Benjamin Kaupp.
Educator. Advocate. Professional question-asker.
I teach students, build programs, and occasionally ask institutions why they’re making everything so unnecessarily difficult.
I’m a faculty member at Foothill College, where I direct Tools for Transition & Work, a college and career readiness program for neurodivergent young adults. I also work in curriculum leadership and am pursuing a doctorate at Johns Hopkins.
A Few Things
I Believe
Disabled and neurodivergent students don’t need to become someone else to deserve a future. They need opportunities, meaningful support, real expectations, and the freedom to figure out who they want to be.
Unfortunately, education has an impressive talent for confusing compliance with learning, independence with isolation, and difference with deficiency.
I’m interested in changing that. Sometimes through teaching, sometimes through research or advocacy, and sometimes by noticing that a supposedly complicated problem could be fixed by writing a clearer email.
The goal isn’t to sand off every interesting edge until students look “normal.” It’s to help people build lives that actually belong to them.
A longer note on the subject ↗What I Actually Do
Teaching & program development
Working with neurodivergent young adults on skills that matter beyond the final exam.
Advocacy & institutional tinkering
Curriculum, disability advocacy, and questions that sometimes require committee minutes.
Workshops & other adventures
Neurodivergence, student success, and how to stop making simple things complicated.
There’s more to life than committee meetings.
When I’m not teaching, studying, or attempting to persuade an institution to make a sensible decision, I have a fairly eclectic collection of other interests.
Old cars, new technology, things with engines, things without engines, and the occasional questionable project that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
I firmly believe that taking your work seriously doesn’t require taking yourself terribly seriously.
The other stuff I get up to