Composition Forum 39, Summer 2018
http://compositionforum.com/issue/39/

A Keywords Approach to Doing Disability in the Composition Classroom

Pamela Saunders

Abstract: The following is a side-by-side review of two recent additions to the growing “Keywords” genre: Keywords for Disability Studies and Keywords in Writing Studies. Often considered a niche issue, or, in the classroom, solely the concern of specialists, what Keywords for Disability Studies does is reveal the tacit norms behind (dis)ability that inflect all bodies and minds with meaning. Keywords texts offer a number of entry points into their respective fields, and, because of their formal structure, challenge readers and teachers to devise their own pathways through the text. Reading Keywords for Disability Studies alongside Keywords in Writing Studies reveals opportunities for all composition scholars and teachers of writing to both apply an awareness of (dis)ability norms in the field and the classroom and map productive intersections between the two fields of study.

Adams, Rachel, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, eds. Keywords for Disability Studies. New York UP, 2015. 224 pp.

Heilker, Paul and Peter Vandenberg. Keywords in Writing Studies. Utah State UP, 2015. 187 pp.

One of the goals of this special issue is to inspire readers to think about how disability—its vocabularies, frameworks, and histories—invites us to rethink the tenets of composition. One way of manifesting this goal is to review side-by-side two new texts that offer a vision of their respective field as an assemblage of conversations centered on key terms. Both Keywords for Disability Studies and Keywords in Writing Studies enact, in content, the overlaps and conversations between these two entangled fields of study. What I hope to show, beyond providing a review of each text and suggestions for their pedagogical use, is how reading Disability Studies in the context of Writing Studies invites us to recognize the bodily knowledges and histories that student writers bring to our classrooms, the implications our best practices hold for diverse bodies and minds, and the general relevance of (dis)ability to just about everything else. So often we envision our students’ identities as inflected by race, gender, and socioeconomic status, yet without a bodily dimension or reality. The result is that disability within composition is often considered a niche issue, or, in the classroom, solely the problem of specialists. What Disability Studies does is reveal the tacit norms that inflect bodies and minds with meaning, and reading it alongside Writing Studies reveals opportunities for all composition scholars and teachers of writing to apply that awareness to norms in our field and in our classrooms. This review proceeds first by characterizing the structure of each text and evaluating the goals both sets of editors articulate for their collection. I then focus on how the texts might be read together, by exploring both their overlapping projects and terms and their points of divergence or distinction. Finally, I consider how these texts might serve as a pedagogical resource.

Both Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, and Keywords in Writing Studies, edited by Paul Heilker and Peter Vandenberg, came out in 2015, and both are a loose adaptation of Raymond Williams’s canonical 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Writing Studies is also a direct follow-up to Keywords in Composition Studies, published in 1996 and compiled by the same two editors), with each instead focused on a particular evolving scholarly field and incorporating dozens of different authors. Both texts consist of an alphabetized, encyclopedia-like list of keyword entries, or short essays on single words that carry complex, contested meanings for scholars in either field. Disability Studies offers sixty-two keywords, and Writing Studies offers thirty-six.

These texts share similarities with other discipline-building projects or texts under the composition and rhetoric umbrella. Linda Adler-Kassner’s Naming What We Know introduces what she calls threshold concepts, or ideas so central to students’ understanding of a particular discourse community that students could not proceed intellectually without first grasping them. Threshold concept share similarities with keywords, but they ultimately represent fundamental points of consensus—about how writing works, for example—which is why they function as entry points into a discourse community. Keywords might be better understood as representing a lack of consensus, or the messy, conflicted process of disciplinary meaning-making. Both keywords texts share similarities to James Jasinski’s Sourcebook on Rhetoric, including the alphabetized glossary structure. Sourcebook, however, represents the thinking and synthesis of one author (and to split hairs, the Sourcebook title emphasizes the book as a collection, whereas these texts emphasize the major moves and intellectual efforts of the field distilled into single words). Finally, these two Keywords texts are similar in aim to projects like Kelly Ritter and Paul Matsuda’s Exploring Composition Studies, though, as is obvious by now, the keyword approach involves isolating a single term, rather than describing a disciplinary issue.

Since these texts weren’t explicitly intended to be purchased and read together, it’s important to acknowledge and respond to the stated goals of each collection on its own. In their introduction to Writing Studies, Heilker and Vandenburg seem concerned that readers will misunderstand the point of their text, as evidenced by their efforts to characterize it by all the things that it doesn’t do: provide exhaustive coverage, act as a glossary, or act as a reference work “monumentalizing some particular vision of the discipline.” Heilker and Vandenburg’s first explicitly stated goal for Writing Studies is “not to provide fixed, unitary meanings of a term or even to privilege some terms above others” [emphasis added]. Instead, Writing Studies is only meant to “illuminate how many divergent and contesting significations reside within our field’s central terms.” Yet, in my experience reading, I found that I often wanted to use the text in exactly the ways the editors didn’t intend—What, exactly, is the problem with a glossary? Is anyone expecting exhaustive coverage from a 187-page book?—and that doing so enhanced the text’s usefulness for me. I found that the editors simply didn’t need to carve out such a narrow space for this text to inhabit, and could perhaps trust readers to use it in ways they might find edifying.

