I was recently asked to participate in a panel on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Academic Writing on Michigan State University campus. In my talking points, I drew some connections to the challenges of machine translation for language educators in the late 2000s. Google translate was born in 2006, and as early as 2008, I was …
The myth of fairness
Sometimes unintentional ableism bubbles up in the shape of myths that society tells us about what a learning experience needs to feel like for students across the board. One hesitation I hear often from educators is their concern about fairness to other students when considering what accommodations are "reasonable" for their disabled students in the …
How are US Language Centers Approaching DEI?
I was recently interviewed by Dr. Betsy Lavolette, associate professor in the Department of English at Kyoto Sangyo University, in her endeavor to collect some information on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts in Language Centers in the United States. Dr. Lavolette has done an outstanding job highlighting some of the things language center folks …
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Learning Community: Accessibility for Teaching and Learning in Language Instruction
I'm happy to announce that the Michigan State University Office of Faculty and Academic Staff Development has chosen to sponsor the Learning Community that my colleague Adam Gacs and I proposed for 2022-23. This year, we'll be exploring accessibility and disability-inclusion when it comes to language teaching and learning in various learning environments (in person, …
DEI Graduate Certificate
I just completed a pilot program that I'm particularly proud of: the first iteration of a DEI Graduate Certificate conceived of by graduate students in Human Development and Family Studies (Melissa Yzaguirre and Gianna Gasaburo!) and underwritten by the MSU Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion Creating Inclusive Excellence Grant. This certificate program challenged graduate …
I’m an Inclusive Pedagogy Fellow
I just learned that I was selected to be an Inclusive Pedagogy Fellow (IPF) for the academic year 2022-2023! (The Inclusive Pedagogy Fellows Program is a subcommittee of the College Inclusive Practices Committee). For a couple of years now, I have been developing disparate pedagogical elements related to the teaching of accessibility for additional language …
Navigating group work when one member is disabled
A colleague asked me a really excellent question last week. How should an instructor scaffold group work expectations when there is a disabled member in the group? There are a number of ways to approach this, and how you proceed will depend on the needs of the students, your relationship with them, what if any …
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College of Arts and Letters Graduate Certification in College Teaching
It's official! I have completed the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) Graduate Certification in College Teaching. This personal achievement is all the sweeter because of how it positions me to help other MSU students. I'm really excited to be able to pay this experience and schema forward in order to help mentor other CAL …
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Can “best practices” in language teaching create barriers to accessible learning?
Here's a doozy of a question I encounter often in my work: is it possible that any learning barriers for disabled language learners are actually erected unwittingly by language teaching strategies that we consider "best practices”? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. One example is how the visual turn has manifested in language teaching …
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Progress, not perfection
Remember, when we're trying to improve accessibility and disability-inclusion in our courses it's good to aim for progress, not perfection. On the one hand, anything less than 'perfect' might be inaccessible, yes. But don't overwhelm yourself thinking you have to fix everything overnight, particularly if you don't have a lot of institutional support. If you're …
Caitlin Cornell 