Category: first day

Show Notes

• Neuhaus, Jessamyn (forthcoming, 2022). Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. West Virginia University Press.
• Wordgathering
• Wells-Jensen, S. (2018). The Case for Disabled Astronauts. Scientific American.
• Smith, K. C., Abney, K., Anderson, G., Billings, L., Devito, C. L., Green, B. P., … & Wells-Jensen, S. (2019). The great colonization debate. Futures, 110, 4-14.
• Wells-Jensen, S., Miele, J. A., & Bohney, B. (2019). An alternate vision for colonization. Futures, 110, 50-53.
• SETI Institute
• Mission: AstroAccess
• Baruch Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology

Transcript

John: Faculty that fit the cultural stereotype of a white male professor are often presumed authority figures in the classroom. Faculty that do not conform to this stereotype can face challenges in acquiring student acceptance of their expertise. In this episode, we discuss the role the first day of class can play in addressing these challenges.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Sheri Wells-Jensen and

Emily: K. Michael. Sheri is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Bowling Green State University.

Emily: is a poet, musician, and writing teacher and is the poetry editor for Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature at Syracuse University. Sheri and

Emily: co-authored with Mona Makara a chapter in Picture a Professor entitled “How Blind Professors Win the First Day: Setting Yourselves Up for Success.” Welcome,

Emily: and Sheri.

Sheri: Hello.

Emily:: Hello.

John: Thanks for joining us. Our teas today are…

Emily:, are you drinking tea?

Emily:: I’m not, I’m drinking water.

John: And Sheri?,

Sheri: I am not drinking tea, I wish that I were. If I were it’d be some awesome lavender thing,

Rebecca: …which would be very nice. I have Scottish breakfast today.

John: And I have English breakfast today.

Rebecca: Before we get started talking about your chapter,

Emily: and Sheri, you do such really interesting and fascinating work. Can you share a little bit about some of the things that you do in your scholarly and creative activity?

Emily:, do you want to start?

Emily:: Sure, I got my masters and my bachelor’s degree in English. And I always knew that I wanted to teach English. But I didn’t start writing creatively until I finished my master’s program. And I kind of looked into the great abyss of what am I going to do with my life. And professors suggested that I start writing creatively. So I did, I started writing essays. And I had the first couple of pieces accepted for publication, and it really encouraged me. So I didn’t really attempt a lot of scholarly work, although my interests were scholarly. I’m very fascinated by disability studies, by environmental literature, and by how music affects people mentally, physically, emotionally. So as I continue to teach at UNF, I continue to publish essays and poetry mostly and I started doing some reviews. And then I was an associate poetry editor for WordGathering, which is located at Syracuse University. So that has been really exciting to be able to read and review and encourage up and coming and experienced disabled poets as well.

Rebecca: It’s been nice reading some of your work recently,

Emily:.

Emily:: Thank you.

Rebecca: How about you, Sheri?

Sheri: I started off as a young person wanting to go into astronomy and physics, and kind of a long, winding path later, I was in the Peace Corps, and was just smitten by the genius that was my Spanish as a second language set of teachers. These women, I just thought they were the most amazing people I’ve ever met. And I wanted to be just like them because they were brilliant, and they had technical knowledge, and they were super intuitive, and I was just amazed by them. And so my studies became linguistics, and I got a PhD in linguistics. And then my first year working at Bowling Green State University, our department chair asked me as new faculty what I’d like to teach in the summer. And I just reached randomly into my mind and said, I would like to teach a class in Xenolinguistics, combining astronomy and linguistics. And what would an alien language be like if there were an alien language? And instead of saying, “That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said, “Oh, okay, go do that thing.” [LAUGHTER] Which meant for my first year, I was desperately scrambling to prepare that class and figure out what it was I would say about that, and what that would all be like. And so that landed me on another long trip, which has placed me in this remarkable position of studying the intersection of astrobiology and disability studies. So what would your mind and cognition be like if you had a totally different body in a different environment on a different kind of planet? And how would that affect your language? And then how would that affect your mind? And to some extent, then, could we ever communicate with beings like that, which also led me thinking about humans in outer space, and disabled people traveling into space on commercial and governmental space vessels.

John: Each of you and your co-author come from very different disciplinary approaches. How did you come together to write this chapter for Picture A Professor?

