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Double Down on Being Human
I gave a talk at the Nrth Conference Elevate Festival today in downtown Toronto. I am sharing the talk and the notes in their entirety here: To glean a new perspective, we need simply to look critically at our existing standpoint. How well do we know our viewpoint? How did we learn what is important,…
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The Canadian School of Inclusive Design
Below is an excerpt from my dissertation, A Pedagogy of One: Engaging the ‘Missing Middle’ Toward Inclusion in Education about the Canadian School of Inclusive Design. The name refers to the endeavours of the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University (IDRC), previously the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) at the University of Toronto, where…
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A Dissertation Link
Photo by Katerina on Unsplash Find and download A Pedagogy of One: Engaging the ‘missing middle’ toward inclusion in education in an open institutional repository because the openness of this matters. When ideas and content are being removed, those things that are open cannot be erased. The Internet is written in ink, especially the Open…
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A Pedagogy of One: Engaging the ‘missing middle’ toward inclusion in education
Download the full dissertation https://jdc.jefferson.edu/diss_masters/43/ Committee:Kihong Ku, Thomas Jefferson University, USAChristopher Pastore, Thomas Jefferson University, USALizbeth Goodman, University College Dublin, IrelandBonnie Stewart, University of Windsor, Canada Jess Mitchell, Ph.D.SMARTlab Practice-Based PhD in Architecture and Design Research, Thomas Jefferson UniversityCC-BY 4.0 International I was motivated to do this thesis because I felt I was noticing something…
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Are we more divided now than ever?
We see it in our news feeds, our timelines, our email inboxes. They are all filled with loads of stories suggesting we are really, deeply divided. This comes to mind. Politics feel precarious. Wars, insurrections, and more. Gender, sex, bodies, abilities. Race, class, historical reckonings. Traffic! I yelled at a man driving through my neighbourhood…
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Can Trust be Built Online? A Journey Toward Creating Brave Spaces
You bet your boots it can. Early in the pandemic I read an article where someone claimed that trust could not be built online — that it was one of the rich ingredients of life we were missing with our new, quarantined existence. Meaningful connections, where trust is built and shared, the author claimed, weren’t…
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What is Co-design?
Maybe you’ve recently made a commitment to Inclusive Design. Maybe you’ve found yourself ‘behind’ in the ‘racial awakening’ — maybe you’ve been asleep and missed the awakening of the last hundreds of years. No matter! Now you’re working toward inclusion — you understand it’s an important piece of moving forward: you simply can’t check your…
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An Attempt to Disrupt Education (Part 3)
In those first few moments we had done a lot of behind-the-scenes work. You see, in those first moments there is a special opportunity. That is when we either reconcile ourselves to ‘the ways things are expected to be done’ or we commit to doing it differently: we are either complicit or we insist on…
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An Attempt to Disrupt Education (part 2)
All of the details mattered: the door I entered, the hoodie sweatshirt I was wearing, my nervousness, my first time on campus and in this room, that split second first impression — this is the context in which we all began something. There were slightly more than 20 of us. The students weren’t quite sure…
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An Attempt to Disrupt Education
Part 1 I was nervous. It was the first day of class. I dutifully got there 15 minutes early and sat outside the classroom — thinking of just how to make a good first impression while feeling my heartbeat hard in my chest. The class was scheduled to start at 7. I slowly entered the…