Disability

A wonderful thing about disability studies is that it unselfconsciously suggests that compassion can guide conversations about pedagogy:

"For educators, it is ethically questionable to practice pedagogies and construct spaces that categorically exclude entire classes of people.  We need to pay attention to the teaching of composition through the lens of disability studies to remind ourselves of just how much our profession has to learn, and just how much we have been content to ignore" (Selfe and Howe).

And so not only do we need to face our need to be compassionate educators, we need to look at how our tendencies to try and enforce and extend "normal" impede that pursuit:
 
Dolmage quoting Lennard Davis's Bodies of Difference writes, "language usage, which is as much a physical function as any other somatic activity, has become subject to an enforcement of normalcy" (116).  I appreciate it when Dolmage  (Writing Against Normal) reinforces that the essay composing process is messy.  It is such a simple but vital reminder. There is no standardized or tidy process for composing (creating) anything.  We might expect standard products for standard purposes, but when it comes to creating things (like writing our own lives) there are few standard processes, and fewer standard purposes. Perhaps the more divergent we are, the better. (See Veronica's Roth's awesome book of this same name.) :-)

"The normate subject is white, male, straight, upper middle class;"... "The subject and his body translate as error-free, straight and logical prose; as a writing process this is a portfolio of progression towards perfection and away from all evidence of struggle and labor" (Dolmage 115).  Ah, yes, never let them see you sweat--got to make sure that disorderly body gets hidden.  I find it fascinating that Dolmage makes the connection that the enforcement of writing standards happens at about the same time that body standards become an issue (I am thinking that this is junior high school). 

Dolmage writes, "We see normalcy imposed multitudinously through 'surface features' like page layout and sentence length. We see normalcy interpellated through nebulous ideas like 'clarity,' which Trinh T. Minh Ha suggests 'is a means of subjection' and 'conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing'" (116).  

Yes! And we wonder why students act in such rebellion to this enforced conformity. It's not that they can't write, it's that they reject its rigid forms like teenagers reject controlling parents.

"Make it your first priority to design for people with disabilities" (Slatin 2).  Spaces that acknowledge the unique needs of all students challenge the control paradigm in favor of a compassion paradigm.  We can be in charge without being in control.

In recent years composition studies has offered us conversations in consideration of race, class, sexual orientation, SRTOL, and for the rich textures of difference. Unfortunately, these conversations are largely relegated to composition courses, publications and conferences with little reverberating out into the disciplines where error-free, straight and logical prose are still the order of the day.  How can we get this loving voice to sing loud enough for the rest of the academy to hear? How do we create an "ethical infrastructure" in the American institution? 

(Personally I think WAC and WID work is where the reverberation of these conversations can best be facilitated.)

Ironies abound right now relative to conversations about disability.  While a text such as "Disability and Kairotic Spaces" suggests that real energy is moving to break down barriers to access, the physically embodied truth is that able-bodied students on this campus are so tuned out of their own bodies that they cannot respond to each other let alone to disabled bodies.  The feedback awareness required of a body to be sensitive to another body in space is removed by the hyper-attention to sounds piped in by ear bud.  I see it everyday, everywhere.  I am a victim of it.   I am the one who moves out of people's way because while my knee might be unstable, none of my senses is compromised.  So we not only have true disability in people to be conscious of (temporary or permanent), we have manufactured disability: self-imposed hearing impairments that result in a conscious withdrawal from social and physical proprioception. 

And here is what is unfortunate:  these people I am referring to are not imagining disability for any higher purpose; I am not even sure they know they are enacting disability, but in their oblivion to social and physical cues, they are compromised from making quick and effective decisions.  Walking and i-podding is safer than texting and driving, but it is still a state of dis-ability.

"I become more convinced each day that practicing accessibility means closing the imagination gap that separates most people from people with disabilities. It means imagining disability, and working at it long enough to get over the first shock of being unable to do what you're accustomed to doing in the way you're accustomed to doing it--long enough so that you begin to find solutions and workarounds, long enough so that you can begin to tell the difference between good design and bad design, between things that you can't do because you haven't learned how to do them yet and things that you can't do because there's no way for a person in your (imagined) circumstances to do them" (Slatin, John. The Imagination Gap.)

Besides the work we can do as individual educators in our classrooms, how can we link up the conversations we are having in Comp and Rhet to the real world?  And here is perhaps the biggest irony of all: We could do this as writers, but what is deemed good writing in the academy is not something that ordinary folk would want to read; and if we disavow our academic roots to write for the masses, then those texts leave us with no professional credibility. Victor says that the field of Composition suffers from "an anxiety of sophistication" (personal blurt 11/4/14)

On a narrative note. I am no stranger to disability:
I was born with a dislocated hip that was not discovered until it was too late to do anything about it (after my baby-cartilage had hardened into deformed bones).  I grew up with a pronounced limp and  physical limitations that made me have to work twice as hard to physically catch up with other active kids. It also required me to have surgeries at inopportune times, and to wear uncomfortable casts,  braces and shoes for way too much of my youth. My family did not acknowledge this as a disability (except to tease me).  My "disability" was an obstacle to overcome and not an excuse for care.

While recuperating from surgery in the Wiesbaden Army hospital where I lived for over a month as a child, I was given a tour of the "discarded" children's ward (a subset of the children's ward where I had my bed). Abandoned children waiting to die of their deformities were stored in that ward. Suffice it to say that I learned more from that little tour (given late one night by a young Army Corpsman who should have known better) than I was ready at 10 years old to know.  It still haunts me.
Someday I will write about this.

These experiences are the fire my able self was forged in.

So when I read about disability, I appreciate the need to think beyond normal and to experience the world from the perspective of others who don't "fit in" even if they can "get in." But more than anything, I appreciate that disability does not just mean socially different.  It often means living with great physical pain.  So when Slatin, quoting Alan Cantor, writes: "People are not 'disabled,' rather disability is what we call it when functional limitations (of sight, hearing, for example; or of movement, speech or cognition) encounter design flaws in the environment" (6), I would offer that sometimes the design flaw in the body creates pain that can not be easily mitigated by the external environment, and that's no one's design fault.

In an effort to re-think normal, it is important that we don't make the category more inclusive.  Re-thinking normal means "retrofitting" our minds to see all individuals and their suffering (physical, social, emotional, intellectual) as worthy of personal and unique support.

So the questions remain:
What does accessible education look like?  How can it be tailored to each individual?  What are the lines between honoring dis-ability, accommodating it, and enabling it?