Sheri: So I saw the call for papers. And I thought, “Oh, this is so cool, because I think a lot about pedagogy, obviously.” And I think a lot about what it is I have to do differently, since I’m blind, what it is I have to do differently than other faculty and how that’s similar and how that’s different. And I started thinking about writing it myself. And then I thought, “Yeah, but I’m only coming from this small place of my own experience and my own discipline.” And so I was thinking, who are fabulous people that I could get to co-author this with me. And I thought immediately of both Mona and

Emily: as people who are in very different disciplines, Mona, being a chemist, and

Emily: being more on the creative writing end of things and I thought, “Well, let’s see how our experiences might complement one another.”

Rebecca: Can you tease us a little bit about your chapter in Picture a Professor?

Emily:: We had so much fun putting this together, we all got together on a zoom call, because of course, it was COVID time. And we all just started sharing stories, what happened to you? what happened to you? Oh my god, that happened to me too. So I really think it was cathartic for all of us to share that we all had the same bad experiences, but also that we all found workarounds to deal with negative experiences in the classroom and to deal with the inaccessibility of most classrooms. But we started from a place of gathering common experiences. And most of them, I would say, when we started to narrow it down to first day of instruction, it was that we walked in, and students thought “that’s not my teacher,” or “that couldn’t possibly be my teacher,” because we all talked about how we look so different. So Sherry uses a white cane. I use a guide dog, but I haven’t always used a guide dog. And we’re all different ages. And then when you walk in, and you’re visibly disabled, the students think that your lost, most of them will say, “Oh, can I help you find a seat?” And I’m like carrying a huge pile of photocopies like, “I’m the teacher, here’s the syllabus,” and they’re shocked. And so we really thought, let’s focus on the first day, and really talk about how we negotiate those impressions of us that are so off because again, for most students, we’re the first blind person they’ve ever met. And they’re just shocked that we would be allowed to teach. And then it’s like, “Oh, this isn’t a class about Braille. So what are you doing here?”

Sheri: Right, exactly. And then our philosophy on managing first- day scenario is much like you might hear anywhere else, except that this is not optimal for us… if we want to survive and want our classes to go well, we’ve got to deliberately engage with the narrative and take control of it. So we can’t let students decide what the class is going to be like. We have to decide what the class is going to be like, and with firmness and respect and lovingness. And let me go back to firmness. [LAUGHTER] Tell the students “This is how it’s going to be. Listen, friends, this is how the class is gonna go. Love ya. Pay attention. We are going to have to change your focus here.” And we want to be in a place where disability is neither central to the conversation nor taboo, and negotiate that… not so much that we’re negotiating who we are. But what we’re doing is taking the students, meeting them to some degree where they’re, at with the understanding that they might think this is weird, and explaining that, “Okay, it’s not weird, you’re going to be fine. Welcome to the ride.”

Rebecca: Here we go. It’s the adventure of the semester. Can you share maybe a tip that you talk about in the chapter?

Sheri: One of the things that we talk a lot about, which is necessary for us as blind people, is the preparation of the physical environment. So when I teach in a new classroom, I go there in advance, I scope it out. And this is part sort of grounding myself and part getting in touch with the physical environment. So I go into the class ahead of time, I take one of the seats, and I sit there and I think, “Okay, this is the perspective of the student, this is where they’re going to walk in, they’re going to take one of these seats. What’s this room like?” And that sort of helps me to ground myself, take a few minutes to breathe. And then I also kind of do the search, I kind of check around: Where’s the fire extinguisher, If there is one? Where are the windows? Where are all the exits? What is the arrangement of the seats? Do the seats move? I answer all those questions for myself. So that just like when my kids were little, I knew my physical environment so well, that whatever noise they made in the room, I knew what made that noise. That’s how my toddler survived, [LAUGHTER] ‘cause kids get into everything. So the way that I made sure that everything was safe for my toddlers was that I knew what was in my room and where it all was, so that when the kids did something, I’m like, “Oh, I understand that you are now messing with thing X.” And so we all do the same thing with our rooms, we make sure we know where the light switches are… the whole nine yards. And this is particularly necessary for us. But it’s a good idea for everyone to go take up your space, to own your space, to have your classroom kind of be your stage… more staging area than stage, I guess… so that you know what’s happening in there and that you feel very comfortable walking around in it and welcoming people into it.

