Sara Shunkwiler Named 2024 Teach Access Fellow

Their vision is to teach about accessibility, empowering students to design, develop, and build an inclusive future in which technology products and services originate as accessible. Over the next year, Fellows will learn how accessibility informs their personal practice, how to effectively teach others about accessibility and disability rights, and strategies for embedding lessons about accessibility and equitable access into content curriculum.

For Sara Shunkwiler, also adjunct faculty teaching chemistry and physics at Hopkins School of Education, the challenges disabled STEM professionals continue to face concerning disclosure and equitable access are personal. As an engineer and long-time STEM educator with a chronic illness, she has experienced and witnessed the stigma and bias that she now speaks about internationally. Sara made the switch from engineering to education to advocate for diverse representation in STEM and was recently featured on the Society of Automotive Engineers blog. Another faculty challenged Sara to own her disability story, which she shared publicly for the first time in the Fall 2022 Faculty Forward Magazine article on the challenges of disclosure in STEM.

Over the past year, Sara and her colleagues have become frequent presenters on equitable access to STEM fields through inclusive and accessible course design and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a social justice tool. The CLDT team was honored with the Hopkins Diversity Leadership Council Group Award for disability advocacy, reinforcing that disability rights are human rights. The award recognizes CLDT’s ecosystem approach through education of faculty, staff and students about accessibility and was accepted by CLDT members Toni Picker, Kelly Queen, Matt Ribkoff, Mel Rizzuto, Sara Shunkwiler, Katherine Springer, and Austin Tremblay. Additionally, last year Sara was the inaugural Hopkins Yvonne M. Theodore Advocacy, Accessibility, and Inclusion Award recipient for outreach on behalf of disabled students, faculty and staff. Sara has appeared twice on This Ability Clinic YouTube channel to talk about math accessibility and will be returning with Space Systems Engineering Faculty Brian Bauer to share their evolution as disability advocates.

Despite efforts aimed at diversifying STEM fields, disability as a form of diversity often remains overlooked. Course designers and faculty play a key role in disability inclusion and STEM equity through inclusive learning environments and access to accessible and accurate course content. Sara’s goals are to raise awareness of the prevalence of disability and ableism, teach about accessibility, and empower others. You can read more about disability terminology, the challenges of disclosure, and STEM accessibility in Sara’s Faculty Forward Magazine Inclusive Teaching Series.

Sara Shunkwiler, WSE Instructional designer and educator for Hopkins School of Education was recently named a 2024 Teach Access Fellow for her extensive work and advocacy of disability and inclusion.