"How disability 'fits' into our structures and practices reveals much about their potential for inclusion and exclusion. Attention to disability shows that physical structures equate with ideological structures" (15).
"In the following pages, I sketch a new map of composition, one that recognizes how students with disabilities have been excluded, how the academy has accommodated them, and how disability, as an identity and an epistemology, has and will continue to push us to see teaching and learning in new, broader, and more empowering ways" (15).
Dolmage's metaphors are visible, tangible, and recognizable and they are "produced ideologically, in the world in which you move." They are
- steep steps "to keep certain bodies and minds out"
- retrofit--we "add ramps at the sides of buildings and make accommodations to the standard curriculum"
- Universal Design--"an enabling space for writing and a way to think broadly about ability"
"Disability is also produced, sometimes most powerfully by our uses of space. If the composition teacher wants to treat students ethically and respectfully, she must consider the spaces where she teaches in terms of disciplinary attitudes, but also in terms of bricks and mortar, walls and steps that exclude bodies...we must map composition in terms of the exclusionary potential of spaces and see the potential for constructing alternative modes of access" (16).
--Steep Steps
As a discipline, the way we see ourselves is projected onto our classroom spaces that exclude. The self of selves that have been projected upon the space of the university are not just able-bodied and what is considered normal, but exceptional, elite. The university is the place for the very able" (17).
"In composition, such steep steps come in the form of a restrictive grammar and usage rules that allow writing to be added up" (17).
Compositions can be seen as a sorting mechanism. "This sorting is, of course, more than just a managing of space; it is a discursive marking that reaches into minds and bodies..This focus on standardization...'makes writing much more suited to the business of class and cultural discrimination...'usage rules are the conventions of written language that allow Americans to discriminate against one another. Questions of usage are tied to social attitudes about who is intelligent and well-educated, and who is not'" (17).
"As teachers of composition, we recognize the diversity of the standards we teach. But we must also recognize our roles within institutions and disciplines, and perhaps even our personal pedagogical agendas, in which we may seek to avoid and disavow the very idea of disability--to give it no place" (18).
"It could be said that the academy is a primary enforcer of cultural norms...American academies have delineated and disciplined the border between able and disabled, 'us' and 'them.' These line drawers were able to solidify their own positions as they closed the doors on others...One way to map the spaces of academia and disability would be to look at the ways land was parceled out in the United States...the distance between..the able and the disabled, has a particular structure. In the writing classroom, when teachers try to ascertain what this structure of exclusion looks like, they search students' writing."
"Clearly, disability in the college classroom is not respected. It is something to fix. The method of fixing disability focuses on patterns of the 'typical,' and the 'natural,' implying that disability is neither...Instead, the process of normalizing...the process of writing is used in service of exclusion, delineating the 'abnormal'" (19).
"In the case of the basic writer or the learning disabled (LD) writer, the disability is the writer's, and the university thus marks the writer as foreign and irrational. Not surprisingly, foreignness and irrationality are two of the most commonly applied metaphors for people with (all types of) disabilities in the history of the Western World" (19).
"Both basic writers and LD writers are stigmatized socially by their labels...Certainly, by labeling LD errors as bizarre, teachers absolve themselves of responsibility for understanding the error or the student. They stop teaching. But more remarkably, this allows the teacher to label anything bizzare, or beyond their comprehension or imagination, as disabled. The move is to disavow the error and dismiss the student and his or her writing, as bizarre, far from normal. This version of foreign and irrational, bizarre disability serves to reinforce the fiction of the writing teacher's natural, typical, rational ability" (20).
"We are keenly aware of issues of class, race, and gender, and when this is not the subject matter of our classes, it is at least a key consideration of our pedagogy. Yet we need to ask ourselves some important questions."
--The Retrofit
"To retrofit is to add a component or accessory to something that has already been manufactured or built...it acts as a sort of correction" (21).
"Common reason then seems to dictate that disability is supplemental to society, that it is an afterthought" (21).
"disability in writing programs is made invisible most of the time, and called bizarre when necessary--when the paradigm needs to assert its boundaries; when teachers need to impose the visibility of standards; when they need or want to define themselves and their classrooms as not bizarre; when they want to identify their work as typical or natural; when they stop learning or teaching" (21).
The retrofit is a halfhearted cure that doesn't help all.
"when students are referred to Disability Services should they desire assistance. The message to students is that disability is a supplementary concern" (21).
"It is important, however, to recognize that the retrofit is often only an after-the-fact move because the facts refuse to recognize disability as a reality, or the factors cast disability as a strategy, or the benefactors claim accessibility not as everyone's right bust as their opportunity to provide charity" (21).
"The first step is to recognize disability as an embodied fact, an identity. To ignore this fact is to do violence...we need to allow for an environment in which students can claim difference without fear of discrimination...disability cannot be seen as something one person diagnoses in another. Disability must be seen as socially negotiated; people with disabilities must be seen as the moderators, the agents of this negotiation" (21-22).
"Instead, all students and teachers, coming to the conversation with varying abilities, must redefine, what they are able to do together...changing the spaces in which we teach is necessary if we want to teach and learn from all students" (22).
--Universal Design
"UD is defined as 'the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation of specialized design'" (23).
UD contains:
- Equitable Use
- Flexibility in Use
- Simple and Intuitive Use-Easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
- Perceptible Information
- Tolerance for Error
- Low Physical Effort
- Size and Space for Approach and Use
"UD is not a tailoring of the environment to marginal groups; it is a form of hope, a manner of trying" (23).
UD "offers composition a way to locate itself not in response to changing hostile geographies but as a proactive architect of future possibilities" (25).
"UD does offer ways to move, theoretically, that have everything to do with the universal--not as a means of homogenization but as a way to complicate divisive notions of difference with new models of cooperation" (26).
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