Rebecca: Classrooms are so different. And if you don’t take the time to be embodied in those spaces, you can really stumble around on your first day, no matter who you are. And the technology is different, the layouts different. And then there’s always the variable of the students. So the more variables [LAUGHTER] you can be aware of before the unknown of the students comes in the better.

Emily:: I recently made the switch to teaching high school. And one thing that I got surprisingly emotional about… I did not expect to be so emotional about it… but I have my own classroom, and it’s mine. I don’t have to move. I don’t have to trade classrooms with anyone. And like you said, every classroom is different. And so as a college professor, you’re constantly a traveling teacher. You never get to settle anywhere. You have four or five classrooms for the semester. But again, If a faculty member rearranges the tables, and you walk in, you don’t know that. If the lights aren’t working to your advantage, you don’t know that till you get there. And so I remember my principal had picked out classrooms for me when I first started teaching high school and said: “I think this should be your room because it didn’t have any windows…” and I’m very light sensitive, so I want a dim lighting, I didn’t want sunlight. And she walked around and pointed to all the things that she had considered when she chose that room for me, I just started sobbing, I mean, I was so embarrassed, [LAUGHTER] you know, because that was my room. And when I walked in, I would know where everything was. And I would be able to control the lighting and she took all the outlet covers and replaced them with a contrasting color, so that I could actually find my outlets. It was huge. And I thought, “Wow, this is something that I never experienced at the college level.” There’s something very special about it being your room, and it just takes so much weight off of having to adjust every time you walk into, essentially, a classroom that you’re renting for that semester.

Sheri: Oh, that’s huge. Oh, my gosh, what a wonderful thing. I think the other thing, that if we could throw out one more thing that I think is really important from our chapter, which is for any professor who finds themselves not in the majority, is to avoid the usual advice. I think when I got started in grad school, someone said to me, “Well, you know, you’re gonna have to work four times as hard as anybody else.” And that, to some extent is true. But it doesn’t have to be as true as they say it is. Teachers already work really hard. It’s not really possible to work four times as hard as most teachers, it’s not like most teachers are sitting by the pool sipping margaritas all day long, [LAUGHTER] just like oh, I guess I’ll go teach now no big deal. That’s just not how it plays out. And so if you are a teacher with a disability, or if you’re a person of color, you know, if you’re LGBTQ, whatever your situation is, you can’t be 400% better than anybody else. And so the solution is to be just a little bit smarter, and to leverage what we already know about good pedagogy to your advantage, so that you’re not working harder, you’re working smarter.

John: So what would the first day of one of your classes be like for students in the class? One of the things I’ve been hearing a lot about recently, in some of our faculty conversations is “syllabus day.” And recently, someone even threw out this term “syllabus week,” both of which seemed like one of the worst things you could do on that first day. How do you start off your classes?

Emily:: I am guilty of syllabus day. [LAUGHTER] But I found a couple of ways to make it more interactive. So my students walk in. Usually their seats are not assigned on the first day, especially now that I’m teaching high school, I work with assigned seats, but in college you never do. I usually don’t. And there’s questions on the board designed to get them thinking about what the class is really going to be like, that maybe they might be provocative questions like, “Is there such a thing as standard English?” or “What is the emotional value of poetry?” …things that there’s not a clear right answer to which is what drives most students crazy. [LAUGHTER] And we kind of do a little introduction, and I do pass out the syllabus. Some of it is just again based on time, but if I have a nice long chunk of time I pass out the syllabus, then I make them either work alone or with a partner and come up with two questions from the syllabus or two expectations about the course. So I explain the nuts and bolts that I know they need to hear. And I also introduce my guide dog ‘cause he’s usually in the corner and they’re all looking at him anyway. [LAUGHTER] So, I introduce him, I tell them they can’t pet him or talk to him. So I crush their spirits a little bit. But then we do get into a more interactive approach to the syllabus where we will go around the room that I hear from every student an expectation about my class, like, “Oh, we’re going to write 20 page papers in here.” And then I could say, “No, we’re not.” And then I also take their questions. And what I feel that this does, instead of me just reading the syllabus, which I’m not terribly good or comfortable reading long chunks of material out loud, I feel that it makes me the authority in the world because I have all the answers. So when they have a question, are we going to write 20 page papers? I can say, “No, you’re not.” But I’m the one with that answer. And so instead of coming in and saying, “Oh, is she really my teacher?” …and for the more hostile students, “Does she qualify to be my teacher?” This makes me the clear authority in my own classroom.

