Neurodiversity and Autism Awareness Month

Hello!
       I hope everyone at Fordham and beyond had a nice Easter Break, and will continue to enjoy the upcoming holidays and beautiful spring weather!
      This month, I wanted to mention a cause that is dear to my heart: Autism Awareness. April is Autism Awareness Month, and in this post, I wanted to increase awareness by sharing briefly how my interaction with individuals with autism has shaped my academic interests and intellectual pursuits.

      I began graduate school as someone who loved literary studies. I thought, and still think, that studying and teaching literature, and art in general, could make the world a better place; that by extending conversations about art, we could forge connections and understandings between individuals and groups that would create harmony in the world. I know these are maybe naive ideas, but I truly feel that studying and teaching humanities provides a benefit to the world.
       In order to help put myself through graduate school financially, I began working as an ABA therapist in the home of a family with two children who had been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. What was incredible about working with these two boys was that it opened me up to understanding how diverse the human brain and mind really is. These boys each learned, thought, and processed information in ways completely different from each other, and completely different from anyone I'd ever met. It changed my whole perspective on the ways in which studying and teaching art, language arts, and humanities subjects could, indeed, have an impact on the world. Suddenly, I began to see that forging connections and understandings between individuals and groups was important to bridge not only cultural and social gaps but also cognitive, perceptive, and sensory diversities.
      This realization changed my life and changed the way I studied literature and narrative. I embarked on my dissertation project which studies the history of representation of mental disabilities in American fiction. I also began attending disability studies panels and conferences, which are great because they are interdisciplinary and thus have exposed me to a wide variety of graduate research and scholarship  related to disability, bodies, difference, and neurodiversity. I also began working at a school for children with Autism, hoping to be able to help more learners with Autism acquire the skills in the way they learn best, in order to become more independent and self-expressed.

         In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, I urge you to learn something new about ASD, or share what you know and have experienced with someone else to keep the conversation going!
In the meantime, check out the Organization for Autism Research, which gives grants to graduate students researching autism issues across disciplines such as psychology, sociology, biology, neuroscience, and more. And, here's a great article from The Chronicle in 2009 called Autism as an Academic Paradigm. 
Let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts!

New Semester; new blogger! Introducing...

Hello! My name is Liza Zitelli, and I will be taking over the writing duties for the Grad.Life blog! I’m happy to be in a position to take over the fine work of Alexandra Loizzo, the first Grad.Life blogger, and Naima Coster, who took over the post after Alex graduated. I took the weekend to read through the Grad.Life archives; at times poignant, at times humorous, and always thought-provoking, it was a great read! My only sadness upon reading these posts during the weekend arose from the fact that I hadn’t been a follower of the blog up to this point.

  Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In fact, I didn’t even know the blog existed! To be fair, I arrived on the GSAS scene back in 2003, before (way before – almost a decade before!) the Grad.Life blog began. In fact, it was probably before most blogs began – when the blogosphere was enjoying the early stages of its big bang, just at the beginning of the era when blogs were becoming a real mainstream form of communication and source of information for institutions and programs. And over the course of the pre-blog years, I guess I got into such a routine of getting my information from Blackboard, from emails, and from word of mouth, that I never took real quality time to venture out of my information-comfort-zone to utilize, discover, or take note of some of the new updated methods of communication available within the GSAS. It makes sense (says Liza, rationalizing to herself,) that, as such a long-time student, I might have missed this boat.

Still, I was unnerved when I was offered the position of writing for the GSAS blog of which I never had heard tell, never mind had read. Having been a graduate student for so many years, in many incarnations, I want to think that I am a connected, long-term, entrenched member of the GSAS community. I began my Master’s in English here in 2003, and then have worked through several forms of fellowships and teaching associate positions, both full and part time for different stretches, slowly grinding out my up and coming dissertation. But somehow not getting the memo about Grad.Life over the last two or three years made me begin to think a lot about what it means, exactly, to be a part of the GSAS.

jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sure, we all can get caught up in the bubble of our own head, research, classes, department, teaching positions, and outside lives. But learning so late in the game that there was a blog dedicated to, and written by, GSAS students, left me feeling – I don’t know – left out, out of the loop. In the same way we need to read journals in our field, and to take advantage of professionalization tools offered by our city, university, and departments, we also need to be aware of the community resources around us. Graduate life is not just about teaching and researching. If it was, it wouldn’t really be a worthwhile pursuit.  Learning about Grad.Life was a huge reminder to me that in our profession, we have to make it part of our duty to stay connected, and stay with the times.

