I will be leading a one-day intensive workshop for the CUNY Learning Disability project, to be held at Guttman Community College on April 1st from 10am – 1pm.

The workshop will explore how concepts of Neurodiversity and Universal Design for Learning can help instructors across the disciplines re-think their approaches to…[Read more]

This talk was presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, FL on March 19, 2015. It is part of panel E.24, titled New Directions for Disability-Studies Research: Using […]

Stephanie Kerschbaum’s Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference (2014) represents a turning point in disability studies research for writing studies. While the monograph–published by CCCC and […]

Rather than spending this time at the beginning of my oral exam describing my three lists to you again, I thought I would talk a bit about my motivations in putting them together and how this exercise has been useful to me so far. I won’t go much in detail into what I learned from reading the individual texts (since that will certainly come up as I answer your questions); instead, I want to focus on practical concerns, on next steps based on what I know and don’t know now, on real world applications for all this thinking I’ve been doing. So, having spent a year or so reading, what’s it good for?

My motivation in putting these lists together was to help me get the scholarly acumen to pursue my personal commitments as an activist scholar. My own perspective as an activist scholar emerges from three different but related images of myself:

First, I see myself as a cultural theorist. I have a long history of work in critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. Disability studies offered me a natural extension of my interests in social and cultural analysis, a new way of asking impertinent questions about what we think we know and how we have agreed as a society to operate.

Second, I am also a writing teacher, a worker within the contentious and pervasive institutional mechanism of literacy instruction that extends through nearly every college and university in the nation. This field offers me new ways to understand the importance of writing and education for adults, and it also gives me practical knowledge of how universities work, especially from the perspectives of writing program administrators, writing across the curriculum directors, and other hybrid faculty/administrator roles that folks like me tend to hold, often immediately after earning our degrees.

Finally, I am a person with learning disabilities who has chosen to make academic work his career. I’m someone who has difficulty carrying out the tasks of academic life for reasons believed by some to have root in my atypical brain–specifically my dyslexia. I am personally invested in understanding the kinds of challenges people like me face working in academia as it currently exists; and I am personally invested in imagining ways people like me–people we might call “neurodiverse”–can play an active role in changing the status quo of teaching, learning, and working in colleges and universities.

So, the purpose of this exam for me has not been simply to gain knowledge of a set of canonical texts for their own sake–it’s been more about utility. My aim was to get the lay of the land, as it were, for how currently published scholarship can support me in my commitments as an activist scholar.

My reading led me to some well-laid paths: for example, it led me to a robust body of scholarship by disability studies scholars in the humanities published over the last twenty-plus years. Likewise, it led me to the works of writing teachers and writing program administrators who, since the days of Open Admissions in the late 1960s, have been imagining new ways literacy instruction can support the success of students at odds with academic environments because of racial, ethnic, gender, and class differences.

It also led me to relatively obscure paths, especially in trying to better understand learning disabilities and other disabilities associated with neurological difference as they are experienced in colleges and universities. Here I had to draw upon a wide range of discourses from fields as diverse as neuroscience, psychology, educational technology, as well as the first-person accounts of memoirists and former students.

I still don’t feel I’m an expert in the topics I studied for this exam. While I have a much better lay of the land of what others have written, and while I feel I have grown much more conversant in the discourses of disability, learning, and teaching in higher ed, I still feel anxious about the gaps in my knowledge.

For instance, I still know very little about the history of disability accommodation practices on college campuses following the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation act of 1973, an important landmark moment for disability in higher ed. Likewise, I don’t know, exactly, the rates at which LD or other neurodiverse student populations end up in remedial writing programs, or the ways their experiences in writing courses might contribute to the abysmal retention rates for these populations.

I don’t know these things partially because the secondary research doesn’t have much to say about them yet, or what is said is only provisional, out of date, or simply offers hints. It is partially for this reason that at the same time I’ve been doing this secondary research I have also begun my own primary research.