Sheri: Yeah, I’m gonna agree with

Emily:. I don’t like syllabus day, but I do a couple of syllabus day things, because it’s really important for both my comfort and honestly for the comfort of my students that they feel safe with me in charge. So I do go in more on the first day than some of my colleagues do, and say, “Okay, sit yourselves down friends, this is how the class is gonna go, and this is who is in charge,” because their default is that I’m not in charge, and that someone else is going to come in and do things for me, or that they’re gonna have to take responsibility for doing things that they ordinarily would not have to do. So I agree with

Emily:. I also do a little bit of that. Here are the rules of the test. I establish how we’re going to interact, since they’re not going to raise their hands. That’s a big question that many of them have on the first day: “How are you going to know if I want to talk to you?” …and just some really basic uncertainties that they might have about me being in charge of their classroom. And so we do a bunch of that, and then I have them sit and write for five minutes. I have them make a list of everything you don’t know about language, just go. And then I put them in the groups and they compare, you know, what don’t you know? what don’t you know? and that kind of sets this class up for two things. First, this class is a safe place in that you have a real teacher. And also, we’re going to do really cool things, and you’re going to find out things that maybe you want to know.

Emily:: I would also like to add that it’s important on day one to do your best to set aside every negative experience you’ve ever had. Because most of the time, our students are not hostile. They just don’t know any better about how to treat you. So if you walk in and think “they’re all judging me and you feel defensive,” it’s the worst place you can speak from. And this applies to anyone: fat, thin, blonde, brunette, anything that you think: “Oh, my students are making fun of me, they’re judging me.” As a teacher, you have to turn that off, even if they are, [LAUGHTER] you have to turn it off. Because you can’t stand up there and maintain yourself as a teacher and feel insecure. And an example that I have is walking around the room, walking from table to table, hearing their questions about the class. A student said, “Are you blind?” I said, “Yes.” And I instantly felt embarrassed. Oh my gosh, I don’t know. It’s not always easy to be called out, even though it’s something that’s very obvious. And the student said: “oh, okay, I just wasn’t sure.” Totally neutral. I mean, the student wasn’t hostile. And at the end of class, the student came up to me and said, “I didn’t know that a blind person could be my teacher.” It’s really cool. So if we can try our best to set aside ego and to walk into this experience like, “okay, they’re gonna love me.” …like, psych yourself up a little bit, it’s gonna go better. I mean, you have the right to be in that classroom. And that’s something that you have to remember when you walk in on that first day.

Sheri:

Emily:, you say half the things I’m thinking, that’s really cool. And I would just add to that, that you have to absolutely have to go into it pumped and ready. And you also have to go into it, knowing your history and knowing that it could happen. So we don’t want to pretend bad experiences never happen, and we’re not ready, I’m ready for them to be hostile. So maybe I’m a little more jaded than

Emily: is. I am totally ready for them to walk out as the individual students have done on me before. But I approach it as: I know, this could happen, but I’m cool. I got this. And I also overtly tell them: I’m blind, and this is relevant to you in the following three ways. And then we just talk about it. I just talk about it. And I don’t open it up as a big let’s answer all your questions about blindness. That’s not the topic of the class, but I do present it to them and explain to them how it is going to be relevant to them in this classroom situation. And then we move on, we get on to the business of doing the cool stuff that we came here to do.

John: And when I mentioned syllabus day, I was not trying to suggest it’s a bad idea to distribute the syllabus and go over the basic ground rules. What concerns me are the people who say, well, they just go through the syllabus point by point and reading it, and it sounds like you’re each doing something much more engaging than that.

Sheri: Here’s hoping. [LAUGHTER]

Emily:: That’s the goal.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your educational journeys as students and then now as faculty members, what has that looked like for you?

