This paper is only
slightly revised from the version I gave in
Opening the
Conversation between Disability Studies and
By
Rebecca Day Babcock
It’s about time that writing center and disability studies scholars begin a conversation, as their agendas have a great deal in common. This conversation can expand and enhance both programs. Writing center studies and disability studies share much of their philosophy and approach to education. In this paper I will explain these connections and propose we take disability into account in our writing center work. In particular, I would like to point out the importance of hiring directors and tutors with disabilities, and for these people to write about their experiences. Also, I would like to encourage us to consider issues of access and different student needs in our work. Finally, I would like to put out a call for more research on disability in the writing center.
Theories
and Philosophies
In March 2005, PMLA published the proceedings from the Conference on Disability Studies and the University. Sharon L. Snyder, in her presentation “Geographies of Uneven Development: How Does One Make Disability Integral to Higher Education?”
discusses the need for a new model of education. Rather than one of “passing down” (the banking model) she calls for a model in which “information is shared and contested, the temptation to reproduce ourselves is resisted, and thus, the normative logistics informing much pedagogical practice are refused” (538). Snyder is talking about the classroom, but I think the writing center can do this and is already doing this. We do share and contest information in the tutorial, especially in the collaborative model. We do resist the “temptation to reproduce ourselves,” as we are careful to let the text remain fully the writer’s and not to take it over or put our own stuff in there. I think we would say that, at least in most writing centers, “the normative logistics informing much pedagogical practice are refused.”
Snyder goes on to say that current classroom pedagogical models “exclude through inflexibility of presentation, indifference to varying modes of learning, and inattentiveness to diversifying classroom populations and out of fear that might require new teaching materials and methods” (538). Again, the writing center is trying its darndest to include through flexibility of presentation, to be embracing of different modes of learning, and to be attentive to diversifying populations. We embrace and welcome new teaching materials and methods. At least that’s the way I see writing centers. In her title Snyder asks, “How does one make disability integral to higher education?” One answer might be “through the writing center.”
In another article from the conference proceedings, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder write: “The institutionalization of disability studies is fraught with difficulties because the field situates itself as a force of destabilization—one that would treat unaccommodating environments and disciplines, not individual insufficiencies, as the object of change” (632). I think the writing center is also working to change “unaccommodating environments and disciplines” rather than “individual insufficiencies.” I understand the work of Nancy Grimm as advocating change in the outside environment and attitudes toward the student rather than changing the student him or herself. I also see the tendency to critique established practices in Marylin Cooper’s “Really Useful Knowledge.” This is also a fundamental issue in bilingual education in that we don’t need to change the child (especially in terms of language) but we need to change society’s attitude toward that child and her language: If we don’t do this in writing centers, we need to. This is also related to the concept of CCCC’s Student’s Right to Their Own Language: “We should begin our work…by making [students] feel confident that their writing, in whatever dialect, makes sense and is important to us, that we read it and are interested in the ideas and person that the writing reveals” (23). In a recent article in TETYC Kathryn Schmitz and Susan Keenan argue for teachers to evaluate deaf students’ writing for content rather than grammar. If it’s not true that writing centers are working against injustice in the system rather than weaknesses in students’ writing processes and products, then maybe we should be. This of course is related to disability because some students we see will demonstrate written products or writing skills and practices that are influenced by their disability. In the case of physical or mental impairments when we can’t change the student; we must change the environment.
Importance
of Hiring Tutors and Directors with Disabilities and Hearing Their Stories
In another paper in the conference proceedings Catherine J. Kudlick writes that “Disability only rarely figures into hiring decisions and discussions of diversity in curriculum, and the resulting invisibility of disabled colleagues reinforces the topic’s marginality to academic inquiry” (561). Do institutions actively seek out disabled writing center directors to enhance diversity, or do institutions consciously or unconsciously discriminate? One of the authors in our upcoming collection Writing Centers and Disability writes of how, after an accident and surgery that left her with brain damage, instead of accommodating her, her supervisors gave her new, difficult, and even impossible tasks, seemingly in an effort to frustrate her or to show that she was no longer qualified for the job. And how about our tutoring staffs? Many directors may strive for a representative gender, racial, or ethnic mix of tutors, but how many writing center directors consider the importance of having disabled tutors on the staff? It may even be the case that writing center hiring practices are possibly exclusionary to tutors with disabilities. Couldn’t requirements like minimum GPA, writing samples, and grammar tests possibly be exclusionary? We can talk about serving students with disabilities in the writing center and taking a disability perspective. But we have to look at whether or not disabled people actually work in the writing center. The Writing Centers Research Project survey doesn’t ask about disability. Perhaps that could be added in future surveys. Some of my colleagues and I are planning a survey of diversity in the writing center. Most articles written about disability in the writing center focus on serving tutees with disabilities and are written as reports of I tutored a student and here’s what happened. I did a search of Comppile and could find no articles about writing center workers’ experiences with their own disability and the academic profession. With my co-editors I am currently working on an edited collection called Disability in the Writing Center that will contain writings by directors and tutors with disabilities, however, even in a collection such as this some authors choose not to disclose their disabilities. The fact that people would find this risky shows that discrimination is still real. Even with these risks, the literature would be enhanced by the inclusion of even more experiences of tutors, tutees, and directors with disabilities in the writing center.
