teaching
experience
open educational resources, workshops, podcasts
I’m always excited about an opportunity to share what I’ve learned. My goal is to make a topic more approachable to learn for the next person than it was for me. That may mean breaking down a highly technical guide into a digestable demo document, creating a mulitmedia resource to fit the visual and auditory learners among us, or making a design toolkit. You can find examples of all of these instructional design routes below!
In spring of 2023, I was interning for the Digital Media Lab (DML) and was tasked with pitching design workshops for the DML to host. Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick, the lab director, had previously sent me Andi Buchanan’s “Design a Spaceship” essay from Uncanny Magazine, for a different project we were working on. The essay was a call to imagine spaceships that worked for disabled minds and bodies. After all, as Buchanan argues, if we’re speculating about a world with light speed travel, why couldn’t a spaceship be accessible to a wheelchair user?
This essay really stuck with both Dr. Fitz and me, so I pitched her a “Design a Spaceship” workshop. What if we gave participants a crew with various access needs and personality preferences, and a ship with a purpose that would inform further spacial needs? Dr. Fitz, as a professor of world speculative fiction and digital storytelling, was immediately interested in the pitch— and a three year collaboration (so far) was born.
We called it the DISCO (Design Inclusive Spaceships Collaborative Operation). Not only does it get at the goal of the design jam, it also gets at the vibe. These workshops were meant to be an exciting, creative, and (responsibly) playful introduction to accessible and inclusive design– to counter the narratives that accessibility makes designs inherently “boring” or that accessibility is daunting to start learning.
We pulled in all kinds of fun multimedia. Students modeled control panels out of clay. They used fabric swatches to create uniform designs.
Participants really loved it. They became fond of our crew members, really got into the “what if” questioning, and built radically inclusive spaces. We knew this project had the potential to become something bigger.
The first two DISCOs were individual workshops organized and created by the two of us. With the support of a Pitt OEDI mini-grant and the Nancy Tannery Grant for Open Educational Resources in Spring 2025, we were able to hire seven student interns (Bonsu Tutu, Web Developer; Karlynn Riccitelli, Print Layout and Design Editor; Babita Heystek, Fabrication Expert; Julie McGaughey, Accessibility Coordinator; Kaylynn Zhang, Digital Illustrator; Peter Ju, Co-Design Session Coordinator; and Tatyana Olevich, Co-Design Session Facilitator). During this semester, I served as co-director of this phenomenal team, running project management for production, and acted as the accessibility and disability studies content lead for the toolkit.
Our team collaborated to develop and fabricate both a web-hosted and a physical version of the DISCO toolkit. One of the highlights of this semester was the fact that we were able to host co-design sessions to help improve past research-based personas and create new crew personas, to ensure they were firmly anchored in a variety of lived experiences.
This toolkit is designed to help facilitators easily create DISCO jam prompts and run them for workshop participants, with the support of resources to make sure our core values of responsible speculation and holistic access remain intact. Among other components, the toolkit features a deck of personas to randomize crew, and a set of ship blueprints to help vary the prompts. Because of this, every DISCO jam will be a little bit different– and that’s part of the fun.
The practice of access and inclusion is iterative, imperfect, and never truly done. Therefore, this project is ongoing. To find our future scaling goals, follow along as our project grows, and check out the first iteration of this toolkit, you can visit our DISCO website.
I first found my love for teaching when I had the opportunity to serve as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for an Integrating Writing and Design course. UTAs were tasked with developing and giving three lectures on topics of our choosing. From there, I went on to co-author a course proposal, then served as the Digital Media Lab intern, where I facilitated three workshops hosted by the lab. Now, as a postgrad freelancer, I am routinely contracted in as a guest lecturer and workshop facilitator for the University of Pittsburgh. Below is a list of the workshops and lectures I've given through my student and freelance career.
If you would like to talk more about any of these teaching materials, or schedule me to facilitate a workshop for your group, please contact me!
[ freelance ]
Professional Development course guest visit. Focused on key accessibility topics relevant to students' digital portfolios, like how code interacts with assistive technologies and how to create more accessible visual styling.
Pitt 2025 Design Jam keynote speech. Discussed why the concept of the average user is actually a myth, and how we can better center humans in our designs when we acknowledge genuine human diversity.
Digital Media Lab sponsored event. Workshop co-facilitated with Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick, as a third iteration of the Design a Spaceship workshop ran initially spring 2023. This semester, we designed and playtested the first iteration of the OER toolkit mentioned in the section above.
[ freelance ]
Writing for Accessibility course guest visit. Focused on key accessibility topics relevant to accessible data visualization, both with visual styling of color and font, and with logical structuring of content.
Intro to Disability Studies course guest visit. Presented on service dogs and lived experience of being part of a service dog team, including education on legal rights of teams, public access barriers, and what can be done to improve accessibility for service dog teams.
