It’s official! The Michigan State University Graduate School has recognized my completion of its Certification in College Teaching Program. (I also completed the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) Graduate Certification in College Teaching - see March 5, 2022 blog entry). I am particularly proud that some of the work I completed for the certificate …
Dissertating: Language Instructors’ Preparedness for Accessibility
Language instructors are often underprepared to address accessibility concerns for disabled language learners. In fact, my own underpreparedness for this type of inclusion in my English language teaching career is what ultimately pushed this longtime teacher to return to research and pursue a Ph.D. I passed my dissertation proposal, and my study is almost underway. …
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New graduate course: Individual Differences and Accessibility in Foreign Language Teaching
It's official! I am wrapping up the development of a course I have designed and will teach this summer for MSU's Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching program: Individual Differences and Accessibility in Foreign Language Teaching. Since I have long believed that disability nests naturally under an umbrella of Individual Differences discourse within second …
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 …
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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Stay tuned! Proposal accepted for Special Issue of Language Testing Journal
My colleague Robert Randez and I are excited to be working on a commentary piece that was accepted for the 2023 special issue of Language Testing which has been dedicated to accommodations in language testing and assessment for disabled students. In this piece, we will first emphasize the importance of adopting appropriate terminology when referring …
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New Article – Assessing Outside the Box: the Open Format Assignment
I, along with my colleague and friend from Philosophy, Dr. Megan Dean, recently compiled our experiences incorporating open format assessment into our undergraduate courses. In this article we wrote for the FLTMAG, we each showcase, in detail, how we have used open format assignments in our courses. We even included rubrics we have used! I …
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