CONVERSATION PROJECT

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The academic discipline of Disability Studies (DS) emerged over the last forty years in part as a reaction to the dominant “medical model” that viewed disability as a deficiency and therefore focused on “fixing” people or otherwise trying to make them fit into “normal” society. DS scholars, however, approached the topic of disability from the perspective of disabled people and viewed barriers for the disabled as socially constructed. The “social model” of disability posits that it is society itself that disables people by erecting physical and social barriers that limit access and assign stigma to people with disabilities. The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) argues that “disability is a key aspect of human experience,” and DS scholars therefore work to “promote greater awareness of the experiences of disabled people” and “advocate for social change.” In their Policy on Disability in CCCC, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) state that “the questions posed by disability studies ask us to rethink language, the body, the environment, identity, culture, power, and the nature of knowledge itself, enabling a meaningful engagement at multiple levels: bodily, personal, social, cultural, and political.”

Disability studies uses disability as a critical lens to critique and interrogate nearly all disciplines: from history, religion, art, philosophy, and literature to the fields of medicine, architecture, and education. This bibliography is focused on applications of disability studies to the field of education, particularly the college writing classroom, and is primarily interested in how an instructor can meaningfully incorporate disability studies into their pedagogy and curriculum. DS asks writing teachers to view their students’ diverse bodies and minds as a resource, to think critically about the power of language and its effects, to see what role the body plays in the writing process, and to consider the accessibility of their spaces and assignments.

This bibliography therefore offers writing program administrators (WPA) and all teachers of writing concepts from DS scholarship – ableism, embodied learning and writing, the social construction of disability, normative concepts of time and production – that are particularly relevant to composition. Jay Dolmage provides a general overview of how disabled people are excluded in higher education, how institutions have tried to accommodate them, and how disability studies can be used to improve learning for all students. Ella R. Browning, meanwhile, argues for the importance of meaningfully and productively incorporating disability studies – not simply “tacking it on” to existing curricula. Kristin Lindgren provides an example of teaching disability narratives to illustrate how these texts helped students understand how writing is an embodied act. Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s article calls for a theory and practice of teaching that conceives of disability as enabling a special critical insight. Finally, Tara Wood offers the concept of “crip time,” borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists, as a possible pedagogical framework for composition classrooms allowing greater flexibility with time and production.

It is important to remember, however, that DS research is not guided by “fixing” or “dealing with” disabled students; DS scholars argue that physical and social contexts are what need “fixing,” not individuals. The authors in this bibliography instead emphasize rectifying teaching approaches and writing classrooms themselves, especially through the implementation of Universal Design (UD), to improve access and education for all learners.

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Browning, E. R. (2014). Disability studies in the composition classroom. Composition Studies, 42(2), 96–116.

Starting with the observation that attention to disability is becoming more common in first-year composition courses but is often “tacked on” to their curricula, Ella R. Browning explores how a disability studies perspective can be meaningfully and productively incorporated into a writing classroom without altering the curriculum itself. Browning uses a sample first-year composition curriculum from a large public university to offer rhetorical approaches and pedagogical strategies that help students “to consider, explore, and articulate nonnormative embodied experiences in meaningful ways, even within a standardized composition curriculum” (98). Browning argues that including disability studies means “thinking critically about the ways that language, space, action, and inaction construct and sustain the dis/ability system” (104-5). Browning advocates using stakeholder theory in classrooms to explore complex notions of disability and how they affect individuals and including assigned readings by authors with disabilities. These readings should avoid “overcoming narratives” and focus instead on the ways people with disabilities can lead fulfilling lives. Finally, Browning provides a number of questions for instructors to ask themselves as they work to consciously avoid ableist ideologies in their teaching, including: “When I conceptualize the openness of my course and my awareness of important issues of identity, are there identities I leave out? How might I change this?” and “Do my classroom activities and pedagogical strategies privilege able-bodiedness? Do I allow for various models of embodiment, various ways of learning, various ways of composing, various ways off making meaning? How might my pedagogy be more inclusive?” (112).

Brueggemann, B. J. (2001). An enabling pedagogy: Meditations on writing and disability. Journal of Advanced Composition, 21(4), 791–820.

In this article, Brenda Jo Brueggemann shares her personal experiences as a self-identified disabled person implementing disability studies in her writing classrooms at Ohio State University. She argues for a theory and practice of teaching that conceives of disability as enabling a “critical, experiential, cognitive, sensory, and pedagogical insight” (795) using examples from three of her classroom spaces. One such activity for a FYC honors course she designed around the theme “Abilities in America” was asking her students to brainstorm “hot issues in America” and how they may relate to disability. After students chose the issue of date rape for discussion, Brueggemann explained “how disabled people are more often than not perceived as either asexual or abnormally sexual” (807) and how statistics on sexual abuse reflect high numbers of abuse toward disabled, institutionalized people. She then had her students break into groups to do the same exercise of connecting disability with other “hot issues.” This activity can complicate students’ understanding of issues they may see as straightforward and helps to generate topics for student writing. More importantly, this activity helps students to see the topic of disability as similar to race, class, and gender in being worth approaching with a critical eye. Brueggemann reports that putting disability at the center of her curriculum came with some student resistance and represented the greatest challenge of her eighteen years of teaching, but she describes her students’ ability to imagine and connect to the material, social, and individual “world of disability” in these courses as marking the enabling pedagogy she seeks to enact.

