Dr. Devon Healey honoured with the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education
Congratulations to Dr. Devon Healey, Assistant Professor of Disability Studies in Social Justice Education, on receiving the 2025–2026 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching. This award recognizes OISE’s inspiring educators who have continually demonstrated a deep commitment to excellence in teaching, and have made outstanding contributions to teaching at OISE.
Professor Healey has made outstanding contributions to teaching and to student learning and development in her department. She is described as a superb teacher who uniquely weaves together her creative critical performance work and her unique interpretive take on blindness (based on her own experience and that of other blind scholars), to choreograph a dramatic teaching experience.
A critical disability studies scholar, Dr Healey is deeply committed to accessibility and to fostering conditions where all students can thrive, even in the face of systemic barriers. Her courses—including Disability Studies: An Introduction, Disability Studies and the Culture of Vision, Blind Studies, and Disability Studies through Narrative Inquiry—are consistently oversubscribed, with students describing her teaching as engaging, transformative, and intellectually rigorous. Her course evaluations reflect this impact, with scores that consistently exceed departmental and institutional averages.
Reflecting on the award, Dr. Healey emphasizes the collective nature of teaching and learning:
“I have never understood teaching as something that belongs only to me or that happens solely within the classroom, but rather as a shared and ongoing practice of thinking, feeling, questioning, and imagining together.”
When considering the legacy of the honour, she shares:
I understand this honour as an invitation to continue nurturing spaces where different ways of knowing, sensing, and being can emerge and be taken seriously. ... It also means continuing to build connections between the classroom and the broader community through collaborative and artistic work, while staying attentive to accessibility as an ongoing, shared practice of reimagining how we live and work together.
Professor Healey was honoured at the March 31, 2026 OISE Excellence Awards Ceremony, where she was celebrated alongside other faculty award recipients. We are so proud of her!
