Jose Miguel “Miggy” Esteban receives the Kathleen O’Connell Teaching Excellence Award
New College would like to congratulate Jose Miguel “Miggy” Esteban on receiving the 2025 Kathleen O’Connell Teaching Excellence Award, which honours outstanding teaching and the impact of sessional instructional staff to the teaching mission of New College’s academic programs, interdisciplinary courses and Writing Centre. The award reflects the College’s commitment to socially engaged education and pedagogical innovation, inspired by Dr. Kathleen O’Connell’s teaching contributions, who taught courses on Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray at New College for two decades.
Miggy’s work and approach to teaching deeply resonates with this spirit. Their research explores how creative practices within the disability arts community can inspire more caring, relational forms of teaching and learning. “Moving beyond the mere inclusion and accommodation of disabled and mad students into the classroom, I am committed to understanding how disabled and mad embodiments challenge and force us to rethink our pedagogical practices,” they shared. Drawing from their own dance practices in choreography and improvisation, Miggy sees disability and madness as “creative provocations for exploring different ways to relate to space, to each other, and to our own bodies and minds.”
As an instructor for New College’s Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, Miggy brings these ideas into the classroom in ways that invite future educators, scholars, artists and activists to imagine new pedagogical possibilities. Reflecting on what it means to be recognized with this award, they emphasized, “I am always so grateful for all the ways in which my students teach me. For me, this award is more of a recognition of the generosity of my students.” Miggy acknowledged the challenges learners and educators face today, and the many emotional states that shape each week – from uncertainty and unwellness to curiosity, joy, and hope. “Still, my students show up in the ways they can,” they noted, “I am so privileged to get to live out the questions I am grappling with in the community with such creative and passionate students.”
Outside of teaching and dance, Miggy enjoys cooking and is currently expanding his crochet skills beyond blankets and “other rectangular-shaped” items.
About the recipient:
Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Miggy’s choreographic work develops improvisational practices of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx remembering and belonging through (un)rest. Currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE/University of Toronto, Miggy’s research and teaching are oriented through disability studies, black studies, and dance/performance studies. Miggy’s dissertation project reinterprets practices of teaching and learning dance through methods of choreographic narrative that are influenced by disability/mad arts, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance. Miggy’s work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Choreographic Practices, Disability Studies Quarterly, Feral Feminisms, Journal for Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre Journal, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and in various edited volumes.
Select publications:
(2024) with Elisabeth Motley, Fragmenting Cripistemology: Gap Movement and Choreographic Practice
(2024) Embodying Maarte: Reinterpreting Queer Performances of Failure through Crip Inspirations
(2023) My Panalangin of (Un)Belonging: Encountering Still Gestures of Prayer, Improvising Still Movements through Depression
(2023) with Elaine Cagulada, In, Against, and Beyond the Ivory: Dreams of Belonging Otherwise through Wonder and Embodied Poetry
Select dance/creative work:
(2023) pahinga
(2023) Trace
We extend our warm congratulations to Miggy on this meaningful and well-deserved recognition!