Listening to Our Elders: Working and Writing for Change

Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition. “I simply gave up trying to present at CCCC...”: A conversation with the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition

Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition “I simply gave up trying to present at CCCC on learning disabilities because I needed to get myself on the programs” A conversation with the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition Jay Dolmage, Samadhi Metta Bexar, Brenda Brueggeman, Susan Ghiaciuc, Patricia Dunn, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Sushil Oswal, Margaret Price, Nicole Quackenbush, and Amy Vidali Introduction Disability has a troubled history in college composition. For most of the twentieth century, people with disabilities were institutionalized in asylums , “schools” for the “feeble-minded,” and other exclusionary institutions : locations deemed the inverse of the college or university. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability,valorize perfection,and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual (or physical) weakness. Yet, the composition course has also been seen by others within academia as a remedial space, the place to temporarily store, fix, and cure students deemed unready for college. College is both a landing and launching space for the “most able.” But the composition classroom has always been located slightly off this runway. In the excellent histories of composition that we have at our disposal (see Berlin, Crowley, Shor, Clark, Fox) we see that the early role of writing classes at schools such as Harvard was to sort society, and to attribute illiteracy -as-disability to unwanted ethnic, class or gender groups. The ability or inability to write has been used to mark biological and cultural difference , as it has been used as a chute or ladder of class movement. Beyond histories of writing instruction, when we look directly at the history of disability in our disciplinary literature, we find only sporadic attention; most of what we find is a little bit scary, or a little bit embarrassing , depending on the angle. Take for instance, Ralph M. Williams’“A Method for Teaching Spelling to a Group of Seriously Retarded Students,” published in College English 16.8 in May of 1955. Williams recounts “four Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition 57 years of experimenting with groups at Trinity College” to address what he saw as a generational spelling deficiency: “the widespread feeling among college teachers that the spelling of college students has deteriorated since World War II” (500). He uses the word “retarded” to refer to the fact that many spellers tested at levels four or more years behind their age—so the word has a sort of literal meaning. But he also suggests that these same students , “who have been bad spellers for any length of time are emotionally ‘blocked’ in varying degrees” (501). This early article summarizes almost four previous and four subsequent decades of college composition’s attitude about disability/ability: the teacher’s job is to diagnose a lack in a group of students; this diagnosis likely carries forth from, or puts forward, some form of social or cultural stigma about that group of students; and then the teacher’s job is to develop means to fix these students. Other subsequent articles take on a similarly diagnostic and/or prescriptive perspective: “A Clinic for Misspellers” College English (1978); “Strephosymbolia: A Possible Strategy for Dealing with It” College English (1981); “Recognizing the Learning Disabled College Writer” College English (1989); “Review: Learning Disabilities: New Doubts, New Inquiries” College English (1990). On a similar note, the NCTE archives hold a short record of a “Proposed Committee on Dyslexia, 1985,” that seems to never have come to fruition. These bubbles of interest in disability, then, all seem to be generously motivated and well meaning. But they isolate disability within one specific student group, use a diagnostic rhetoric, and seek remedial means to correct “problems.” It wasn’t really until the late 1990s that disability—as a question of human rights, as a critical modality, as an identity category—came into the common consciousness of the CCCC. As Jennifer Clary-Lemon writes, “until 1990, most dis/ability scholarship focused around a medical model of disease and rehabilitation” (28). As she suggests, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 allowed “issues of disability and oppression [to come] to the fore in America” (28). In writing studies, this meant greater administrative attention to the accessibility of programs, an expanded disability rights-based research agenda, and the push for a more accessible national conference. Several scholars at this time studied the “LD” label, and the controversy surrounding it, looking at how learning disability was often conflated with basic writing. Patricia Dunn’s landmark Learning...