In Disability Studies, Adams, Reiss, and Serlin are at a disciplinary crossroads: “As it has moved into new terrains,” they write, “disability has become a remarkably heterogeneous category” (3). This increasing heterogeneity of disability studies has meant that “different areas of scholarship have not always been in productive dialogue with each other” (3). The goal of this text, then, is to highlight areas of disagreement or tension and to “provide a conceptual architecture that holds together the field’s sometimes fractious components” (3). Beyond this goal of unifying the field, Adams, Reiss, and Serlin are concerned with “establishing ... [the] importance” of the keywords to “many other areas of inquiry across the disciplines” (3). Disability Studies, then, is designed to bring everyone together and argue for the centrality of disability issues and terms to other disciplinary endeavors. As a reader, I found myself wanting to see more emphasis on areas of disagreement or tension, a recognition of ongoing “fractious components” and a greater acknowledgment of the most contested, seemingly unresolvable terms at the center of it all. Perhaps this is because I am simply drawn to disagreement, and find it more interesting to read about, but I also think doing so would help illustrate the stakes of these intellectual efforts and more clearly demonstrate the field’s importance to “other areas of inquiry across disciplines” (3).

Where the real scholarly magic happens, though, is in the shared conceptual spaces between these texts. When reading these texts in tandem, I discovered that they share eight overlapping keywords: design, disability, gender, identity, performance, queer, technology, and work. These shared words offer an entry point into using disability to rethink composition, as they demonstrate the existence of productive intersections and spaces for common interdisciplinary issues. In the Disability Studies entry for disability, Adams, Reiss, and Serlin emphasize the history of public activism within the Disability Rights Movement, the socio-cultural evolution of concepts like normalcy, and projects like “protecting the normal from the abnormal ... in the name of progress” (6). In Writing Studies, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson focuses on the myriad meanings and cultural myths surrounding disability both “within the academy” and within composition studies (57): in these spaces, disability manifests as a “perceived insufficiency in students,” or an “aspect of identity and contributor to diversity,” or, as illustrated by the existence of the other text in this review, “an interdisciplinary studies area aligned with other areas, such as feminism or queer theory, offering a critical perspective on the academy and field” (57). Lewiecki-Wilson connects disability to the historical trajectories of other “previously excluded groups” within composition, including basic writers. While Adams, Reiss, and Serlin emphasize disability as it indexes civil rights history, Lewiecki-Wilson outlines the term’s implications within the context of the university for both students with disabilities and able-bodied or “mainstream” students, particularly when it functions to suggest that disability is not the problem of mainstream or able-bodied students, teachers, or administrators.

In reading these two disability entries together, Disability Studies describes a much broader historical movement with far-reaching effects, adding both depth and expansiveness to Lewiecki-Wilson’s more focused assessment of students in the writing classroom. While Lewiecki-Wilson cites Julie Jung’s argument that disability narratives in composition “reinforce the “belief that accommodation is an individualized process” rather than a ‘shared social responsibility,’” (59) Adams, Reiss, and Serlin locate the evolution of that “shared social responsibility” as it affects all facets of public and community life. What Lewiecki-Wilson’s entry offers in return is the idea of disability as a “rhetorical phenomenon,” which opens up pathways of inquiry alongside historical accounts of disability. Both entries converge around an understand of disability as less an “object of medical correction” and more an embodied “source of knowledge,” representing what Adams, Reiss, and Serlin call a “new attention to inwardness” (9). Understanding disability as knowledge supports pathways of inquiry and pedagogical imperatives that broaden the scope of disability in composition.

Unlike disability, which names an identity category and a specialized area of scholarship, the overlapping keyword work shows how the meaning of more generalized terms might be enhanced through disability frameworks. In Disability Studies, Sarah F. Rose explores how disability has influenced the very notion of work, in that disability has “often been equated with the inability to do productive work” (187). Rose adds that “Certain types of disabled people’s labors ... have frequently not been recognized or compensated as proper work,” (188) and that such a lack of recognition not only results in a lack of employment opportunities, but also limits “people’s access to citizenship and social standing” (189). In Writing Studies, Dylan B. Dryer focuses on labor issues within the field of composition and in the interface between composition and other fields or departments on campus. There are telling similarities between Dryer’s assertion that compositionists are often exploited “for our willingness to do the “work they don’t want”” and Rose’s description of how disabled people are too often exploited or not recognized as “proper work.” When reading these texts together, it seems that the same underlying norms—about certain kinds of labor and the bodies and minds that perform it—inform both fields.

