Disability and the Writing Classroom

This page is a collection of resources and helpful tools for those interested in thinking about disability and their writing classrooms. It is a work in progress, and I invite you to communicate with me about resources you find helpful or how you have made use of material on this page and elsewhere.

  • The first thing I always recommend to people asking about disability and their writing classes is that they request Disability and the Teaching of Writing, edited by Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann, a sourcebook available for free to instructors from Bedford/St. Martin’s. Just ask your local textbook rep.
  • This handout (in MS Word format) is one I generated for a February 2013 workshop on disability and writing classes here at UD. It gives a sense of some of the disability-related scenarios teachers might encounter in their classrooms, and expands what we mean by “disability in the classroom” and the myriad ways it intersects with teaching practices.
  • This blog by Jay T. Dolmage on the Bedford/St. Martin’s “Bedford Bits” website explicitly addresses ways that writing teachers can build accessibility and accommodation practices into their courses.
  • Disability scholar Amy Vidali has created an inclusive teaching workshop that encompasses a broad range of ways teachers can revisit and rethink their pedagogical practices.
  • Kairos 18.1 has a CoverWeb feature on accessibility and multimodality, including a webtext (to which I contributed) titled “Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces” that touches on ways that teachers might become more sensitive to the various means by which students access course materials and content, especially content designed for online spaces.