04/07/2026
✨ Join Us at the Disability Studies Conference! ✨
We’re proud to highlight an upcoming panel featuring three incredible instructors from the University of Arizona Writing Programs—bringing insight, advocacy, and real classroom experience to an important conversation on equity and access in education.
📚 Crip Time for Educators: On Providing Equitable Support for Our Instructors and Students
🎤 Sylvia Chan, Emma Gomez, & Nataly Reed
📅 Wednesday, April 15
🕘 9:00–10:00 AM
📍 ENR2, Room S107 + Zoom option available
This powerful session explores how educators can better support neurodivergent and disabled students while rethinking traditional academic expectations around time, productivity, and access.
👉 Register to attend (in person or via Zoom): https://bit.ly/UADisCon2026
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Wed, Apr. 15 at ENR2, Room S107, 9-10 AM
Crip Time for Educators: On Providing Equitable Support for Our Instructors and Students by Sylvia Chan, Emma Gomez, and Nataly Reed
As long-time educators for the University of Arizona Writing Programs, we are disabled and allied teachers, advocates, and artists who integrate disability justice into our culturally relevant pedagogy, access needs, and classes. Inspired by Ellen Samuels’ crip time, we seek to center aspects of non-linear time and alternative methods to teaching in response to academic and normative constraints. Crip time may encompass our access needs in seeking workplace support, without being stigmatized for “being a problem.” This advocacy is what we also seek to accomplish for our students. We question how can individual instructors build on their current awareness to create successful learning environments with neurodivergent students? While instructors in higher education are highly trained in their disciplines, a majority learn their best practices in pedagogy and curriculum on the job. Well-intentioned instructors may meet legal and institutional requirements but struggle to work successfully with neurodivergent students in their classrooms. Alice Wong states in her memoir, Year of the Tiger, that her working relationship with former UCSF administrator, Eric Koening, was an “equal partner[ship],” something “that […] most people wouldn’t imagine between a student and an [educator]” (2022). Unlike Wong’s experiences, faculty and disabled students are losing valuable partnerships and community for higher profit margins and superficial enrollment numbers. Crip time is imperative because it is time working with our disabled students and providing support that can ask for more constructive labor from the instructors. We hope to consider what re-envisioning our time—time to be disabled, time to grieve, time to be broken, and time, unexpected—can embody in response to or in a world of productive, fast-paced, and ableist academy. This presentation offers practical resources such as reflection questions, checklists, and recommended media.
