I’ve been away from my blog for close a week because I contracted the “head cold from hell” complete with a special instruction book from Satan–“blow your nose ceaselessly you huge, hairy, boneless slob.” (The Devil is all about self contempt especially when you’re in a diminished spot.) Withal we fell from the world and coughed like poor John Keats and hoped for better days or at least a full moment of thought.
Meanwhile we did our best. We tried to read. And we found ourselves thinking about university life and its uneasy relation to people with disabilities. We think about this rather often for we are like a marble cutter of human rights: steady, habituated, working on an angel that still has no head. What I mean is that colleges and universities “admit” students with disabilities but see them as separate from the broader pedagogical and cultural work of education, imagining that “the disabled” are in effect a kind of nuisance that must be grudgingly accommodated. I believe that faculty at American colleges and universities bear a lot of the blame for this grudging and minimal inclusion as they fail to ask themselves when thinking about the art of teaching the kinds of questions that disability can productively promote. A good example of “the questions” can be found in the introduction to Disability and the Teaching of Writing. edited by Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. They write:
“Whether acknowledged or not, disability does have an impact on the college classroom, and it often raises powerful, unexpected questions:
- What attitudes about disability and disabled people shape perceptions and actions by students and teachers?
- What social, physical, and learning barriers complicate access to learning for disabled students and to teaching for disabled teachers?
- What information and history (about disability and people with disabilities) do we not know that might change (our) attitudes and dismantle such barriers?
- What literacy skills are developed when embodied differences and disability are included as topics in the curriculum?
- In what ways does attention to disability forge connections across campus?
- How can we better understand learning and writing as embodied practices, foregrounding bodily difference instead of bodily perfection?
- How can the inclusion of disability improve the teaching of writing?”
Such questions are central to the affirmation of citizenship of course. But they also speak to the complex, poly-semous and neurologically diverse qualities of human consciousness and learning styles. I believe that great teaching (in any discipline) requires an essential curiosity about one’s students and in turn that curiosity should inevitably support individual achievement to the greatest degree possible. The use of assistive technology in the classroom as a means of demonstrating ideas–letting the Kurzweil reading system read aloud a passage in Milton will capture attention. Letting Kurzweil track what its reading with colored icons on a an overhead projection helps visual learners follow along. But I digress.
As Brueggemann and Lewiecki-Wilson point out, there as a terrible tension surrounding disability. Students with learning disabilities remain in the closet. Professors with hearing loss, vision loss, or other unapparent disabilities hide their conditions fearing a kind of attitudinal demotion from their colleagues or worse. And yet embodied differences are the source of considerable power in language and in self-awareness, the two things university instructors are most often hoping to foster, at least in those courses where reading and writing are paramount.
Embodied differences are the nerve of our nation’s body politic. Bringing those differences forward in the teaching of writing continues to be a critical matter and yet, today, still a bit under the weather, I can still say in full confidence that the most college faculty still don’t know that people with disabilities are not only one of the largest minority groups on campus, but that by understanding their differences we can improve how we teach.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
A agree that colleges are largely hostile to people with disabilities. I believe this has much to do with the fact that professors know very little about teaching and accordingly, any demand that calls them to think about pedagogy scares the bejeezus out of them. They project this fear back onto pwds with a vengeance. The average American college professor knows as much about pedagogy as he or she knows about rotary engines. As for Howard’s question: does butter have an aroma, yes, if you’re an American house cat. Cats love butter.
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I would go farther than you seem to be willing to go and maintain colleges and universities nationwide are hostile to the inclusion of people with a disability. Sure exceptions exist but the norm is either begrudging accommodations or outright animosity. With tight budgets, institutions of higher education build ramps and install elevators not because they want to but rather to meet the letter of the law. Such inclusion is not valued. This is bad enough but students with learning disabilities face even great discrimination. I have been told by one of my professorial peers that making the campus accessible is appropriate in his estimation but resents the fact the campus is overrun with students who claim they have a learning disability. This same highly educated man said he resented making any accommodation for such students and that they has no place on college campuses.
You are also correct that professors hide disabilities as they age. This is as troubling as the fact there are precious few professors that have an obvious disability. I have been teaching for 15 years and at the end of the semester I always ask “Have you ever had a professor that used a wheelchair before?” Not once has a student answered yes. This is a sad statement about the utter lack of inclusion.
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A nice posting on the blog. What can I say succinctly when there is so much to be said? Education should be about an exchange of ideas. That implies different perspective which is inherent in a society that is made up of like individuals who have share a major superficial part of their individual experiences as a group yet do present with unique perspectives given their own particular individuality. It seems to me that this individual uniqueness based on different responses to the same stimuli must have at it’s core disability or perhaps more aptly, contrasting abilities. We need to alter the language into people first. For the fact is that all are disabled and I do not mean this in a good two shoes, artsy fartsy, everbody is gifted way. Disability implies a lack of ability to do something. I may think it is a huge deal to be blind but you may think it is a bigger deal to not be able to appreciate Dante’s poetry. I may fear Deafness but you may fear not being able to smell fresh bread coming out of the oven. Does butter have an aroma by the way?
Coming from the most limiting ghetto on earth could be a huge handicap to one person but serve as a vital propellent to another. Just like drama took form in the first explanation of the hunt by the hunters on their return to the campfire, so to at that campfire was born education – “how the hell did you make this hot thing in the middle of the circle? and by the way how do I make my hand feel better after being burned.
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