User:AmberShaw

Weaver (Amber) Shaw
Lecturer, Academic English Program (Science)
UBC Vantage College
weaver.shaw@ubc.ca

My Land Acknowledgement

xʷməm̓qʷe:m at sunrise

I live and work on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. I understand this not as a ceremonial opening or a statement of personal goodness, but as a material and political reality that shapes my daily life. My home, work, movement, and belonging here remain entangled with ongoing settler colonial occupation and with Indigenous Lands, laws, histories, and futures that exceed institutional realities. I offer this acknowledgement with gratitude, but also with an awareness that gratitude alone is insufficient. For me, this acknowledgement must remain tied to accountability, to continued learning, and to the responsibility to resist the ease with which universities can turn Indigenous sovereignty into language without changing structures.

My Body Acknowledgement

Weaver Shaw

I move through the academy as a privileged white queer woman whose life has been shaped by the protections, permissions, and distortions of colonial institutions. My body carries both marginalization and advantage, but I am not interested in using complexity to soften the fact that I benefit profoundly from whiteness, citizenship, education, and the forms of legibility that institutions reward. I have been trained in systems that normalize domination while calling it knowledge, neutrality, excellence, or professionalism. Any work I do in teaching, writing, or advocacy is necessarily shaped by those inheritances. I understand body acknowledgement, then, as a refusal of innocence and as a reminder that accountability begins not in abstraction, but in the embodied conditions through which I speak, teach, am heard, and am protected. I continue then to search out opportunities to live my life in better harmony both in and out of academia.

About

Teacher, Scholar, Writer, Advocate, Volunteer, Vegan Foodie, Lover of Co-ops, Local Farms, Fair Wages, Pride, My Dog, and Science (Fiction).

My work focuses on Universal Design for Learning, inclusive curriculum design, and the integration of GenAI in higher education. I am especially interested in creating learning experiences that are rigorous, accessible, and responsive to the realities students face now, particularly multilingual and first year learners. I examine how GenAI can expose hidden academic expectations, expand access to learning, and reshape teaching practices, while also raising important questions about ethics, power, language, and access. At the center of my work is a commitment to designing learning spaces that support confidence, criticality, and student agency.

Teaching and Research Interests

Universal Design for Learning (UDL), GenAI for Education, Curriculum and Materials Design, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EDIA), and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

Working in the Academic English Program combines my love of teaching with my passion for linguistics. My main focus is in creating active, student centered, and participatory learning spaces through the design of innovative curriculum and materials. I am also largely interested in researching, writing, and developing GenAI resources for minority group students.