Upper Peninsula Teaching & Learning Conference - 2026

As I have progressed over the past eight years as a writing instructor, both as an adjunct and as a graduate student teaching first-year writing and technical communication, I, like most instructors, am constantly reflecting on ways to improve my course materials. My goal is not only to strengthen assignments in ways that enhance student learning outcomes but also to ensure that all materials are accessible and free from barriers for every student. 


My efforts to make my courses more inclusive align with scholarly conversations about the ethical responsibilities of educators and the importance of designing learning environments that welcome all students. According to Selfe and Howes, who argue, “For educators, it is ethically questionable to practice pedagogies and construct spaces that categorically exclude entire classes of people. We need to pay attention to the teaching of composition through the lens of disability studies to remind ourselves of just how much our profession has to learn, and just how much we have been content to ignore”(para. 2). The sentiment from Selfe and Howes can be applied to all classes. All instructors should strive to foster inclusivity through all materials and pedagogical strategies, aligning with Titchkosky’s (2011) assertion that “a classroom, a policy, or a professor can be perceived through questions of access” (p. 7). It should be clear that there is no question of access, and there will be no need to worry about whether accommodations will be followed in the classroom.


This presentation will explore strategies for designing courses through a disability studies/justice lens. Drawing on disability studies scholarship and my teaching experiences, I will offer practical approaches to accommodations, including creating accessible course materials —such as syllabi, slide decks, office hours, and other instructional resources —and pedagogical practices that foster access, empathy, and inclusion for all students.


References
Selfe, C., & Howes, F. (2013). Over there: Disability Studies and Composition. Kairos A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 18, no 1. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/pages/index.html
Titchkosky, T. (2011). The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. University of Toronto Press.

This presentation reconceives revision as an act of authorship rather than correction. Using a constructivist, co-created feedback model and a SWOT-based revision framework, it shows how underprepared writers learn to evaluate, defend, and shape their own rhetorical choices. The session highlights classroom practices that cultivate agency, intellectual risk-taking, and durable writing development.

Prison education plays a vital role in expanding access to learning, supporting rehabilitation, and promoting academic success and community reintegration. This presentation highlights the progress of Lake Superior State University’s STEP UP program through two perspectives: the LSSU Academic Success Center Coordinator involved in program administration and implementation, and a student tutor who provides direct academic support to incarcerated learners.


Combining institutional leadership with firsthand tutoring experience, the presentation illustrates a collaborative approach to addressing educational barriers and creating inclusive, equitable learning environments within correctional settings.


The first segment focuses on the development, implementation, and sustainability of the program, including its history, impact, and the logistical, administrative, and security challenges involved. Campus resources, cross-institutional collaboration, and the recruitment and support of student tutors are also discussed.


The second segment centers the student tutor’s perspective, comparing on-campus and prison-based tutoring experiences. This portion highlights the role of individualized, student-centered support in promoting access and equity, addressing common misconceptions about incarcerated students, and fostering tutors’ professional growth and cultural awareness.


Overall, this presentation demonstrates that prison education programs are both feasible and impactful. Attendees will gain practical insights into program design and strategies for leveraging student tutors to expand access to higher education in correctional environments.

Learning requires us to risk (and often experience) failure. If we want our students to develop a willingness to welcome challenges and risk failure, we as teachers must grapple with our own discomfort with failure. This interactive session explores how fear of failure prevents us from embracing growth opportunities and offers practical strategies for building resilience through reframing failure as a learning process. 
We will begin with candid failure stories from the presenter. By examining specific stories through two different lenses—one focused on what went wrong, another on what was learned—participants will explore how narrative framing shapes our relationship with failure and influences our ability to move forward. We will also talk about the need to make our classrooms and learning communities places of trust as a precursor to talking about failure productively.
The session will include activities and structured discussions that examine critical questions: What distinguishes "failing at something" from "being a failure"? How does fear of failure inhibit risk-taking and question-asking in academic settings? What are the real consequences of failure versus perceived ones? When does failure represent a learning opportunity rather than simply a mistake? 
Participants will engage in small-group discussions tailored to their varied roles, exploring topics such as creating early low-stakes opportunities for students to fail and recover, normalizing help-seeking behaviors, processing disappointing results in professional contexts, and developing strategies to encourage student engagement despite fear of looking foolish.
The session concludes with an introduction to practical tools for productive failure discussions, including premortems, test wrapper reflections, and project life graphs. Attendees will leave with  concrete "small bite" strategies they can implement immediately to help students—and themselves—develop healthier relationships with failure, ultimately building the resilience necessary to truly welcome challenge.