I have begun an IRB-approved study examining the history of disability service provision and disability policy in the CUNY system. Through a series of interviews and focus groups with current and former disability service providers, and by gathering and examining an archive of disability policy documents and service provider publications, I am attempting to study how disability politics and disability discourse have worked in real world institutions.

I am hoping that this research will move me out of the abstract realm of disability theory and into a practical understanding of how disability in higher education is affected by things like administrative policies and on-the-ground work by staff and faculty working in classrooms and boardrooms. I hope that I will discover insights from this research to help inform my work promoting access as as a progressive writing program administrator and activist scholar.

I will give just a few quick examples of the ways I’m trying to put my emerging expertise from this secondary and primary research to use. In March and July of last year, I gave presentations at national conferences arguing that writing teachers and WPAs have much to learn by better understanding the history of disability politics and inclusion on college campuses. I presented this timeline which synthesizes insights from all my research to re-present the history of progressive writing program theory, drawing new parallels to pushes for disability inclusion in higher education. By contrasting the well-known history of writing-studies’s evolving approaches to student difference with the largely unknown history of disability activism and progressive inclusion in higher education, I hoped to help WPAs understand how current emerging interests in disability studies within composition/rhetoric represents not a disruption, but a culmination of our longstanding investments in social justice, diversity, and innovation.

To those same audiences, I also presented some early findings from my interviews and archive gathering, showing how disability service provider work has direct application in the writing classroom and the work of WPAs. For instance, I described the work of Anthony Collarossi, a former disability director at Kingsborrough Community College. Collarossi–an LD specialist, a former school counselor, and a self-identified person with disabilities–developed training materials for instructors at his campus based on Multiple Intelligence theory and cognitive psychology research on different learning styles.  He also designed and piloted a set of credit-baring gateway courses for at-risk students both with and without diagnosed disabilities, courses that blended together academic support, self-advocacy, and multimodal writing instruction. Writing teachers and WPAs alike have been enthusiastic, and have easily understood the importance of recovering these kinds of disability-inspired innovations for potential application to our own practices.

Finally, I have also applied my developing expertise to my work in peer teacher training. I have given three workshops over the last year for instructors in a range of disciplines, talking about disability and universal design for learning in college classrooms. Since my responsibilities as a future WPA will certainly involve teacher training and curricular design, it’s vital for me to have good working models for helping instructors understand disability as a more than merely a medical/legal concern for service providers to deal with.

I aim to develop workshops to help instructors work through their own disability biases and come to understand the power of disability stigma, allowing them to re-envision disability not as a problem of student deficiency but as a problem of curricular access, of social discrimination, and of cultural bias. I hope the next two years of my dissertation work will give me more opportunities to develop workshop models, teacher resources, and other tools for working disability praxis in real institutional contexts.

I’ll wrap up by saying that one final outcome of this year of study, the feeling that I have found other scholars in my field interested in the intersections of disability studies and composition/rhetoric, people actively publishing and supporting the work of emerging scholars like myself. In short, that I’ve found my tribe, especially in places like the active DisabilityRhetoric online community and the faculty working in the CCCC committee on disability issues. I’ve made personal connections with scholars whose work inspires my own, and as one result of this connection, I will be presenting on a panel with Margaret Price about disability studies methodologies for composition research next March.

None of what I’ve said so far directly addresses the questions of what I’ve been reading for the last year and what I think about the ideas and concerns of individual scholars, how I make sense of the wide range of debates that focus my lists. I’m eager to talk about that now. I hope what I have done, however, is give you a sense of what I see this exercise as being good for, both so far and looking forward toward my future research and practice. So let’s get down to the questions.

I’ve been trying to think through what went wrong with my writing on this project. Wrong isn’t quite it–what I learned by not succeeding to meet my deadline.

