in a hybrid mode if that's the direction we're heading, which I agree with Stephanie, I think ultimately that is where we're heading. But that just doesn't happen by osmosis. Just like that big leap to going to everybody being in Zoom, that was really hard for students. It was really hard for faculty, but it was a one or the other, right, we were in person or we were in Zoom. Hybrid's really different because again, it's not equity if you're doing things in the class and your folks who are attending remotely just get to watch you do those things in class, or just get to watch you lecture.
So it means teaching differently. It means thinking about how you create your courses differently. It means you're creating from the get go the idea of half or whatever percentage of your students being physically there and some of your students not, which means from the inception, you're creating your course differently. And that's what Universal Design for Instruction asks you to do, is not just tweak things, but think about things from the inception and how do you create it to be more accessible. And I think everyone is still in this place of we went from one to the other to we're sort of in the middle and it wasn't created from inception as a hybrid. So people are just still trying to tweak it like, well, is it an in person class that I'm tweaking to be partly remote or is it a remote class I'm tweaking to be partly in person as opposed to how do I think about creating a class from the ground up that's going to serve both those populations of students? That's Universal Design outlook.
Nana Osei-Kofi 40:18
Thank you. Yeah. Plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead is what I'm hearing.
Kali Furman 40:24
You both have offered so many wonderful insights and tips and ideas for all of our listeners. So thank you all for sharing all of your brilliance with us. And I just want to offer, is there anything that we haven't touched on that you want to make sure we highlight in our conversation today?
Martha Smith 40:42
I think one of the things we haven't put a lot of time into in this conversation but I would highlight is that the ability to create the relationship between disability services and faculty can come from either side, and that I would just offer my colleagues from the disability services side to keep reaching out and making those relationships with faculty. And for faculty to not be afraid to reach out to disability services as a thinking partner, just not about how do I implement this accommodation, but how can I think more broadly about being inclusive to students in my class and in what I want to accomplish in my course? And I think that's for me the joy of the relationship with Stephanie, is she was willing to reach out and for us to have conversations, we were both willing to engage in that and grow that. And so ultimately this is about a collaboration, and I think we want to model that this collaboration can happen anywhere at any time if disability services and faculty are willing to step into that void and have that conversation.
Stephanie Jenkins 42:05
Stephanie stepping in. So in addition to what Martha has said, I just want to note how unusual the relationship that we have is, right, that when we were researching for our article, we couldn't find a lot of precedent for the cross unit partnership that we have had, which I find tragic simply because of how productive and intellectually invigorating I have found the work that Martha and I have done together in addition to the social justice work that has happened in my classroom because of the help that she has provided. And it's important to note how our relationship almost didn't happen in the sense that there were so many obstacles to us coming together, right, because I was on the tenure track. I was constantly, right, deterred from working on these sorts of projects because it wasn't research because I was supposed to spend less time in my teaching. Because from within the disability studies community, working with disability services wasn't necessarily something that was looked well upon.
And even if the work that I did with Martha was seen as service, it didn't necessarily fit my job description because it was service that didn't have an academic focus. And so I'm very grateful to the DPD program here at OSU which provided us with the resources and the time and the community to work on this project, because it helped us formalize the work that we have done together. So thank you. If there are academic administrators who are listening to this podcast, please take note. [laughter]
Nana Osei-Kofi 44:06
Right. It's curious what we define as academic and what isn't seen as such. So, absolutely. Thank you both so very much for being here today.
Next episode, we'll be speaking to Drs Marisa Chappell and Linda Richards about their chapter titled, “Show Don't Tell: Teaching Social Justice at the Source.” See you next time.
Bradley Boovy 44:29
We'd like to thank Orange Media Network and their podcast director Jen Dirstine.
Kali Furman 44:34
This podcast is sponsored by the Difference, Power and Discrimination Program. More information on the DPD program, our book, and the transcripts for this podcast are available at dpd.oregonstate.edu.
Nana Osei-Kofi 44:46
Listen to us on any of your preferred podcast platforms. Continuous learning and growth is critical to educators with deep commitments to fostering critical consciousness through their teaching. Join the conversation.