Emily:: I had an unusual educational journey, I don’t know how far back you’d like me to go. But I went to private school from K through 12. And from K through eight, I never used a cane, a white cane. And I just knew that I had low vision. And if you know anything about the blind, there’s lots of terms, but low vision is just somebody who’s not really blind, kind of have a low key… like big, thick glasses. When I made the transition to high school, I also made the transition to using a cane. My vision didn’t get any worse, but my campus was much more complicated. And so I moved from being somebody who wasn’t visibly disabled to somebody who was. And that also meant I became the target of a lot of negative attention. So high school for me, it was fun, in all the ways that high school is fun, but it was the first time that really people had made fun of my disabilities. And then I got to college, and I remember thinking college is really cool, because nobody makes fun of my disability. So I moved in these circles and it gave me a lot of things to think about in terms of my identity. And so now when I teach, I’m aware of how to respond to students who feel that there’s something shameful in the way that they’re made… in their disability, whether it’s visible or invisible. I can respond to that. I can say, “Okay, I’ve had bad experiences, and I’ve had good experiences, but I was always good in school.” I was a nerd, front-row student. And my biggest wake up call when I was teaching college was that not all students love school. I mean, I can’t believe that I have to say that out loud. Like I can’t believe I had to learn that, because I love school. So I thought everybody loves school. Not all students want to be in school. Again, I love school. And then I didn’t know what it felt like to be a C student, because I’ve never been one. And so one of my students said, “When you’re a C student, you’re ashamed to come to class, to know what you haven’t done.” And I had never thought about that before. And again, I’m a pretty empathetic person. It was a shock that I had never thought about that before. So what I have tried to do with my students is really dig into their history, because like I said, most teachers liked me. I did struggle in college with some professors who had never taught a blind kid before. So like one woman said, “Oh, I’ve never taught one of you before.” I was like, “You mean, a person?” [LAUGHTER] And she never learned my name. And she was just a weirdo. But then I had other professors who I had to constantly remind them to help me with my accommodations and things like that. I had very few teachers who just didn’t like me. And I don’t think that I’m anything special, that I’m a good student, and most most of the time we like our good students. I talked to my students about what it’s like to be somebody that your teachers don’t like, and how hard it is to ask for help when you think the teacher doesn’t like you, because now that I teach high school, I see a lot more of that, “Oh, she doesn’t like me, She doesn’t like me.” And some of my students say that about me, “She doesn’t like me.” And I have to really dig through and tell them, “I’m tough on you, but it’s not because I don’t like you. It’s just two totally separate issues.” But again, when a student has a history of being a troublemaker or problem kid, they don’t come into class wanting to be there, and they don’t know how to relate to their teacher. And so I think those are some of the things I’m still figuring out because I’m a relatively young teacher. So in a way, for me, the biggest issue academic was not my blindness, it was learning how to empathize with people at different levels of academic intelligence.

Rebecca: Thanks for sharing that story,

Emily:, something that we all need to think about. Most of us who are teachers like school.

SHEERI: …and most of us are big nerds, too.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheri: So I started out passionate about astronomy and physics. I was a big science fiction reader. I read goofy science books for fun. Although there weren’t very many books available to me as the blind kid. I’m fully blind, so I’ve read Braille my whole life. In the 70s, growing up in southeastern Michigan… lovely place to grow up… but it’s not a place where they expect young blind girls to go off to be astronomers. It’s not that anyone said, “Don’t be stupid, you’re not allowed,” but I could read the room. And I could tell when I started to get into higher math in high school, the hesitation that came into everyone’s voices, and the delays that came to me when I said things like, “Oh, well, I guess it’s geometry time.” Anyway, they were like “You could take geometry… we could get that book for you…” And I don’t know, it would have been different, maybe, if they’d said, “No, you can’t.” Maybe that would have created some kind of resistance in me, I would have insisted, but they never did. They were just kind of like, “Uh, you could do that, I suppose.” And being interested in adult approval as I was, I thought I can read this room, I know what it is given to me to do. So I majored in psychology. You remember those MASH episodes? I wanted it to be that…. what was his name? Sidney Friedman… the psychologist who would come out and do the big dramatic save on the traumatized soldier, and I thought, “Oh, okay, I could do that. That’d be cool.” [LAUGHTER] And I ended up in the Peace Corps, teaching English and doing some other things, and ended up in linguistics from there. And I began to see in my classrooms, I began to find students that were like me, in that they had also set aside something they were deeply passionate about. And they had also decided that they could read the room. And they’d also decided that they were going to take a different path than the thing that filled them with fire and joy. And they had shut down, or they felt the fire, but were reading in their lives messages that “You could do that if you want to.” That’s not straight up a disability thing. That’s the thing that we tell young people all the time, we tell everybody that all the time, I mean, just settle down, don’t be going all crazy on me… don’t do these wild things. And so I find so many students that have this deep longing to do something important, or to follow a specific path. And what I tell them, and I think is really true, is that if you ignore that fire, it will go out. If you don’t feed that flame in you, you’ll lose it. And that will be not only sad for you, but it will be sad for the rest of the world. So I try to think about that when I’m teaching and I find a student who’s good at something to be sure and go, “You’re really good at that. Have you thought about pursuing this as a career?” or, you know, “This doesn’t seem to be your thing, what is your thing? Tell me what your thing is.” …and try to remind them that they’re not here just to check boxes, and to grow old and then die. They’re here to really do a thing. And I don’t know what that thing is, but they secretly do. And if you sit and ask people about it, eventually they will tell you where their passion is. And sometimes it just takes a little tiny bit of work to fan that flame in students. And then they can start off on a thing that they’ve always wanted to do. And sometimes it needs to be tempered. Not everyone can drop out of school and take their guitar and travel Europe and be successful. But there’s always ways of accessing that fire that you have burning inside you. And I’m really grateful that I’ve been able to turn it around as an academic and do things that I really love, and not just things that will create a paycheck.

