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./p>
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. In my professional practice both in academics and in industry, this has meant learning to listen to and support my colleagues and students while also taking responsibility for my own education. This commitment extends to building infrastructures, support, and cultures of learning within the communities I am a part of.
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, I have learned that this standard of technical accessibility is not enough. 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.