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Michael Stein
Michael Stein is a thinker and a doer. And he challenges his students to become thinkers and doers as well.
Born deaf to a hearing family, the Maplewood, New Jersey, native attended Princeton University, majoring in Public Policy, and then Harvard Law School.
He specializes in disability law and the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
Stein teaches courses in NTID’s Liberal Studies Department, is working on developing a course on Disability Rights, and tutors courses in Criminal Justice, Politics, Public Policy, Law, Philosophy and Economics.
“I enjoy challenging students to think,” he says. “I encourage students to identify counter arguments and rebut them. It’s that moment when they understand how to engage in reasoned argument that I enjoy the most.”
Stein has students break into groups and simulate plea bargaining as a class exercise, and provides opportunities to bring to the real world what they learned in the classroom.
“Fellow faculty member and attorney Jennifer Gravitz and I taught a Criminal Justice Research seminar last year, and our students wrote a comment in response to the FCC’s request for information on phone access in the correctional system,” he says. “The FCC cited the students’ work several times in a follow-up report.”
In addition to bringing the real world to the classroom, Stein brings his classes to the real world. He recently led a group of students to Chile to learn about the deaf community
in that South American country.
“Prior to coming to NTID, I had lived in Chile for close to a year working on advocacy issues with deaf leaders,” he says. “Bringing my students to Chile was a great way to expose them to what disability rights advocacy looks like on the ground, especially in a world with limited captioning and almost no relay services.”
With his approach to teaching and learning—both in and out of the traditional classroom, Stein demonstrates for his students how thinking and doing can create a better world.
This story appeared in the Spring/Summer 2014 issue of FOCUS Magazine.
