Riley McGuire: Centering accessibility, identity, and skills building
Assistant professor of English, 2023 Alden Award Winner
Riley McGuire’s original plan was to become a high school teacher, but along the way, his professors encouraged him to consider teaching college. With the support of a loving mother and exceptional mentors, McGuire, a first-gen student who had rhotacism and lambdacism in school, earned a Ph.D. and discovered he loved teaching.
“That’s really where I found my field was the most meaningful,” said McGuire, an assistant professor of English. “In the humanities, a lot of our best work comes out of the classroom.”
McGuire’s teaching style reflects what he has learned from his mentors, from his peers at Worcester State, and from his field, which encompasses 19th-century British literature, queer theory, and disability studies.
“Disability studies encourages us to not just think of disability in medical terms, but as sociopolitical identities,” he said. “It’s not all about capitulating to norms around how bodies and brains should function. I like to take that into my teaching in terms of being really flexible in terms of the assignments that students complete, what participation can look like in a class.”
Accessibility also means financial access. With the high cost of textbooks in mind, McGuire assigns free ebooks, audiobooks, and texts in the public domain whenever possible.
Alongside accessibility in McGuire’s classroom is flexibility. Students have different motivations and goals, so McGuire offers them options, while building fundamental skills like critical reading, good writing, and public speaking. A final assignment for a student who wants to be a school librarian might look different from one for a student who wants to be a poet. Everyone is challenged to engage with all that literature has to offer.
“I want them to leave feeling more confident in their ability to share their thoughts, ideas, opinions with other people,” he said. “And then there’s a moral or ethical benefit to literary studies. For me, teaching these classes, it’s all about issues of representation and power and identity and social hierarchies. What is our place in the world? How do we relate to other people? How can we use literature and theory to answer some of those questions?”
In 2022, the students in McGuire’s LGBTQ+ Narratives class took center stage at the Unity Day ceremony for an LGBTQ+ flag raising, a strong statement of support for the university’s LGBTQ+ community. Some students gave powerful and moving readings at the podium. Some students did interviews with local media. And everyone in the audience received a 36-page booklet of original writing by the class.
The event was the coalescence of a lesson McGuire has carried into his classroom from his doctoral advisors. “They were really able to show me that I had something worth saying, but also that I was the right person to say it, that my perspective, my experiences could be seen as an asset.”
Giving Worcester State students the opportunity to share their voices and see that their work is worthy of an audience was especially meaningful, he said. “It was really helpful to say that what you do here can exceed the confines of the classroom,” McGuire said. “You can help actively shape our campus into a more equitable one.”