Need
and Accessibility
There is a clear need for writing centers to consider disabled students. More and more disabled students are coming into our Universities: in the aforementioned conference proceedings Wendy Newby writes, “As of 1999, approximately nine percent of the students in two- or four-year institutions reported having a disability….In 2000, 1.5 million undergraduates reported a disability” (599). Thomas Couser writes that “people with disabilities make up the population’s largest minority: Census 2000 found that nearly twenty percent of the population over five years of age to be affected by some sort of disability” (602). Lennard Davis states it this way: “There are more people with disabilities than there are African-Americans or Latinos” (2). But we also know that not all students formally report their disabilities. We have a dual charge: claiming that the writing center is a place where these students can feel at home, and that our pedagogy already can meet their needs, and then to make sure that it does.
We must also make the writing center accessible. Georgina Kleege, in her talk “Reflections on Writing and Teaching Disability Autobiography” writes, “Although being disability studies scholars [we can read “writing center” scholars] does not make us access specialists, I believe we cannot cede the responsibility for access to specialists or accept without question others’ prescriptions about who needs access and what kinds of access are appropriate” (609). This resonates with me, as after a talk at Hershey in which I advocated editing and proofreading help for students who need it, some writing center directors expressed their strict adherence to the “letter” of the accommodations letters that students get from the disability services office. I think we can interpret Kleege’s statement by saying that rather than just stick to the letter of the law or the accommodations statement, we need to work together with the individual student to find out what works best, and be ready to be flexible and adjust our pedagogies and even our policies, practices, and theories if necessary, especially if those are exclusionary. Sharon Snyder writes, “Students with significantly differing needs must be enlisted in a reinvention of the classroom [writing center] environment” (538). In writing centers we should discuss accommodations and different learning needs with individual students as well as focus groups.
Research
Finally, there is an immediate need for research on disabilities in the writing center. Most of the published articles have been extremely informal case studies of “I tutored a student with a disability and here’s what happened. Some of the disabilities mentioned in these articles are deafness, epilepsy, hearing loss, low vision. There are also articles and passages in books that recommend tips or technology on how to help students with disabilities. To my knowledge, there is no published formal research on tutoring students with disabilities in the writing center. While not yet published, my dissertation on tutoring deaf students is one exception, and there are a few others in our forthcoming edited collection as well as an article I wrote based on my research coming out in Disability/Teaching/Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. But much more of this research needs to be done, and it needs to proceed with formal methodology rather than the informal case studies which are all we’ve seen. Stephen North pointed out the limitations of lore over 20 years ago, but yet much of our knowledge still consists of lore rather than formal research. James Sosnoski defends lore in his article “Postmodern Teachers in their Postmodern Classrooms”: “Lore…counts as understanding for teachers of writing. It is not, however, formed in the way that disciplines paradigmatically produce knowledge. It is contradictory. It disobeys the law of noncontradiction. It is eclectic. It takes feeling into account. It is subjective and nonreplicable. It is not binary. It counts as knowing only ina postdiscliplinary context” (204). I value lore and what it can do, but at this point I call you to formal research. We need a mix of both, and at this point, all we have is lore.
Our forthcoming book includes first-person accounts of tutoring students with disabilities, being a writing center worker with a disability, and formal research and theory. this is just a start, not an ending. As the two recent and popular collections Stories form the Center and Writing Center Research show, there is room for both types of knowledge, lore and formal research. I am not devaluing narrative. Narrative is crucial. But I am suggesting we still need more formal research in general, but especially regarding the interaction of disability with the writing center.
When
I presented this paper in
Works Cited
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