Rebecca: I love that. And I love thinking about ways to do that for our students.

Sheri: Yeah.

Rebecca: So Sheri, one of your research interests focuses on disability and inclusion in space exploration and astrobiology. And your publications on this topic include a Scientific American article on “The Case for Disabled Astronauts,” and you also address the impact of blindness on extra terrestrial communication and colonization. Can you tell us just a little bit about your work in this area. You’ve teased about it a bit, but it’s so interesting.

Sheri: It is so much fun. I’ll tell you the story of how I got started in this. Because I taught this xenolinguistics class a million years ago, my first year teaching at Bowling Green State University, I got a random, almost random, invitation to attend a colloquium that they were having at the Search for Extraterrestrial Institute, you know that Carl Sagan place… oh my God, it was so amazing. And that almost killed me, I was so excited, [LAUGHTER] like the excitement was almost too much from my heart to stand. And so in a desperate urge to not look foolish in front of people who knew Carl Sagan, I read frantically through the SETI literature. And I found a repeated claim in that literature, that any extraterrestrial race capable of building a telescope capable of intelligence and building a civilization, for example, would have some analogue of human visual perception. And I thought, what? Really? You can’t imagine a race of intelligent blind aliens that could build buildings and have science? What is that? And so I wrote what I thought was a really cool paper about the path of the development of science in a blind species. And it was really fun. And we talked about how, of course, they wouldn’t start with astronomy, like humans did, because I’ve never seen the stars like they couldn’t see the stars. So what would they do? And I wrote this cool paper, and I was very excited about it. And I presented it at a conference and we had this lively debate. And we argued… it was back and forth, we had so much fun. And a lot of them came around, like, “Oh, okay, we get it. Yeah, that could happen.” Blind aliens could build a telescope, blind aliens could build rocket ships and fly into space. And I felt fantastic about it. And then my paper was over. And I said, thank you, and I started walking with my cane toward the edge of the platform, which obviously, I just climbed up 45 minutes earlier, and a guy jumped up from the front row of seats, and he came running, like pelting, toward me, and he said, “let me help you down those stairs.” And I thought, “oh, no, oh, no, we have just established that blind aliens could do all these things. But you are unwilling to let a blind human walk down three padded stairs.” And I thought, “This is harder than I thought it was gonna be. It’s not like you can just present people with facts.” And they’ll go, “Oh, all those prejudices and assumptions I had, I guess I’ll just consciously set those aside now because I know better.” That’s not how it works. And so I started thinking about access to STEM fields for disabled people in general and blind people specifically. And I started working in that area. And I started thinking about, “Well, what is the ultimate goal?” For many astronomers and physicists, they all want to go to the International Space Station, don’t they? Well, can they? Well, no, right now, they really can’t. And so I started working with some folks to figure out what are those barriers, specifically? What are the accommodations that we would need to make that possible, given that if we have long-term human settlements in outer space, some of those people will become disabled while they’re there, because space is freaking dangerous and tries to kill you all the time. It’s not a safe place to live. [LAUGHTER] So disability and injury are gonna happen. We will have disabled people in space. And then what do we do about that? If they’re on the way to Mars, and people become disabled? Are we going to chuck them out the airlock? Or are we going to have constructed our environments and our policies such that those people who have acquired some disability along the way can still not only survive, but continue to be trusted and effective members of the crew. And if we’ve got that in place, you can become disabled in space and still keep your job. It’s not a big jump to maybe we need to rethink who goes to space and allow the best scientists and the best thinkers and poets or whoever we need in space to go there regardless of disability. I work with Mission:AstroAccess which sends disabled people on zero-G parabolic flights. So we all get a little taste of microgravity and we do research to see what accommodations we need there in zero gravity to be effective members of a crew. And I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard or had so much fun in my whole life.

