Pedagogy
My Approach to Pedagogy
Starting Point
I became an applied anthropologist out of necessity. As a first-generation college student from a low-income household, my career in higher education has been defined by the need to maintain a parallel patchwork career for subsistence, spanning customer service, manufacturing, education, design, and information technologies.1 The necessity to maintain both career paths in equal measure throughout my adulthood has allowed me to build substantial connective tissue between them, leading to thirteen+ years of experience applying anthropology professionally and the development of a research profile focused on design and business anthropology, innovation culture, and science and technology studies. Although I have flourished out of this necessity, I have also experienced overt discrimination and systemic challenges throughout both of my careers because of my socio-economic class, gender, age, and more. As a white cis-woman in the United States, I experience and have benefited from a great number of privileges that many of my colleagues and students have not. However, my personal experiences of precarity and discrimination have shaped my perception of other’s actions, choices, and performance as not merely shaped by individual agency but as always embedded within multiple, intersecting social and material structures of power and inequality. This perspective has shaped my professional values, motivations, and approaches around empathy, learning, and inclusive accessibility.
Methodological Empathy
By empathy, I do not mean simply an emotional sympathy for others but rather a rational methodology for judgement, decision making, and design that demands attention to and response to differences of ability and access through a form of methodological relativism focused on inclusion and equity. In practice, I have used empathy to evolve my approach to teaching, mentorship, and professional practice. In teaching, empathy has meant critically evaluating my class policies and teaching strategies by assessing them based on how they create exclusionary boundaries rather than on upholding traditional classroom practices and power dynamics. This is similar to responsive design methodologies that reject the classic method of designing for an ideal “end-user” archetype and instead respond to the material, emotional, and social needs of people in ongoing, iterative reflexive practice. For example, through conversations with my students while teaching at USM, I came to see academic writing not as simply "correct" or "proper" grammar and form—as it was taught to me—but as a niche genre of writing that is embedded in historical and structural power dynamics that students are not equally prepared to learn and do not ubiquitously value—particularly as the normative language required for academic writing is used to denigrate and marginalize the linguistics of BIPOC and people from certain regions and social classes. Thus, at RCCC in my next teaching position, I removed the linguistic requirements from my response paper assignments to focus on conceptual and critical learning and then created a semester long, iterative academic writing assignment. This assignment was graded on participation only until the final version was due at the end of the semester. This allowed me to provide non-judgemental linguistic feedback and guidance that suited the needs of each student over the course of the semester. I also introduced the assignment as a form of participant-observation—that is, as a way for students to gain insight into anthropology (and academics generally) by learning the ways anthropologists build arguments and present them linguistically.
Ongoing Learning
This methodology of empathy demands an ongoing commitment to learning, specifically learning from those people who one seeks to empathize with. In my research, this has meant reading widely beyond the traditional cannon of social science that is dominated by primarily white, male, and colonial voices from prestigious and privileged backgrounds. In my professional practice both in academics and in industry, this has meant learning to listen to and support my marginalized colleagues while also taking responsibility for my own education on issues such as racism, LGBTQ+, indigeneity and colonialism, class and poverty, and so on. This commitment extends to building infrastructures, support, and cultures of learning within the communities I am a part of. For example, as a member of the leadership team, I spearheaded the anti-racism archive initiative within the AAA’s committee for the anthropology of science, technology and computing. While many other scholarly societies were releasing statements from leadership in support of Black Lives Matter in 2020, we sought to not only voice support from the leadership but actively engage our three-hundred members in anti-racist research. We believed the key to building a more inclusive community started with us all considering these issues within our research, professional practices, teaching, and activism. For sustained change, we could not rely on a handful of scholars—who are often those most affected by racism and discrimination—to do the work for us. So, to this end, we asked members to get actively involved in the project by seeking out anti-racist resources for their own work and then sharing them for us all to benefit from.
Inclusive Accessibility
Technical accessibility standards require that technology is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. This means the technology should be robust enough that no matter what visual, auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, technical, or other abilities one has, one can perceive all elements of the technology, operate all of its interactive elements, and understand the information it provides. In my work and teaching, accessibility is an ethical imperative that drives my practice. I am a passionate advocate for technical accessibility and have worked to improve accessibility practice and education in the organizations I have worked for. However, in terms of building diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities, I have learned that this standard of technical accessibility is not enough for disabled people or anyone else. Providing access to hostile environments does not remove or reduce the harms of the hostility. Thus, I have structured my professional practices and activism toward inclusive accessibility that is both technically accessible and welcoming to difference through a commitment to empathy and proactive learning.
1 I have been continuously employed since I was 15 years old—except for a two-month break to complete a field school required for my bachelors. That's not a humble brag, it's just context. Everyone should have the opportunity to complete their education with their full attention and energy. When they cannot due to systemic inequality, we should be obligated to recognize their dedication and ambition as equal to their privileged peers.