My students are going to love this, thought Kyle McQuillan after reading a collection of HIV narratives from Cuba written in the 1990s. She was teaching a college medical Spanish course that semester and decided the short stories would tie in perfectly to an upcoming unit on sexual health.
But when it came time for discussion, the class fell silent. Normally engaged, her students were unresponsive, struggling to connect with the text.
Determined to understand what went wrong, McQuillan initiated a conversation with her students. Their feedback was eye-opening. They wanted more social and historical context, tools to break down the text, and space to explore how it resonated with them personally.
Looking back, she realized she had assumed they would instinctively grasp the literary significance of the stories. Instead, they needed a stronger foundation: an introduction to the AIDS crisis, Cuba’s health policies, and the global response.
The following semester, she reintroduced the material with her previous students’ insights. She provided background on the history, helped students break down the text, and encouraged deeper discussion. The difference in the student response was striking.
“We talked about it for two weeks,” she says. “They kept referencing it in course evaluations, and when I asked what they wanted more of, they all requested more readings like the HIV narratives.”
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That experience of redesigning a lesson around student feedback was a turning point that would shape McQuillan’s approach to teaching and research.
Now a PhD student in the department of romance studies at UNC-Chapel-Hill, she is exploring how integrating student collaboration and technology into learning design can make literature a more inclusive and impactful tool both inside and outside the classroom.
McQuillan’s human-centered approach also extends to community-based solutions. At Innovate Carolina, the university’s innovation and entrepreneurship initiative, she uses creative problem-solving to help innovators iterate their ideas more effectively.
“This kind of design work at Innovate and in my research really hinges on asking people what they need and then doing that,” she says. “Which sounds basic, but that’s not usually the way we learn problem-solving skills.”
Labs to language
When McQuillan started her undergraduate studies at the College of William & Mary, she was on the pre-med track, diligently working through biology and chemistry courses. But she also kept Spanish in her schedule, a subject she had excelled in during high school.
The summer after her third year in college, she took a position as a medical interpreter in one of Virginia’s rural health systems. The experience was illuminating.
“I hated being in the clinic,” she admits, “but I enjoyed the health education outreach side of the role.”
It was the community interactions that energized her, connecting with patients to help them understand their bodies.
A year later, a research trip to Cuba with one of her Hispanic studies professors ignited a renewed passion for language learning. Encouraged by supportive faculty, she made the difficult decision to leave her medical school ambitions behind and pursue a degree in Spanish.
After completing her bachelor’s degree, she spent a year working with the same professor whose research had drawn her to Cuba. From there, she pursued a master’s in romance languages and literatures at UNC-Chapel Hill.
“I didn’t initially imagine my research and applied practice would be in education,” she says.
Yet, she found herself captivated by the ways language classes facilitated connection and curiosity. Teaching Spanish wasn’t just about grammar and vocabulary — it was about fostering relationships and creating immersive learning experiences.
“In other classes, it’s rare to talk about how many siblings you have or what your favorite color is,” she says with a smile. “In language classes, you know things about each other coming out of those spaces, which I think is cool.”
And McQuillan feels a deep connection with the students she teaches, especially in the medical Spanish courses. She says they are like “walking copies” of herself at 19, anxious and motivated — which is why she sees her classroom as an opportunity to expose them to different ways of thinking, learning, and approaching their education.
Better learning experiences
McQuillan’s experiences in the classroom ultimately shaped her PhD research, which explores how student-centered design can enhance literature-based medical Spanish courses.
Her approach is simple: Go straight to the source. By conducting interviews with students from past romance studies courses, she identified key themes related to their challenges and needs.
“Broadly, students’ number-one concern is being able to use these things in the real world and connect them to something relevant to keep the language in their brain,” she says. “Instructors need to create a space where students can practice being wrong in ways that don’t make them disengage.”
From there, she hosted small focus groups to brainstorm classroom activities that address these concerns. Her findings informed the design of a two-part lesson for a Spanish health literature course, where she tested her theories in real time.
In the first lesson, students engaged in activities to build their understanding of a short story about illness. In the second, they participated in a hospital simulation to apply their vocabulary and concepts. The students contributed to building the simulation by assembling objects to make the physical space feel like a real hospital room and role-playing different perspectives from the short story.
The results were powerful. Students not only demonstrated deeper comprehension but also exhibited empathy and collaboration throughout the exercise.
“If we expect our students to go into clinical spaces and be members of clinical teams, they need to understand how that world works,” she says.
McQuillan also used her research to create a replicable framework for educators in various disciplines, proving that student-centered design can create more meaningful learning experiences across fields.
Beyond books
Outside of academia, McQuillan channels her expertise into real-world problem-solving at Innovate Carolina, UNC-Chapel Hill’s hub for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development. Her team operates as a consulting group, helping organizations apply human-centered design methods to their work.
McQuillan has worked on a variety of projects, including co-creating a backpack medicine program for people experiencing homelessness and a social intervention for middle school students with anxiety. Just like her dissertation work, she conducts interviews, runs focus groups, and leads brainstorming sessions to develop solutions for people facing challenges.
Her primary goal at Innovate is impacting the state of North Carolina and public institutions across it. McQuillan has successfully done that through translating novel ideas from Carolina researchers and faculty members to applicable projects that benefit the public good.
“Whether I’m working with students or innovators, I hope they walk away with not just tools like design thinking or improvement science methods, but the mindsets that help them grasp the challenge of being in the problem space,” McQuillan explains. “Embracing empathy, ambiguity, optimism, and failing fast will help them lean into the problem to learn from the perspectives of those who experience it.”