Interview by Samantha James, Student Success and Development Coordinator 

Lindsay Bryde, SUNY Empire’s Digital Accessibility Coordinator, is co-editor of RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul’s Drag Race. Here, Lindsay discusses her role at the college, her background, and how her book came to fruition. This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

Samantha James 
I’m going to jump right in. Thank you for doing this. When did you start working here? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
I started at SUNY Empire in November of 2019 as an educational technologist for the Long Island region. And I've been in the Selden location my entire tenure at the college. 

 
Samantha James 
You came in as an educational technologist and now you are the new digital accessibility coordinator, but you're also working on the Brightspace conversion. Can you talk about both of those roles and what they entail? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
I am on the LMS conversion Steering Committee, which is the big overarching committee as part of the Moodle to BRIGHTSPACE transition. I am part of the big group making decisions about how [the college] is going to respond to the transition that's being done by SUNY. I am also the co-chair of the communication subcommittee, which works on developing our communication plan and strategies for getting information to both the employees at SUNY Empire as well as our students about what it means to be moving from Moodle to Brightspace, which is going to be our new learning management system, starting with the fall 2022 term. This is a big deal because while SUNY has had a variety of different learning management systems over the last 20 years, we have never as an entire system all used the same product. And my new position is digital accessibility coordinator which means that I am going to be doing a lot of project management and coordination of all the training and efforts involved to meet requirements regarding accessibility. If you are a student who needs to use a screen reader, I'm making sure that documents are created that actually work with that screen reader. 

 
Samantha James 
Got it. I do want to get into the book in a minute but you have a degree in creative writing, correct? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
Right. 

Samantha James 
Can you please explain a little bit about your background and your various interests? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
So, I think the best way of looking is that I've been a bit of a jack of all trades from the very beginning of my college career, because I had two majors and two minors. My theater degree is actually where my interest in accessibility and accommodations began, because in professional theater there is a job called a house manager. A house manager is the person who makes sure that everybody is in their seats between the time the door is open and before the curtain rises. That was my job throughout college for five wonderful years. That was how I paid for a good majority of college. A big part of that job is memorizing a law called the Americans with Disabilities Act because I had to be able to provide accommodations in accordance with the law without hesitating or second guessing myself because I had 30 minutes to get thousands of people ready for the show. It gave me a real appreciation for the importance of accessibility and the importance of proactive planning. But I also had this whole creative energy side and I loved working with students. I really love that mentorship, that guidance, and basically wanted to do it all. I went and I got my masters in English. My Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, which fulfills that love of the creative, is evidenced by my book.  

 
Samantha James 
Okay, that's very cool. So what are you currently teaching? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
I am teaching the measuring learning course for SUNY Empire, which is part of the educational studies track. It's an assessment course in education and pedagogy. That's the main class that I'm teaching right now, but prior to coming to Empire, I was a full-time English instructor at a college for allied health in Manhattan. I've been teaching for the last 13 years, and I've taught a variety of different English, education, and theater courses at different institutions and adjuncting in different places. So I've been teaching for a very long time. The nice part about that is that it combines my experience working with students, my experience as an educator, and my interest in accessibility. I've had a lot of students who had different accommodations when I was working at Suffolk Community College who were recommended to my class because people kind of got word that I knew how to do online classes and design them and make them accessible. I already kind of had a rep for that. All these different pieces of the puzzle all kept fitting in together, where now when I'm sitting with a faculty member and say, ‘We need to create your content that's accessible and here's how’ it's not: ‘I'm not telling you to do this because it's the law.’ It's ‘I'm telling you to do this because I've seen the impact it can have on students’ and here's what I've done to make my classes more accessible.  

I follow a lot of universal design for learning principles which is a very fancy concept that educators get to know, usually in their first year of any education program. And it's this idea that you don't make something accessible as an afterthought. You think of accessibility from the beginning, cause it's going to automatically make the course better, both for students who need accommodations and students who don't need accommodations. Everything is going to build those pathways a little bit further than it would have if you thought about it at the end and tried to add something in. I have a very wide and varied background, but I think all of it has helped me in different ways to lead me into a role like this. But yeah, my background in accessibility really does go back in ways that some people might go ‘wait, your degree is in English. Why would you go into accessibility?’ and then I'm like, well, I have always had this kind of side career that heavily involves this. 