I faltered when it came time to work my sources into my argument. In my earlier four drafts, I had been keeping the sources at arms length, trying to figure out my own points. I had left incorporating the sources until pretty late in the process, and I got overwhelmed by the slowness and frustrations of the process: hunting down quotes, figuring out how to summarize things, making new connections. It always catches me by surprise for some reason, and it frustrates me until just give up. I stop writing.

One issue is my patchy familiarity with the texts I want to reference. I’ve read them only once or twice, and then quite quickly as part of my Orals reading lists. After multiple drafts through the argument, I end up misremembering exactly what they said—what I remember is what connection I made when reading their work, my version of their idea: this is the idea I want to use in my paper. Sometimes I can’t track down the exact moment in the text I wanted. And even when I find the moment or idea, there’s the work of explaining how the passage is useful–obvious to me, but not my readers, of course. Integrating sources means big changes and a lot of potentially chaotic revision, especially if I’m tightly tied to the argument as it sits in the last draft.

I think that’s what discourages me in my writing process. As I work through the sources, I discover things that make me feel I need to do major revision, like a whole patch of the landscape is falling into the sea. I get upset that I mis-remembered, or that I didn’t check all my sources more thoroughly before beginning the project – which would have spared me this disappointment. (This is faulty logic, of course.) I get mad it’s not easier.

I remember a particular point—I had recalled an important moment in Donna Strickland’s The Managerial Unconscious of Composition Studies in which she provided an expanded definition of the notion of curriculum, expanding it to include the administrative and technical aspects of the students’ experience. She reframed curriculum to include the whole environment of learning.

I thought this would make a useful connection to the ways that comp/rhet disability scholars like Margaret Price and Jay Dolamge (among many others) are paying critical attention to matters outside of individual classrooms (the normal sense of “curriculum”), instead critiquing things like conference accessibility, faculty bias, administrative practices.

I remember this moment so well because it provides such a clear link to disability studies and the social model of disability, which argues that disability is not caused by a person’s impairment, but rather the barriers for access present in the built and social environment. The social and cultural work of disability studies is to address the curriculum of ableism that allows for inaccessible environments, inaccessible professions, and discriminatory beliefs about disabled people.
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In the future, It might be useful as I did here to to work through the sources at a bit of distance from the draft itself. When I allow myself to just muse on the sources, to be a little chaotic and dig for what the sources really mean to me, I produce some good material, including useful exposition that connects the source to my thinking. It doesn’t guarantee that what I come up with will fit the mold I had planned, but it’s something to keep me moving, at least.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve been writing more as I’ve been going through this process, been feeling compelled to write. I’m making connections between the scholarship and my ideas, and I’m also getting a better hang on the discourse conventions of the fields in which I plan to publish.

While I learn a lot about the rules of the conversation from reading articles and chapters, I think I’ve gotten more from my recent experiences at academic conferences. At both CCCC in Indianapolis and CWPA at Normal, IL, I got to meet people working directly in my field and talk to them about their work, their concerns, and their interests. I also got to experience the way my own ideas piqued or didn’t pique their interest, to hear what sounded useful about my work. Talking and working with real professionals in my fields has started to show me that my writing can be useful to other people, that I can make it usable for them. I think that realization has helped focus my energy when writing, helped me get a little bit out of my own head and try to boil down my efforts to what is most directly useful for my audience and to not waste time and energy on the rest.

If anything, this is a lesson for me about the importance of social learning in gaining rhetorical awareness. The imagined “reader” is one thing, but actual live readers whom I know and whose knowledge and interests I can intelligently reflect on . . . it means much more to me.

Obviously, one of my reasons for doing this blog is to capitalize on the positive gains I get from writing and talking and thinking in social spaces. Comments aren’t quite like conversation, but they can work very well between conferences.
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The scariest thing about spending an entire year working through long reading lists is having to trust my memory. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some important things from the texts I read eleven months ago (or longer). On top of that, I’m now moving through my remaining texts very quickly, not taking as thorough notes as I used to: I’m likely missing things. I’m tormented by the forgotten and the unremembered equally.

