This episode features Arley Cruthers and Samantha Walsh as they discuss their experiences as physically disabled instructors and where they see the potential for disability to be a positive disrupter in open education spaces and for students. We discuss the value of difference and making space for diverse bodies and minds, and the assumptions people make about who will be in a particular space or use a resource.
Biographies:
Arley Cruthers teaches Applied Communications at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and is passionate about open pedagogy, disability justice, and open education. She is the creator of the OER textbook Business Writing for Everyone: An Inclusive Guide to Workplace Communications and at the time this was recorded, was is just finishing her term as the Open Education Teaching Fellow at KPU. For her work in inclusive approaches to open, she received an Excellence in Open Education award from BCcampus. Arley has an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has also published several novels.
Samantha Walsh is a scholar and activist. At the time of recording, Samantha was a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Toronto-OISE in the department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education, formerly Sociology and Equity Studies. Her doctoral research is in interpretive sociology with a focus on disability and social inclusion. She holds a master’s degree in Critical Disability Studies from York University, and she completed her undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Guelph.
Show notes:
- Josie’s podcast: Open Knowledge Spectrums
- An Incomplete History of My Teaching Body by Arley Cruthers in Voices of Practice
- Arley’s open textbook: Business Writing for Everyone
- An introduction to Universal Design for Learning
This episode is scheduled for December 7, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. PT. Let’s listen in…