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 …
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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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 …
In the News / In the Know
This section of my website is a blog (ish) experience. Here, you will see two categories of posts: in the news and in the know. In the news: I'll post periodically about new projects, initiatives, and achievements that I'm excited about. In the know: There comes a point, I think, especially for those of us …
Caitlin Cornell 