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Description
As college and university campuses continue to strive toward diversity, equity and inclusion, the call toward recognition of students with hidden disabilities and learning differences becomes more relevant. Furthermore, as all accredited degree-granting institutions in the United States (along with numerous others around the world) have a basic writing requirement for students of all majors to meet early in their program of study, this call becomes exigent; for it has been suggested that the students’ experience during the critical first year of college writing may be linked to larger retention issues. Combining relevant scholarship in disability studies with important literature on pedagogy and assessment in college writing, I invite writing scholars and faculty, as well subject-specific faculty, to re-imagine written assignments as invitations to discover important learning differences offered by student writers with ADHD, autism and/or dyslexia. This invitation is neither a call to criticize the current teaching and assessment of writing, nor to pathologize learners with these learning differences. Rather, as an experienced writing instructor of over twelve years, having completed a first graduate degree followed by university teaching contracts in three different countries before receiving a formal diagnosis of autism, I recognize the implications of this learning difference on my own teaching and individual writer identity. Therefore, I aim to contribute to the voices of other scholars currently merging composition and disability studies in order to facilitate non-exclusion in writing coursework. In this thesis, I briefly explore different expectations among students and teachers in college writing before discussing some challenges and strengths that learners with ADHD, autism and dyslexia can bring to class and to written coursework. After addressing reasons why students often do not disclose these learning differences in higher education, I turn to assessment of writing as an invitation for universal design.
