As scholars and instructors of composition, we often desire to better understand our students and their interactions and fluency with writing. For the past decades, we have armed ourselves with Berlin and Faigley, marched into our classrooms full aware of our pedagogical outcomes, and applied our understanding of composition to the way in which we teach our students to think about the world around them and how they can perform within that world. Margaret Price’s Mad at School (recipient of the 2013 CCCC Outstanding Book Award) is a startling wake-up call that our work is far from done. Building upon not only her experiences struggling with mental disability but also the experiences of students that she has encountered, Price dramatically calls into question the able-minded assumptions of our classical foundations and also current theories of teaching. But her work is perhaps strongest in its timeliness and urgency: Price fearlessly scrutinizes growing societal assumptions on the intersections of mental disability and violence. Addressing “assaults on the ivory tower” (a euphemism for school shootings) at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and the University of Alabama, Price hits home with her message that our current system is ripe with biases against disability; we shun it, pass it off as abnormal, and in the process we create assumed world views on ability that contribute to a warped sense of the human experience not only for ourselves, but through our students as well.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus most on
the composition classroom, and as such are of most use for teachers and
instructors who are interested in understanding writing with disabilities. In
the first, Price ties the discourses of mental disability to various classical
topoi (such as rationality, participation, and coherence), ultimately drawing
out how problematic they become within the context of the modern-day classroom.
Such disconnects, Price notes, direct attention to the greater assumptions made
throughout the classroom and the academy at large. Disability “becomes a
problem only when the environment or context treats it as such” (4). How can a
student in a wheelchair move about a building that has been built presuming
stairs are the best and only way to navigate between levels? Similarly, Price reveals
the classroom’s preconceived notions of navigating a text, and the subsequent
assumption of students with mental disabilities as unable to perform this task,
as equally absurd and problematic. We must not be tempted by the labels and
classifications that students have been given or assumed themselves. Instead,
Price urges us to “focus instead on ways that [our students’] writing and ways
of knowing might change and inform our practices” (56). Though, she admits,
this is not a new idea, it is “one that apparently cannot be repeated often
enough” (56). Because when the goal of our classroom is to have all students
find ways to “speak, write, dance, and otherwise communicate,” it is because we
have allowed our students to move “against the grain of able-mindedness” (57).
But Price does not only embrace
a classical understanding of rhetoric and education for her diagnosis of the
current state of the academy. Pulling in and critiquing the assumptions of
Berlin, Faigley, and even the critical pedagogy of Hurlbert and Blitz, Price
champions a deeper understanding and exposure of teaching pedagogies that
embrace an often latent bias toward the “able-minded” (47). These habits as she describes them expose the discourse
used within the classroom to label, subject, and dispose of disability as
separate from ourselves; they regulate disability into the realm of medicine
where disability is diagnosable. Writing, then, is left for the normal perspective, and to participate
within the discourse of the writing classroom, the student must assume some
sense of normalcy. This approach asks
us to question such assumptions that we make within our classrooms, our writing
assignments, and our syllabi. Most importantly, however, are the assumptions
that are made in what Price deems as kairotic
space: the “less formal” areas of the
academy where “knowledge is produced and power is exchanged” such as in a
student conference or in classroom discussion, but also in peer-review
workshops, “study groups, interviews for on-campus jobs or departmental parties
or gatherings” (60). These spaces make for more difficult accommodation of
disability when we position ourselves medically and try to diagnose our students’ abilities. Rather, Price suggests a
dialectic model where student and teacher challenge the anticipated needs and
styles for learning. Accommodation should not feel like “charitable offerings,”
then, but areas that allow for the “best of our abilities” to flourish (102).
Though it is in the first two
must-read chapters that Price unpacks the baggage we bring into our writing
classrooms that segregates us from our students with disabilities, her
following four chapters are not to be missed either. Chapter 4, especially, is written
with such a sense of urgency and speaks so close to the heart of the modern
university that it most assuredly contributed to Price’s receipt of the Outstanding
Book Award. Reinvestigating the discursive assumptions with which we have built
into the past decade’s school shootings, Price calls into question our response
to link these assaults with mental disability.
Constructing an understanding of these shootings as the result of
individuals who are not “normal” but instead “a ‘time bomb waiting to go off’”
dangerously supposes that disability is what causes violence (174). Naturally,
it is not difficult, then, to see how such assumptions boil over into our
interactions with other students, faculty, and writing that deviate from normalcy. In this model, disability is
something to be feared, not explored. It is a marker of latent violence, crime,
disaster, and disappointment. For evidence, Price points to numerous federal-funded
grants, videoes, and software that have been developed in order to instruct
students, faculty, and staff to adopt a “survival mindset” when faced with such
assaults. But Price is worrisome that such attempts are further vilifying and
condemning mental disability. By imagining that mental disability caused such
attacks, we are dangerously close to believing that such problems will
disappear if individuals “are cured. Or incarcerated, or expelled, or
eradicated” (175).
Chapter 3, 5, and 6 focus on our
interactions (and the interaction of the university) with professionals in academe
with disabilities. Reexamining the process of publication and accessibility to
information, Price questions the current structure of the university and its
strong emphasis of the necessity of the “sound” and “able” mind to maintain
collegiate interaction and growth. This, for example, can be seen in the
autobiographical works of those with disabilities. For an able-bodied mind,
these works are “just one more tool used to grind us down,” writes Price (194).
But also, these works should be viewed as echoes of refigured rationality.
Certainly, the push toward sound mind and able body punishes these counter-diagnoses of disability;
however, to Price, such work continues to “move toward robustly truthful ways
of living and telling our stories” (195). Furthermore, Price praises the moves
the field of composition has taken in reinvestigating its assumptions on
access, citing the slow movement toward open-access in a number of journals as
of late, but urges us to value open-access more, to consider the power of an
interdependent movement of independent scholars, institutions, and individuals
unaffiliated with organizations. This is the only true way of improving access.
Disability studies have worked
to uncover the biases in our language that create problematic labels and frames
of mind within students with disabilities. Price’s work builds upon these
foundations to extend the conversation into areas where this problematic
formation produces issues of power and identity both in formal classroom
instruction, writing, and also less formal kairotic
space. For this reason, Price’s work is both timely and necessary. It is a big
step toward bridging an often unrealized gap between our heavily-guarded ivory
tower and one of the most disenfranchised populations to step up to that tower
today. And Price reveals there is much at stake if we fail to build this
bridge: our current understandings and assumptions of mental disability—as
supported through our pedagogy, our writing, and our exchanges of knowledge
with students and colleagues—encourages a vilification of the mentally
disabled, dangerously framing disability as a doomsday-ticking time bomb
waiting to explode. But mental disability is not a time bomb. It is an
opportunity, instead, as instructors and scholars to turn to composition to
find other ways of speaking, other ways of writing, other ways of dancing or
otherwise ways of communicating.
Corvallis, OR
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