Ok, so lesson learned, and writing will commence for the semester! Yours truly is humbled and discomfited by my utter lack of awareness  – and also I’m afraid of karma, because now that I am going to be a contributing writer of the blog, I want to make sure Grad.Life is reaching all the students it is intended to reach, and more!! Over the next semester, I will be posting blogs that will attempt to reach out to the student body, hoping my 9 years here will be able to provide some great insights. Obviously, I will need to learn some things along the way, too! But that is the great thing about writing – it always leads to discovery.

Above all, I’m excited to be able to reach out to the Fordham GSAS community in this way after all these years of being a part of the community. Graduate school blogs, from what I sense, can be a refreshing and replenishing site for reflection, sharing, and regeneration for graduate students who want and need to know that they are not, by far, alone – that there is, in fact, a community around them – and that the community has a site in which to see, build, and shape itself.  

Until next time! Yours, Liza Z.

Accidental Pedagogy; or, What You Learn When You Go to Class

“What are you going to do with that?”

Every grad student faces this question – at family parties, high school reunions, and even the occasional OK Cupid date. The logic behind the question is that there is no practical application for any graduate degree that isn’t an M.D., J.D., or M.B.A. And if you can’t do anything with the degree, what’s the point in pursuing it?

Thankfully, there is a range of careers open to us as grad students, and many of us came to grad school because a range is precisely what we’re interested in. And beyond the catalogue of rare jobs a grad student may choose to pursue (radical librarian, anyone?), there is always teaching.

Whether you are a medievalist or biologist, grad school prepares you for work in the classroom. More importantly, choosing to teach addresses a dire national need for good educators.

At Fordham, many grad students complete a teaching practicum; others learn about teaching by working with professors and undergrads through graduate assistantships. And everyone goes to class!

I believe that as grad students we learn a great deal about teaching just by being students. I like to refer to this phenomenon as “accidental pedagogy,” wherein a professor offers pedagogical instruction just by a good (or not-so-good) example.

The professor who shows up to class looking frazzled and carrying a mass of papers bound with a rubber band teaches you about the importance of punctuality and manila folders. The professor who returns a forty-page paper to you with a seemingly arbitrary grade and no comments teaches you about the importance of critical feedback.

(Let it be noted that I’m not referring to actual professors – least of all Fordham English professors, who are great. Seriously. See?)

And yet, as much as grad students learn from interacting with less-than-awesome professors, we gain so much more from working with fantastic professors. Most of us already know what not to do as teachers, but the elements of an unforgettable, illuminating teaching style are far more elusive.

This spring I had a professor whose teaching style was compassionate and egalitarian. She encouraged everyone to speak without thrusting anyone into the awkward seminar limelight. She structured the class so that participation was a cornerstone of our time together. We shared, presented, and discussed every time we gathered.

This professor seemed to understand that although we are all grad students, we still get shy! I appreciated her deliberate nudging and facilitation of class discussion as much as I did her knowledge and expertise.

And sometimes she brought us snacks!

Although “Being Awesome” and “Teaching You All to Be Awesome” were never listed as course objectives on the syllabus, effective teaching skills were a part of what we learned.

It might not be quite accidental that I learned so much about teaching from this professor. She was experienced and deliberate in her efforts to establish a safe, inclusive, fruitful class culture.

Good teaching indisputably requires more substantive credentials than “I went to class a lot,” but all great teachers begin as observant students who notice what works in the classroom and what does not.  

I have a year left at Fordham before I enter the job market. If I am teaching next fall, I’ll be sure to use all I have learned from my professors. I will arrive to class on time with a multicolored array of manila folders. I will create space for everyone’s voice. I will be awesome and teach others how to be awesome. And since I am bound to make mistakes along the way, I will bring snacks – just in case.