Teaching in focus: Stefan Sunandan Honisch

Name:

Stefan Sunandan Honisch, PhD

My pronouns:

He/Him/His

Title:

Sessional Lecturer, Scholar-In-Residence at St. John’s College UBC

Faculty/Department/Unit:

Faculty of Arts / Department of Theatre and Film

Location:

Vancouver

Year I started working at UBC:

2019

What first motivated you to become an educator?

I first began teaching piano during my undergraduate studies in music (Piano and Composition) at the University of Victoria, As a disabled person, I have a strong motivation to support disabled learners, both in the teaching studio and in the classroom, broadly defined to include in-person, online, and hybrid environments. Rapid changes in technology offer new opportunities in this regard but also highlight persistent forms of inaccessibility, and, at a more fundamental level, the deep economic inequality, that make access a continuous, sometimes dispiriting struggle.

Tell us more about your work.

I joined the Department of Theatre and Film in 2019 as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, and, since completing my fellowship, I have continued as a Sessional Lecturer. My teaching experience for the Department includes courses in dramaturgy, representations of disability, and political economy. This year I look forward to teaching a course on theatre and semiotics. I bring an interdisciplinary scope to my teaching, as well as a strong commitment to using principles of Universal Design for Learning and Disability Justice to support collaborative, engaged learning.

What inspired your particular approach to teaching?

Inevitably, my own experience as a disabled student at both the undergraduate and graduate levels has instilled within me the belief that approaching disability access, and inclusion writ large, require an open-ended approach, flexibility, and a willingness to recognize that, as philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce reminds us, "Experience is our great and only teacher." Learning is a collective endeavor, through which we recognize which of our prior beliefs need to be revised and corrected in light of new experience.

What have you learned while teaching that has surprised you the most?

Peirce's insistence that we learn, above all, from experience, hinges on the role of surprise. Likewise, for me, surprise is central to my own learning. What I have learned through teaching has mainly involved being jolted out of my own beliefs about how to support maximum access for students. Concretely, this has meant recognizing the complex ways in which access barriers and supports overlap in digital formats and online platforms.

What impact do you hope to have on your students?

A colleague years ago encouraged me to think of teaching as a conversation. I hope that students come away from my courses with an abiding sense of themselves as important contributors to an open-ended conversation about their chosen fields of study. I further hope students will develop a heightened awareness of inclusion as a shared (collective) responsibility that entails not only resisting discrimination in all forms, but also working collectively and organizing towards economic justice.

Are there any colleagues or mentors you’d like to acknowledge and why?

I am grateful to Kirsty Johnston, Department of Theatre and Film, (UBC), for mentoring me through a teaching internship for Postdoctoral Fellows. I thank Adam Patrick Bell, Western University, for opportunities to think about and participate in collaborative inquiry into disability and access in music curriculum and pedagogy. Recently, I was interviewed by Salli Carter for The Educator Experience podcast, and our conversation has provided me with new ideas for fostering greater inclusion, and deeper access in my teaching practice.

Learn more:

https://stjohns.ubc.ca/visiting-scholar-in-residence-program/ 
https://theatrefilm.ubc.ca/profile/stefan-honisch-banting/