[ freelance ]
Professional Development course guest visit. Focused on key accessibility topics relevant to students' digital portfolios, like how code interacts with assistive technologies and how to create more accessible visual styling.
Unruly Bodies course guest visit. Preview talk for the main Design a Spaceship workshop. Discussed disability and outer space, as well as thinking about disability in ways that lead to building more adaptive environments.
Digital Media Lab sponsored event. Workshop co-facilitated with Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick, as a second iteration of the Design a Spaceship workshop ran initially spring 2023.
[ Digital Media Lab Intern ]
Two-workshop series, educating on the importance of and current state of web accessibility. Participants were sent a demo document that I coded to be both a resource document and a practice tool. The content on the HTML pages explained each topic we covered in workshop, but we also looked at how the HTML/CSS files were coded in a text editor to play "spot the difference" between accessible and inaccessible code.
Workshop co-facilitated with Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick, as the intial iteration the Design a Spaceship workshop that later inspired the OER toolkit discussed in length above.
[ Undergraduate Teaching Assistant ]
Taught students how to make their InDesign files into accessible PDFs upon export. Built an InDesign demo file for this lecture that was shared with students to practice the technical skills, but also functioned as a resource document they could refer back to later.
Explained the importance of style guides, as well as how they can help build accessibility into the foundation of our designs. Talked about accessibility considerations with font and color, and their importance to be inclusive of people with dyslexia and/or colorblindess
Covered the basics, affordances, and history of zines. Also discussed how accessibility can be incorporated into longform digital content with scalability and bookmarks/hyperlinks
It all began with an inclusive design course proposal I was co-authoring during the summer of 2022 with Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick (who directs the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design major). Leading up to my internship to do this work, we were lining up field interviews to get experienced practitioners’ and researchers’ input. At the same time, we were reading responses to a survey we made regarding our course proposal. Many students who responded said they wished they could take the course now, or that they’d be graduated by the time it gets passed. Course proposals, it turns out, take a long time to get approved.
So I suggested to Dr. Fitz, (not knowing just how much it would actually take), “Why don't we record these field interviews and make an introductory podcast resource for newcomers to inclusive design?” That way, anyone, Pitt student or not, could learn new ways to make their designs more accessible and inclusive.
We’d build a team of six to make it happen (Dr. Fitz as our executive producer, me as host and producer, Ashton McCool as episode sound designer, Chloe Dahan as supplement sound designer and web developer, Emily Kuntz as producer, and Shivangi “Teddy” Tiwari as transcriber).
It would be fun and conversational, and it would define all the jargon the tech field is so notorious for. We would practice what we preach in terms of accessibility and inclusion; we’d have a values statement, transcripts, image description documents, and a resource library to supplement the conversation with routes to continued learning. There’d be a space for community engagement through crowdsourced questions and a show email to tell us how we’re doing/where we could make improvements to our practices.
We’d even build the project with maintenence in mind, recognizing sustainability of projects as key to design justice. We’d also understand the importance of the show being guided by different lived experiences. So we’d build the structures to allow it to become a long term DEI project at Pitt, with students taking over from one another!
And from April 2022 to April 2023, we did just that. (Starting fall of 2023, I will be interacting with the show purely from a listener perspective, and I could not be more excited to watch this project continue to grow!) Listen to the show on Spotify.
Summer 2022, I did initial research on how to make a podcast and developed materials we’d need, like cover art and guest prep materials. After the initial start-up phase of getting the trailer out (sound designed by Clare Sheedy) and building the scaffolding of the show, it was time to really step into the host and producer roles for production of full episodes!
In my host role, I was responsible for finding guests and doing all pre-interview and post-production communication with them, to ensure they felt welcomed into the interview and comfortable with what was posted with their names attached. I spent a month preparing for each interview, reading the works of the guest or about their field, so I could develop an engaging and informed set of questions. I learned the art of the Act I/Act II interview and always tried to ask at least one question the guest had never gotten before. (As an example, refer to episode 3 with Ellen Lupton, in which I ask about multisensory access for Dracula). I also spoke on the project at several events, including a launch event Dr. Fitz and I organized for the podcast, multiple panels at Pitt’s Queer Horror Week (2022), and a panel at Pitt’s Undergraduate Literature Conference (2023).
As a producer, I ran weekly team meetings and created semester-long production schedules. In between those weekly check-ins, I sent notes for edits to our sound designers on each mix of the episode and supplement, and I reviewed transcripts and resource library documents created by our transcriber and second producer.
Since I was graduating in April 2023, I also spent that spring semester training two fellow students (interested in taking over the host and producer roles) on the show’s workflow. We wanted the transition to be done carefully, to ensure that the project could continue with the same levels of care taken to the topics of inclusive and accessible design in both interviews and production. I cannot wait to see what our takeover team (Emily Vaiz and Paige Branagan— as well as Emily Kuntz, who is staying on next year!) produces.