Dolmage, J. (2008). Mapping composition: Inviting disability in the front door. In C. Lewiecki-

Wilson & B.J. Brueggemann (Eds.), Disability and the teaching of writing: A critical

sourcebook (pp. 14-27). Bedford / St. Martin’s.

Jay Dolmage examines how students with disabilities are often excluded in higher education, how institutions have tried to accommodate them, and how disability studies can improve learning in the writing classroom. He employs three spatial metaphors borrowed from disability studies to describe the ways space can exclude, how it can be redesigned to be more inclusive, and how it can be more inclusively planned in the first place. First, Dolmage explains how universities construct “steep steps” to the “ivory tower” built upon standards meant keep certain bodies and minds out. Critically, Dolmage argues that these steep steps are purposefully erected by the academy in its role as the enforcer of cultural norms (18). Second, Dolmage describes how universities then “retrofit” their structures by adding ramps to the sides of buildings or accommodations to the standard curriculum. In this metaphor, disability still cannot enter through the front; retrofitting is inherently uncreative, generally forced or mandated, and an afterthought. Finally, Dolmage argues that in both theory and practice we can incorporate “Universal Design” (UD) into teaching composition to create “an enabling space for writing and a way to think broadly about ability” (15). Dolmage defines UD as “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” (24). In the pedagogy of a composition classroom, UD principles include encouraging collaboration and cooperative learning, diversifying media, fluctuating teaching methods, and allowing students to show their knowledge in a variety of ways; teachers are encouraged to “permit,” “listen,” “update,” “guide,” “clarify,” “review,” and “allow” (24). Central to the concept of UD is that it helps all students, regardless of their ability.

Lindgren, K. (2008). Body language: Disability narratives and the act of writing. In C. Lewiecki-

Wilson & B.J. Brueggemann (Eds.), Disability and the teaching of writing: A critical

sourcebook (pp. 96-108). Bedford / St. Martin’s.

Kristin Lindgren reflects on her own practice of teaching disability narratives to illustrate how these texts help students understand “themselves as embodied writers who also make use of specific writing technologies” and to explore how writing is a physical act that cannot be separated from the body (97). Lindgren argues that these narratives, “by foregrounding the materiality of both body and text, can reembody reading and writing” (99). Lindgren specifically takes on the work of Walter Ong and Plato, who, she says, consider written texts to exist apart from the time, place, and embodied subject who produced the knowledge they contain. Lindgren instead argues that the use of disability narratives in the writing classroom can revive “dead” writing by creating awareness of the physical, embodied nature of writing. Lindgren uses four narratives by disabled authors describing their bodies and their own reading and writing practices as examples, including The Body Silent by Robert Murphy, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Waist-High in the World: A Life among the Nondisabled by Nancy Mairs. She further suggests that, in the words of Mairs, disability narratives ask us to embrace literacy as a “carnal act,” or “writing as an embodied practice and about the written text as shaped by the particular circumstances of the bodies that produce and interpret it” (107). Lindgren then extends this conversation to the field of composition studies, noting that it disrupts assumptions about composition to make us aware of writing as a technology and a practice influenced by specific social and material conditions.

Wood, T. (2017). Cripping time in the college composition classroom. College Composition and Communication, 69(2), 260–286.

The inadequacy of common academic accommodations for people with disabilities was Tara Wood’s initial research ‘problem,’ but she came to find that inventing ‘new’ accommodations for the writing classroom could only uphold the current accommodation system informed by the medical model of disability: “individual-based fix-its applied to specific students in specific situations” (262). Wood shares findings from a study on the experiences of students with disabilities in college-level writing courses and finds that instructors may enforce normative conceptions of time and time frames on students whose experiences and processes contradict such required measures of time. Arguing that traditional, normative ideas of time and production can negatively impact student performance, Wood offers the concept of “crip time,” a concept borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists, as a possible pedagogical framework for composition classrooms. Classrooms adhere to normative time frames by definition – students are expected to arrive at a certain time, learn information at a particular speed, and perform in prescribed time frames. Crip time refers to flexible approaches to normative time frames and recognizing that people will arrive and process language at various rates. Woods offers the example of scaffolded exercises that allow for freewriting and follow-up exercises encouraging revision and reflection; implementing crip time is not about adding more time, but about “flexibly managing, negotiating, and experiencing time” (278). Crucially, Wood asserts that this design should be negotiated with disabled students, not simply for them. Wood offers cripping time as a way to think about how normativity is privileged in most of the pedagogical practices of a writing classroom, but she sees cripping time as a way to open up possibilities of nonnormative composing and student/instructor negotiations of time.