Sunday, February 10, 2008

Hey UDL friends,
Welcome to my blog— a place where we can hash out ideas and theories on Universal Design. I am not exactly sure of this blog’s real purpose yet, but I suppose I can get started by telling you a little bit about me.

I’m a Boston native (Go Sox!), though I’d been living on the tropical island of Manhattan for some six years before starting at HGSE. As an American Studies major at Barnard College, I focused on immigration in the latter half of the 20th Century. After school, I worked as a freelance film editor and then as an associate producer on all sorts of documentaries from floods in Senegal to Fidel Castro’s agrarian policies.

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a film about dyslexia. Using both animation and verite, the film explores the inner worlds of four individuals as they grapple with their learning disabilities on a daily basis. Every member of our film crew is dyslexic, including myself, so it is a remarkable experience working in an environment where LD is the norm.

UDL was first introduced to me last fall in Stone Wiske’s class. I quickly became enamored with its openness to all kinds of minds and its critique of the systematic exclusion of some types of learners in schools and beyond. So I am eager to delve deeper this semester in UDL, as it exemplifies the kind of spirit of pedagogy I hope to employ in my own classroom one day.