So, part of the exercise of the orals, for me, is a challenge of self-trust: I have to trust that my early notes and writings about the texts did good work, that I’ll be able to review and recall. I have to trust that I’m taking in enough to talk intelligently on the day–that it’s okay to forget a few things, and that my examiners are not expected perfection. That all I need is to pass. These are probably useful lessons to learn on the threshold of two years of dissertation work.
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It’s sometimes hard to keep balance in Seattle, where I’ll be for nearly two weeks starting next Tuesday. I visit at least once a year, usually in the summer, when the weather is at its best and I have the most free time (most years). It’s the only time all year I get to spend with my oldest friends in my first city-love. I tend to indulge. It’s valuable recuperative time after a year in crazy-making New York.

So, obviously it’s hard to stay disciplined and get work done when I’m there. When I could be singing karaoke with my friends or hiking on park trails and/or enjoying all the easily available, legal, high-quality marijuana–I have trouble getting work done. I’m going to try to keep some work time set aside every morning, and continue moving through my reading and writing, but I know it’s going to take some balancing. I wonder how others deal with this kind of situation: the paradox of vacation productivity, anyone?
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Besides the orals, as if that weren’t enough, I’m working on a draft article I want to submit to a CFP due August 15th, six days away as I write this. The call is well suited to my work, and gives me the opportunity to revise my CWPA talk and reflect on some other work I’ve been doing. Here’s the CFP, for those interested: Teaching Disability, Special Issue of Transformations.

It’s a bit of a distraction from the orals work, but it’s giving me an occasion to make important connections among texts on my lists, and I think the writing will lead directly into both my dissertation proposal and some early chapter in the dis. If you’re interested in reading a very drafty recent draft (half outline half chunked text), you can access it here with the temporary password “draft“. Feedback or encouragement are both welcome!

One important tool is Optimized Character Recognition. When you scan a document to share with students, you can scan it with recognized text, which allows it to be read with screen readers.

There are specialty programs for disabled people that will convert scanned PDFs into OCR’d PDFs so that they can be read from a screen reader. You can also have disability services help you scan directly to OCR. However’y ou can do it yourself as well: Here’s a quick guide to OCRing a text using Adobe: http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/acrobat_ocr_make_your_scanned/

Tips for Ensuring OCR’d PDFs actually work: 

It’s necessary to check that your OCR’d PDFs actually work! One option, as Sushil Oswal suggested is to download Microsoft’s new Windows Eyes software (for free!) and listen to the file itself.

This might not work for everyone, however. Suppose you’re Deaf or hard of hearing, how can you tell the accuracy of an OCR’d PDF?

One thing I’ve discovered from my years of scanning and listening to readings using Kurzweil 3000 is that a poorly scanned PDF will be translated to the computer as gibberish. For example, if you scan something that’s been underlined by hand, the OCR will not be able to distinguish the letters. Or, sometimes lowercase Ls are turned into 1s, etc.

A simple way to check the accuracy of your OCR scan is to try copying the text of the PDF and pasting it in another program, like MS Word. Once you’ve OCR’d a text, you should be able to highlight and copy any text that has been recognized and integrated into the file. Whatever appears when you copy the text should be exactly what the program thinks the PDF says: so if it’s full of errors, then you can expect that the student listening to the file will hear those errors. If the text copies across platforms without errors, then the audio should read without errors too. Take it from me, listening to a poorly scanned PDF is deeply frustrating.

The Graduate Center Composition and Rhetoric Community is very excited to invite you to a conversation about the future of Basic Writing between Ira Shor and Rebecca Mlynarczyk– […]

George Otte (CUNY’s Director of Academic Technology, Chief Academic […]

I’ve been working on my lists for three weeks now, and I thought it felt about time for a checkin and self evaluation. I’ve written seven reading response posts and tried a few different formats, with […]

My first list provides an overview of interdisciplinary disability studies in the humanities. It explores methodological approaches used by historians, literary critics, and […]