Aparna Menon receives the 2026 Kathleen O’Connell Teaching Excellence Award
New College would like to congratulate Aparna Menon on receiving the 2026 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.
As an instructor in New College’s Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity (CSES) program, where she co-teaches Introduction to Critical Disability Studies (CSE241), Aparna grounds her teaching in the tradition of connection and community. “My teaching philosophy begins with the acknowledgement that the work in my classroom is not mine alone,” she shares. “It belongs to the students who bring their whole selves into the room, to the mentors and co-teachers whose ideas I carry – Dr. Anne McGuire, Dr. Pia Kontos, Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, Dr. Rod Michalko, and previous winner of this award, Miggy Esteban among many others, and to a longer tradition of South Asian scholarship that sees education as a fundamentally relational, socially engaged practice.”
CSES Program Director and mentor Dr. Anne McGuire sees this collaborative practice firsthand: “Aparna’s teaching invites new ways of thinking, learning, and belonging by approaching disability and neurodivergence as sources of insight, creativity, and possibility.”
Receiving recognition for her teaching holds a special meaning for Aparna, rooted in the award’s history. “It is always precious to receive awards recognizing one’s scholarship, but an award that recognizes one’s teaching work carries a different joy entirely. This award is named for a scholar who taught Tagore’s work,” she reflects. “Tagore’s own university at Santiniketan was built on a refusal to separate learning from life, individual achievement from collective becoming, and the classroom from the world it’s embedded in. That is the mode of teaching I hope to keep carrying forward.”
Outside the classroom, Aparna homeschools her nine-year-old autistic, non-verbal son, and works as a math tutor for autistic, non-verbal adolescents. “These experiences,” she says, “have reshaped what I understand as legibility, pacing, and learning to mean.” She also loves growing plants, practising yoga and reading murder mysteries with a cup of chai.
About the recipient:
Aparna Menon is a PhD Candidate in Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research, grounded in Critical Disability Studies, explores autistic non-verbal communication among children and youth, also drawing on communication studies, posthumanism, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) frameworks. Her research also includes projects on disability and food security, food and autism, and ethnocultural food supply chains. She is a parent counsellor, a tutor for autistic adolescents, and, last but certainly not least, a parent to a 9-year-old son with multiple disabilities. She has just completed her doctoral fieldwork among children and youth labelled autistic and non-verbal in Mississauga, ON, and is currently writing her dissertation.