 
Samantha James 
Okay, so now I want to talk about your book “RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul's Drag Race,” which is out now. How did how did this book come to be? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
When I was working for Suffolk County Community College, I was the faculty advisor of their Queer and Allied Student Union and my students were talking about RuPaul's Drag Race a lot, and I started watching the show in season three, which was before the show became mega famous at the level it is now. I could understand why my students enjoyed it because they were all LGBTQIA+. And there was always a different challenge of the week because part of the appeal is that you don't necessarily have to like drag if you just like reality television and competition. Every episode is its own reality show unto itself, because every challenge is drastically different from the next. So, there's like a Survivor week, America's Next Top Model week, Project Runway week, because all the challenges are very similar to other shows. But where those shows only do one type of challenge, Drag Race does the different style of competition every week. Drag is the thread underneath everything, but there's a little bit of everything for everyone no matter what type of reality TV you like.  

I thought it was interesting, so I was using it in my English classes. I would show episodes and use them for writing prompts. In one episode, the Queens had to make an outfit on a dollar. It was called Drag on a Dime. So, they're given $1 and using that $1 they had to make a drag outfit. But I used it to talk about finances and the importance of money.  

I got asked to do some presentations on how I would bring up Drag Race in my classes and eventually I put together a panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association in 2018. We did a whole panel with different educators talking about how they brought Drag Race into their classes. One of my presenters was a gentleman named Tommy Mayberry, who came in and did his presentation in full drag which was definitely a little eye catching because I had never met a drag Queen scholar before and this prompted us to have a conversation about his drag and his teaching, and ultimately Tommy and I decided to kind of combine our powers of his knowledge of drag and my knowledge of pedagogy, as well as our general shared interest in all things Drag Race. And let's find all these different educators and what are their RuPedagogies, as we ultimately coined it?  

Now if you go and see our respective Twitter accounts, a big question and our hashtag is RuPedagogies. And what is your #RuPedagogy? How do you use Drag Race to learn? There is a RuPologize. How do you apologize? And RuDemption. How do you find and seek your redemption with Momma Ru? We had over 50 abstracts to begin with that we ultimately whittled down to 15 authors that we invited to write chapters for the book. Tommy wrote a chapter, and I wrote the introduction for the book. We did write as well as edit the book and bring all these authors into the fold. We were very lucky that a publisher named McFarland pretty much within a week of us submitting our proposal went ‘We like this idea. Let's make a book’ and we went ‘Absolutely!’ And I signed my contract for the book in September of 2019, so I had already come into Empire knowing the book was in progress. But it was such early days that nobody really knew what it was going to be at that point. 

 
Samantha James 
How would you describe your book? Is it a textbook or how would categorize it? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
The book can work on two levels. It can be a textbook for educators because it really does provide learning plan objectives, assessment plans, and general advice on how to teach with Drag Race in the classroom. This can be a textbook for education classes, and it's been adopted as such. We've also found that there are also a lot of composition courses and women's and gender study courses that are adopting it because the book does look heavily at Drag Race and it looks at the LGBT population in a variety of different ways.  

We've seen it work on two levels as both textbook for teachers, but also as an impetus for further discussion in a few other disciplines. We've had medical professionals who have looked at the book because we talk about how the show looks at disability and how a lot of the contestants have had medical conditions that were heavily featured around the show. One of the winners from season 11 has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which prompted quite a bit of conversation about Ehlers Danlos and how that impacted her ability to perform on the show. And the season 14 winner has cystinosis. Now we're seeing a whole conversation in the medical community about cystinosis because Willow Pill won, and her condition very much impacted her ability to perform on Drag Race. She's very open about it saying, ‘I wanted to make people aware that the disabled community is beautiful and strong and has the ability to win because we do not get the best edit on reality shows, so we don't always get to bring in audiences to understand what it means to have a lifelong ailment.’ So, there's that layer of interest, and I admit that's probably going to be something I'm going to be writing as my chapter when we do RuPedagogies two, when we inevitably get to unveil that next phase of our book. We're already looking at doing a second book. We just haven't gotten to make the official announcement. 

 
Samantha James 
What do you want people to take away from your book? What do you want people to realize? 

 
Lindsay Bryde 
I think the biggest takeaway is that everything can have its own lesson. It may not always be the obvious lesson, but you can always learn something new, and we want to look at ways that we can learn something new using something that's fun. Learning can be fun because we really tried to go ‘What makes this fun? What makes this engaging?’ and we really challenge our authors to say ‘Don't just talk about one thing. How can we touch on different levels? How can we hit both the academic, the personal, and the professional?’ Everyone really kind of took that challenge very seriously of just not finding their niche but how does it play into the bigger thing? Because it’s always easy to make fun of or mock or put down somebody, but it’s another thing to find what is the joy in what you’re doing and what are you bringing to the table? I really kind of pushed our authors to say, ‘Okay, you don't like this about XYZ? What can we do to learn from that?’ Yes, there are mistakes made; even the show makes mistakes, but they own their mistakes —a lot. We really look at some things that the show has done that might have made people angry, but they think, ‘How do we learn from this and how do we learn from that message?’