In addition to exploring overlapping terms, there are keywords in both texts that could be enhanced by the other text’s perspective. In Writing Studies, Anis Bawarshi’s entry on materiality acknowledges both the centrality of bodies and embodiment and how materiality is often staged in opposition to social construction (108). There is perhaps no greater example of this theoretical tension between the material and the social than within the complex interplay of medical, social, embodied, and other models of disability. Bawarshi’s account of materiality acknowledges that writing processes are not only “temporal performances,” but also “embodied, emotioned, and localized within conditions of production, circulation, and consumption,” citing discourses from “geography, ecology, and economics” as they have informed this understanding (110). Discourses of disability and embodiment can be traced through all of these fields, and remind us that underpinning virtually all discourse lies a notion of the able, productive, functional body, so often realized through an articulation of its opposite: the disabled body. Alternatively, Ralph James Savarese’s entry for cognition in Disability Studies would be enhanced by exploring how cognition has been co-opted historically by composition to serve particular disciplinary formation purposes, particularly the assertion of writing’s centrality to cognitive learning processes. What Savarese shows is how often notion of disability and “narrow notions of personhood” inform theories of cognition (42), and what composition could add is an understanding of how theories of cognition (including the notions of disability they encompass) have influenced how we understand learning, thus articulating the link between notions of personhood and how compositionists conceive of students as learners.

Keyword texts in general have been variously described as primers and reference tools (and perfect for graduate students!), due to their encyclopedic, alphabetized structure and didactic tone. This formal structure has its limits, though, and while both texts are very useful, they suffer at times from particular constraints. Primers are not generally known for being engaging and a pleasure to read. The entries in both of these texts are each written by a different author, however, which does a lot to loosen things up and allow for diverse viewpoints. I found that more successful, readable entries articulated a series of larger questions driving conversation about and around terms. In Design, Melanie Yergeau writes, “When is a writing course about writing? Is writing designing? Is designing writing? To what end do we tinker, produce, and problematize what it is that we do?” (54). Others said what we are all thinking: Morris Young opens his entry on Identity by stating, “Considering identity as a keyword in writing studies is a daunting prospect,” particularly when given only a few pages to do so (88). Less successful entries, though, read like humdrum literature reviews, relying too much on direct quotes from theoretical texts and a litany of parenthetical citations, and omitting concrete examples and engaging disciplinary stories. At times, I felt like I was navigating an entire book made out of the sections of articles that I tend to skim.

Overall, though, both texts were limited in a significant way by their print format. A digital version of both Writing Studies and Disability Studies would be better for a number of reasons. First and foremost, a digital version would allow entries to be updated endlessly, thereby enacting the unfinished quality that the editors seem to want. Second, a digital version would be more inclusive and allow for many more voices to contribute. Third, Writing Studies currently uses bolded text to index keywords that appear in entries beside their own; this is an awesome feature that would be even better if the bolded text were hyperlinks instead. Finally, additional keywords could be added, which would be rewarding for readers who can’t help but see glaring omissions.

Throughout this review, I have modeled some of the analytical work that compositionists might pursue with these two texts. It’s worth noting that the overlapping terms seem especially useful for pedagogical purposes, including having students compare entries and locate porous meanings or shared, cross-disciplinary projects. In general, readers will not be particularly rewarded by reading either text in order all the way through. The editors of Writing Studies were clearly thinking of this when they cleverly bolded keywords as they were used in other entries. This offers readers a kind of “choose your own adventure” method of navigating the text. For example, I read the disability entry, saw the word discourse used, and turned to that entry next.

Beyond just reading for pleasure, though, the texts seem tailor-made for a survey course in either field, and could easily be paired with journal articles or original research project assignments. I can see myself encouraging students to use assigned entries to help generate significant, high-stakes research questions that would guide a semester-long project. As mentioned above, having students explore overlapping terms might yield significant insight, which could be then applied to more innovative, cross-disciplinary projects. Disability Studies even has a corresponding webpage and blog, where activities and assignments might be shared.

Together, these texts represent the writing and thinking of over seventy-five scholars, some of whom composed entries for both texts. The work of the editors to collect and prepare these entries for publication must have been considerable, but the result is truly a gift for both fields: a material enactment of intellectual life and community and a record of significant advancements in discipline formation and scholarly diversity.

Works Cited

Adler-Kassner, Linda. Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Utah State UP, 2016.

Jasinski, James. Sourcebook on Rhetoric. Sage, 2001.

Ritter, Kelly and Paul Kei Matsuda, editors. Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives. Utah State UP, 2012.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford UP, 1976.