Anecdotal Relations: On Orienting to Disability in the Composition Classroom.

Abstract

Attention to stories compositionists tell about teaching and learning reveals some of the ways that teachers orient to disability in the classroom. This article argues that these “anecdotal relations”—relations that are created and disseminated through narratives people share about disability—can frustrate productive negotiations with disability in the classroom. Two anecdotal relations receive particular attention in this article: disability as personal and disability as threatening. Critically recasting these anecdotal relations may offer potential for creating writing classroom spaces that welcome disability. By returning to how we commonly speak of disability, we find the invitational possibility of developing new relations to it. --Tanya Titchkosky (A Question of Access 56) Stories about disability have a way of emerging, sometimes in surprising places, across composition and rhetoric scholarship. This essay explores the work that such stories do for teachers vis-a-vis disability, even when those stories sometimes may not—on the surface—seem to be about disability. These stories constitute what I am calling “anecdotal relations”—relations to disability that are created and disseminated through the narratives people share about disability. More specifically, I suggest that embedded in these stories are two problematic orientations to disability that can frustrate rather than open up possibilities for new relations with disability. In what follows, I first outline my approach to identifying and analyzing anecdotes of disability in composition research. I then use three narrative examples to illustrate the anecdotal relations of disability as personal and of disability as threatening. These anecdotal relations are problematic because, rather than inviting disability into the classroom, they enact barriers that prevent teachers and students from openly engaging with one another. In urging teachers to build relationships with disability, I further suggest that such relationships are needed in order to address problems that arise when disability is largely an imagined or hypothetical presence, and I conclude by outlining how orienting to uncertainty may open up some moves that welcome disability in the composition classroom. Identifying and Analyzing Anecdotal Relations Over the last ten years, as I’ve attended disability-related presentations at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and read and engaged with a wide range of disability rhetoric scholarship, I’ve come to notice some of the ways that—as Tanya Titchkosky puts it, “we commonly speak of disability” (56). These stories construct disability and relationships to disability in particular ways that I have heard echoed again and again as I’ve delivered workshops on disability and teaching, talked with local and national colleagues about disability and composition, and worked to cultivate general disability awareness on my own campus. I use the term “anecdotal relations” to refer to the ways that stories create, portray, and foster relationships between the narrator of the story (who is often also a character in the story) and those who are represented in the story. Some of the stories I identified seemed to prevent such relationship-building between teachers and students. I unpack two anecdotal relations that resist relationship-building with disability in the hopes of inviting readers to join me in “developing new relations to” disability (Titchkosky 56). I focus on these two anecdotal relations—of disability as personal and disability as threatening—because they also underscore a key challenge that teachers face as they design and implement composition pedagogy: that of building connections with students in their classrooms in order to foster learning. The examples selected here emerged through a process of reading broadly (although not systematically) across composition-rhetoric scholarship. I also solicited examples on listservs and on Facebook. I orient to writing and performing close readings as a means of working through and figuring out ideas, so my selection process was in some respects idiosyncratic: I was drawn to examples that spurred mixed feelings that I wanted to understand better. The three examples that I highlight and analyze below involve a teacher who reflects on an assignment and dwells on interactions she had with a student writing about his experience of chronic illness; another who, in making a claim about teachers’ resistance to change, revisits an experience she had negotiating accommodations as a graduate student; and a third who writes a vignette about a student’s persistence in re-taking a writing course four times. My identification of these three examples is not a claim about their representativeness across all composition and rhetoric scholarship, but instead, about their significance. They are significant for the way that they offer a glimpse of the sorts of relationships that teachers imagine for themselves with disability in composition classrooms. Each story selected is different from the others in its rhetorical purpose and function, but when read collectively, these examples illustrate how disability is understood not as something to welcome and celebrate, but as something potentially dangerous. Re-narrating these stories has particularly productive potential for welcoming disability in composition classrooms. Anecdotal Relations with Disability Numerous scholars have attended to the role of “lore” in shaping composition as a field (e.g., Helmers; Lynch; North) and to the role of personal experience in academic scholarship (e.g., Spigelman). In her analyses of such narratives and representations of students, Marguerite Helmers finds that they often portray students in a negative light{1} and suggests that revising such representations can offer a means for productively orienting to students and the work of teaching writing. Like Helmers, I understand critical attention to these stories to be an important means of building knowledge about how our field, our roles, and our responsibilities to others are composed. These representations of students and teachers have important consequences for the work we do in our classrooms and as members of our profession, because they run the risk of eliding, erasing, or dismissing disability as a generative presence integral to our teaching. One example of disability’s emergence in teaching anecdotes that reveals the anecdotal relations of disability as personal and disability as threat, can be found in Melanie Kill’s important article addressing some limits to pedagogical creativity and experimentation. She opens the article with a discussion of several students’ responses to an introductory assignment in her composition class. The assignment was a new one for Kill, and an unfamiliar genre for her students. Its prompt read in part, “Please tell me a little about your background. I am interested in who you are in general but also, more specifically, in what kinds of writing you do and have done.” One student’s assignment discussed his long-term illness, as he wrote: To understand who I am, in general, it is necessary to know of my earlier years because they have shaped my life more drastically than the others. Since I was born I have had an extensive medical background. I basically lived in a hospital for the first eight years of my life. (qtd in Kill 227) Kill notes that in this case, she was reluctant to rely upon her usual strategies for responding because they seemed inappropriate, adding that because she didn’t have her typical repertoire to fall back on, she felt as if her teacherly identity was being threatened. Why did this student’s account of long-term illness throw Kill off-kilter? She explains, I didn’t want to fail to acknowledge his mention of his childhood illness because I was concerned that to do so would seem rude or invalidating. At the same time, I recognized that to take up a teacherly performance—asking questions and offering suggestions—would be intrusive and inappropriate in response to this particular utterance. (228) Notwithstanding Kill’s discomfort in directly addressing the student’s long-term illness, it is worth noting that it is the student who has made this aspect of his experience available for discussion, as a response to Kill’s essay prompt. This move suggests that he might not interpret questions or discussion about his childhood illness and its relevance to his current student-identity as inappropriate at all. Indeed, in interviews with thirty-five disabled students about their experiences with classrooms and accommodation, Tara Wood found that many disabled students wanted more—not fewer—opportunities to openly discuss their disabilities with college teachers