Rebecca: …sounds like a healthy balance of both.

Sheri: Yeah, absolutely.

John:

Emily:, on your blog, you wrote that your experiences provide a different perspective among people who are equally different. And also that the norm itself is a myth. Could you elaborate on that just a little bit?

Emily:: I think the easiest way to think about this is that often when I meet perfect strangers, they assume that I am worse off in the grocery store, Starbucks on campus, say things like they’re sorry for me, or there was a woman who said, “Well, I’m so sorry that you have a guide dog, but I’m happy you could finally find someone to love you.” I thought, wow. [LAUGHTER] I thought, whoa, whoa, I was just at the symphony. And I loved the symphony. And I wasn’t alone. So theoretically, I had found other people who love me as well.

Sheri: Oh my God.

Rebecca: Bizarre.

Emily:: But this idea that, as a disabled person, you’re automatically worse off than other people. And this is when you look into disability studies is part of it as what we call the medical model. And then part of it is what you call the symbolic model where disability some kind of curse or tragedy. And there’s a danger to saying: “Aren’t we all a little bit disabled, because many of us have needs that are not taken care of by the common desire of our society?” So for example, most of us could walk into a building without an elevator and still make it around. There are certain people who if they use a wheelchair, they wouldn’t be able to. But when I look at my group of students, most of them can. If we go to the grocery store, most of them can pick up a soup can and read it, and I can’t. So disability and disability rights are useful designations because they point to a portion of the population that is not covered by the features that we’ve already got in place. However, the fact that I have a disability does not mean that I’m automatically worse off, I’m automatically sitting in a corner thinking about how little vision I have. I remember one time, I went into a bank, and I swiped my card, and the teller congratulated me: “Good for you.” And I said, “Well, I didn’t even buy anything.” [LAUGHTER] So she said, “Well, don’t worry, honey, I run into walls all the time.” And I said, “Well, I don’t, so you might want to get that checked out.” [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Geez.

Emily:: So it’s the idea that my blindness is not a loss of perspective, it is certainly challenging. It is not to say that it’s not challenging, and probably the biggest challenge is dealing with people’s attitudes. And it is exhausting somedays, to be different from others in a way that is not as common. However, I’m not special because of my disability, I’m special because of who I am. My disability is part of who I am. I’m not automatically more saintly, or more insightful because of my disabilities. It’s about how we respond to the hand of cards that were dealt. And that’s kind of what I want to get at is the idea of what is normal. We have typical behavior, we have acceptable standards of behavior. But what’s normal for me might not be normal for someone else, in the sense that it doesn’t mean that my method is wrong. Something that I often feel self conscious about as if I get disoriented when I’m in a public place. Because other people might see me fumbling around and they might think, “oh my gosh, she’s not okay.” But I need that time to figure out where I am. And it’s not helpful for other people to be like, “Go to your left, go to your left.” That’s disorienting. I need to reorient and see where I am. I’ll never forget, I went into a grocery store and there was a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, which I didn’t see going in. But when I came out, or I tried to come out, I was like, “Where is the door?” I could not find it. The mirror was there. Luckily, no one was in the bathroom because I would have been so embarrassed. Because again, it does make you feel like there’s some kind of cartoon just kind of fumbling around. And finally it was like, ‘Oh, I feel hinges, okay, here’s the door. There’s a mirror on the back of the door.” That was crazy. And so I came out. I told my friends “Oh my god, I was trapped in there” and they were cracking up. But again, it’s like Sheri said about the stairs. People want to rush to help you but sometimes help is not helpful. It’s like, “Give me a minute to adjust. And then I will ask you if I still need help, for what I need help with.”

