An Introduction to Disability and Alternative Assessment Practices in Composition Classrooms
In this article, I discuss what disability is, what disability studies entails, the current disabled academic landscape, and how disability can affect writing assessment in composition classrooms. This article is meant to provide a broad overview and lay the foundation for the later articles in this series.
Welcome to Chronically Academic
Welcome to Chronically Academic! To launch this blog, I am beginning with a series of articles about how disability affects those in academia—with a focus on student experiences—and how alternative assessment practices, specifically in composition classrooms, can be implemented not just to accommodate disability, but to put it at the forefront of writing assessment.
I will also discuss how keeping disability and marginality at the forefront of writing assessment can affect and benefit all students. The final article in this series will cover the practicalities of implementing alternative assessment practices in a composition classroom, along with examples of activities, contracts, and assignments.
Not just to accommodate disability, but to put it at the forefront of writing assessment.
Postsecondary Education
These articles are meant to discuss disability, academia, and assessment practices at the postsecondary level. That does not prohibit the discussion from extending to primary and secondary education; those levels are simply outside the parameters of this series.
A Broad Overview
This first article will cover a lot of ground. I will discuss what disability is and what disability studies entails. After defining dis/ability, I will address the current disabled academic landscape. I will then narrow the scope to disability in the composition classroom, asking how disability can affect writing assessment and how instructors can balance the requirements of a composition curriculum with the needs of disabled students.
Defining Dis/ability
Disability as Contradiction
Critical Disability Studies
The Current Disabled Academic Landscape
SubheadiDisability in the Composition Classroomng four
Defining Dis/ability
Let’s start simply with the Oxford English Dictionary definition:
“Lack of ability (to discharge any office or function); inability, incapacity; weakness” (“Disability, n.”).
The OED definition is broad. Denotatively and connotatively, the word disability carries significantly negative associations. However, continuing our exploration of the word reveals greater possibilities for understanding it.
Disability as Contradiction
In “Building a World with Disability in It,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson brings together two apparently contradictory descriptions of disability:
Human Disqualification
“The master trope of human disqualification”(qtd. in Garland-Thomson 51)
Humanity
“The essential characteristic of being human”(qtd. in Garland-Thomson 51)
Dis/ability Is a Quality Everyone Has
This contradiction provides a striking image: a quality used to disqualify someone is also a quality that defines their humanness. I am of the opinion that dis/ability is a quality everyone has. No person can be defined only by normative successes without also accounting for the individual challenges they faced to achieve those successes.
Disability as a Construct
Critical disability studies understands disability as more than a quality that characterizes a specific person’s body.
Disability is “not just a quality that characterizes a specific person’s body. It is also a construct that sorts bodyminds into categories that have to do with wholeness, brokenness, beauty, and wellness, which in turn supports structural inequities based on those categories. Thus, CDS understands disability as a construct that aids in upholding existing power relations and systems. At the same time, it emphasizes the importance of embodiment, lived experience, and relations from the micro (within bodyminds or between bodyminds) to the macro (institutions, cities, systems) level” (Price 19).
What Are Critical Disability Studies?
In Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life, Margaret Price describes critical disability studies by contrasting two questions:
Increasing Representation
“How can we get more disabled people into tenured positions?” (Price 19).
Systemic Change
“How can we remake academe so that it’s more equitable for all, including disabled people?” (Price 19).
A Larger System
Critical disability studies “regards disability as part of a larger system that labels some bodies deviant, broken, or subhuman” (Price 19).
From Access to Equitable Access
Price moves the discussion beyond simply increasing the number of disabled people in academia and toward studying the systemic changes needed to make academia more equitable, including for disabled people. Changing the discussion from simply providing access to providing equitable access is significant, and this series will continue that discussion specifically in relation to composition classrooms (Price 19).
The Current Disabled Academic Landscape
Academic Adjustments
In my experience, most universities have some form of disability office or department to help students access accommodations in housing and classrooms. However, the academic accommodations provided are often geared toward lecture- and exam-based classrooms, including notetakers, extended exam time, and distraction-free exam spaces.
The Remaining Gap
While these accommodations are important, I see a large gap, particularly for discussion- and writing-based classrooms. They can leave issues of time, labor, and how disabled students negotiate both unaddressed.
Disabled Faculty and Instructors
Disabled faculty and instructors must also be considered. Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits disability discrimination in employment and requires reasonable accommodations for qualified employees unless doing so would create an undue hardship (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).
Legal protections, however, do not eliminate stigmatization or the realities of generating knowledge as a disabled person. While faculty and instructor disability is outside the scope of this series, I felt the need to acknowledge the role it plays in academia.
Disability in the Composition Classroom
I mentioned above the need to address accommodations for discussion- and writing-based classrooms. In my experience, very few disability support offices provide accommodations such as extended time on an assignment. This can leave unaddressed the negotiations of time and labor a disabled student must make to complete the assignment.
Works Cited
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Building a World with Disability in It.” Culture – Theory –Disability, edited by Anne Waldschmidt et al., transcript Verlag, 2017, JSTOR, pp. 51–62, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.waterfield.murraystate.edu/stable/j.ctv1xxs3r.8. Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies.
Price, Margaret. Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press, 2024, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.14638157.
Read Grace’s Complete Article
Read the complete long-form version of An Introduction to Disability and Alternative Assessment Practices in Composition Classrooms, including MLA citations and Works Cited.
Alternative Assessment Ecologies
In the next article, I discuss alternative forms of engagement and assessment practices that can be implemented in composition classrooms, which are predominantly assessed through formal academic writing.