This presentation explores how university-level foreign language courses can be intentionally designed to advance accessibility, equity, and belonging through principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Framed within the conference track on Supporting Accessibility and Belonging, the session highlights how language instructors can reduce barriers while maintaining rigorous communicative and intercultural learning outcomes.
Drawing on the Universal Design for Learning framework, the presentation shares concrete strategies implemented in undergraduate language courses, including multimodal input (text, audio, video, visuals), flexible participation structures, scaffolded interpersonal tasks, transparent grading criteria, and multiple options for demonstrating proficiency. Particular attention is given to accessible course materials (captioned videos, screen reader–friendly documents, appropriate font sizes) and assignment design that anticipates learner variability rather than retrofitting accommodations.
From the instructor's perspective, the session outlines a backward-design process that aligns communicative objectives with inclusive pedagogical choices. Examples include choice-based cultural projects, low-stakes formative assessments, collaborative small group task-based projects, and classroom norms that support linguistic risk-taking. The presentation also addresses common tensions in language teaching—such as balancing accuracy and fluency, or standard language ideologies and linguistic diversity—and how inclusive design can foster both academic rigor and student agency.
Equally central are student perspectives gathered through informal conversations, surveys, and reflective feedback. An undergraduate student will share their and other students’ experiences regarding accessibility and belonging. Reported experiences suggest that UDL-informed strategies support students with documented accommodations and enhance learning for all students.
Participants will leave with adaptable lesson-planning tools, sample activities, and reflection prompts to strengthen accessibility, celebrate diversity, and promote academic success for all learners. These tools help redesign language courses to reduce barriers, affirm diverse identities, and promote sustained academic success. While this presentation focuses on UDL in language courses, some of its strategies could be applied to courses in other fields. 

In my engineering statistics and biostatistics courses, I introduced a series of optional extra-credit questions on each homework assignment designed to encourage personal expression—questions such as “Can you teach me a slang word?”, “Who is your idol?”, and “What is your dream job?” Over the semester, I collected more than 120 responses for each question, analyzed the patterns, and discovered insights that surprised me, especially given my East Asian educational background. Students shared humor, creativity, and cultural perspectives that rarely appear in traditional STEM assignments. This presentation explores what these responses reveal about student motivation, identity, and values in an international classroom environment. I will connect the findings to cross-cultural differences in educational expectations and discuss how personal questions can humanize STEM learning, increase engagement, and help instructors understand their students more deeply. The talk concludes with practical suggestions for integrating culturally responsive and relationship-centered strategies into a variety of courses.

With recent ADA Title II changes, getting faculty onboard with accessibility issues is more important than ever. At Michigan Tech, we developed a pilot program called the Accessible Tech Challenge, which seeks to gamify learning about accessibility issues and train faculty in how to apply our existing framework (a “5+2” approach which emphasizes focus on the biggest accessibility challenges in creating learning materials) going forward. It sought to engage faculty through the “challenge” aspect, which included a prize for meeting goals, and through the prospect of scaffolded learning throughout the semester that made allowances for busy schedules.


Join members of the William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning will discuss how we developed the challenge, the process of implementing it, the short-term impact on faculty who participated, and our plans for going forward with the program.

Since time immemorial, Indigenous communities have employed scientific processes to understand and steward resources here on Turtle Island (North America). Educators seeking to bring these Indigenous knowledges into their classroom need frameworks for conceptualizing the historical and current relationships between Western/academic science, and Indigenous science. This discussion-based session will allow K-12 practitioners to engage with such a framework (called "Two-Eyed Seeing") via the expertise of three Upper Peninsula-based scholars.