Sheri:

Emily: just made such a really good point. And I think one of the skills that we have learned as disabled people is to be okay with other people being uncomfortable with us, because they’re just gonna have to. If I’m in a meeting, for example, and the material is not provided to me in advance as required in our department, I will leave because I’m not going to be able to participate fully… my time is better used. I could do anything, I could go grade papers, I could go brush the cat, anything would be even more useful to me, than sitting in a meeting where the stuff is not provided, and I can’t participate. And so I was just mentioning that to someone. And she said to me, “I don’t think that’s respectful. I feel really uncomfortable when you walk out.” And I thought, “that’s too bad for you, isn’t it?” I’m sorry, that… actually I’m not sorry… but your discomfort, this cannot control what I do in my life, or where I go, or what I decide I’m going to try to achieve. Because if I… I think I can easily say we… if we allow other people’s ideas of what they’re comfortable with us doing to control us, we would be sitting in a corner doing nothing all day long. So there is a necessary element of defiance in what we do every day.

Emily:: Funny about the meeting, I have the same problem, because I require large print. I was at a meeting one time and there weren’t enough agendas. And they didn’t bring one for me in large print. So I took mine, I said, “Oh,” and I handed it to the professor who needed one, “please take mine. I can’t read it anyway, I would like someone else to be able to use it.” So you learn a little bit of theatrics to get people’s attention, because sometimes nice and respectful, doesn’t get people’s attention, and you can email them and say, “Please don’t forget my agenda.” And when they don’t have it, you can say, “Oh, I totally get it. But please still print it.” And you know, a million things can happen. So compliant and respectful. And I never want to be disrespectful. But there’s a way to say something with a smile that helps people to understand: “No, I’m at a disadvantage here because you literally didn’t print off an agenda for me.” And I’ve even told people: “Send it to me ahead of time, I’ll print it, I don’t care, I just want to be able to participate.” And so it is hard to get up and walk out. And people always assume you’ve got a bad attitude, you’ve got a bad attitude. And that’s where the exhaustion comes from. Because those are daily battles. There’s always the commercials, and they’ll say, “Oh, people who are losing their vision, will say “I can’t see the faces of my grandchildren. I can’t see a sunset. I can’t see any number of beautiful works of art.” And that’s not really what upsets me. What upsets me is when I am shut out of an experience because other people just happen to forget what I needed and there’s not anything I can do to access the things I need.

Sheri: Yeah, I agree with everything

Emily: just said, and I am willing to be disrespectful, or to be perceived as disrespectful if I’ve done my due diligence, and I’ve given it a try, and I’ve been clear and it’s not happening, I will walk out.

Rebecca: Such important reminders about our everyday experiences in rooms and spaces and with people. We really appreciate your time and attention and wonderful stories and contributions today. We want to be respectful of your time too. So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Emily:: I have some long term literary goals. I have this book that I’m setting it up being part of Picture a Professor, because it’s a really cool collection. And I have some poetry coming up in another collection pretty soon. For me, I recently got certified as a high school teacher. So that has been on my mind. And I haven’t had time to do much writing. So I’m really looking forward to getting back into regular poetry and having something to submit. My long term goal is a collection of essays. I have a ton of essays that I’ve written, I just want to put them all together. Definitely not a memoir, though, I have a thing about young people writing memoirs way too early. [LAUGHTER] The tentative title for my essay collection is something that a waitress said to me at a restaurant when I was trying to read the menu that was too small. And she said, “Oh, she’s smelling the menu. That’s interesting.” And I said, “I’m not smelling the menu.” So,my mom always said you should call it “No, I am not smelling the menu and other essays.” [LAUGHTER] Long term goal would be an essay collection and then I have a poetry chapbook which is very small, and I would like to put together a full length collection of poetry as well.

Rebecca: Awesome. Lots of wonderful things there. How about you Sheri?

Sheri: I am delighted to be able to say finally publicly that I’ve accepted the position of the Baruch Blumberg Chair in astrobiology, which is a six-month residency at the Library of Congress, funded by NASA. And I’ll be doing that for the first part of 2023, during which time, I’ll be working on all kinds of things related to disability in space, including writing a book about our first zero-G parabolic flight, sort of how that came together. I’ve also applied to fly on our November flight. So hopefully I’ll get my second zero-G experience. And if not, then it’s also fine because then I can play ground crew which is fascinating work. So that is my immediate plan, to go to Washington DC for six months and immerse myself in the Library of Congress and NASA and spend time writing and meeting fascinating and interesting people.

Rebecca: Sounds really cool for both of you.

John: Thank you. It’s been great talking to you and we look forward to sharing this episode with our listeners.

Sheri: Thank you so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Anna Croyle, Annalyn Smith, and Joshua Vega.

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