Stephanie Cawthon

Stephanie Cawthon

STEPHANIE CAWTHON, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, Director of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Institute in the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk

What does inclusive teaching mean to you? 

Inclusive teaching means reaching out to the individual students and connecting together as a learning community. Inclusive teaching can be literally physically including everyone in the room, but also psychologically, relationally, and in connection with the course content. This can only happen through intentional design of ways to create and explore the course content at both an individual and group level. 

Please give an example of what thinking inclusively looks like to you in your teaching or your work around campus. 

When the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes thinks about access, it is not simply to provide accessibility services to a single individual who may traditionally be seen as “needing” access. We think about the event, the organization, the organism as a whole. If we expect interaction between individuals with different language modalities to be a naturally occurring part of our events, we do not wait for someone to make a request. Access services are present so that the event is accessible to everyone without individuals needing to make specific requests to attend.