No More Learning

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? Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse
Linda Flower
A critical assumption in the rhetoric of social change rests on the notion of "publicity" or "publicness. " The power of the public sphere is its ability to give visibility to an issue, to create a demand for disclosure and justification (even from a government), and in doing so to exert a powerful if indirect reg- ulatory force. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky says, "The organizer's first job is to create the issues . . . through action persuasion, and communication. "1 And when social categories such as race, sex, class, or disability use the quiet tool of definition to oppress people by "defining them," a critical step in break- ing this marginalizing power has been to go public through the literate act of renaming. Freire describes this public reappropriation this way: "to exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to its namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. "2 Within the rhetoric of social/cultural critique, this means analyzing the implicit mes- sages naturalized into unquestioned assumptions. Within community literacy studies, it can mean direct action supporting the public voice of marginalized people and perspectives through collaborative research, community-based courses and projects, media development, and public dialogue. 3
However, in celebrating the work of rhetoric from an enfranchised aca- demic perspective, we have not always considered the difficulties going pub- lic might raise for others. In equating empowerment with acts of critique, self-expression, argument, or advocacy, we rarely consider the cost of chal- lenging "dehumanizing societal constructions of difference," when to do is to identify oneself as one of those marginal people. 4 I speak here about the iden- tity of being "learning disabled" (or LD), but the problem is more general. Academic rhetors can address this dilemma by speaking with a powerful dou- ble voice--claiming the "stigma" of disability, of speaking Black English, of poverty, of working-class background, of ethnicity, but doing so in an aca- demically recognized voice and successfully mainstreamed work. But for the
138 Linda Flower
rhetors of whom I speak, this is not an option. For these urban high school students, going public about their learning disabilities at school or on a job is no easy decision. 5 It pits the option of getting the help and accommodations they may need against the socially hazardous outcomes of being labeled LD. For them, rhetoric is an embodied act that opens them to being co-opted by the discourse of disability in which they become the object of its rhetoric, not a rhetorical agent. 6
This essay attempts to understand some of the competing forces (the per- sonal goals, public agendas, language, and practices) one must negotiate to go public within a discourse that disables. In such discourses, the already marginalized speaker must not only resist available representations of himself or herself, but also enact an alternative representation. He or she must not only come to voice but also construct and negotiate that voice, that represen- tation within a personally and publicly conflicted space. Second, I consider what this means for educators and supporters, when the work of empower- ment is not limited to speaking in our own voices as advocates or to encour- aging self-expression in others. What if the goal is rhetorical empowerment, helping others, as Brueggemann and colleagues so elegantly state it, "to be their own best advocates, their own authors, and their own best representa- tives. "7
Finding Your Self in a Disabling Discourse
The public discussion of learning disabilities often revolves around whether such learning should be defined in terms of differences in how people learn (for example, the time required or the mode of instruction they prefer, whether verbal, oral, or demonstration) or in terms of disability, defined as deviance from the norm (or from schools' preferred modes of instruction). It was in the context of this debate that we organized the Community Think Tank on Learning Disability. The "we" in this case was an upper-level college class on the rhetoric of making a difference as well as the director and students from Pittsburgh's Start on Success (SOS)--a public school program for students with learning disabilities. 8 This semester-long project culminated in a public dia- logue that brought together nearly sixty teachers, counselors, school admin- istrators, workforce developers, parents, advocates, and high school students with learning disabilities to address the problem we came to call "Naming the LD Difference. "9
The inquiry, however, began early in the semester when the members of the Think Tank team (eleven urban high school students with learning disa- bilities and eleven college students in my class) were asked to create two prob- lem scenarios that would document and dramatize some of the difficult decision points that students with a learning disability routinely confront.
These brief skits would be included in an advance briefing book sent to par- ticipants and then performed at the Think Tank event to focus and jump-start
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 139
the deliberation. In this initial inquiry, it became apparent that going public about the taboo topic of a disability posed an enormous felt difficulty with practical consequences; how you handle the taboo topic of disability makes a huge difference in an urban high school: if you cannot do what is expected in a class, and dare not talk about what you need in order to learn, you prob- ably will not get the help that could, in fact, let you succeed.
In the first problem scenario our high school/college student team created, Joel has just been paired up for in-class work with Shauna, the smart new stu- dent on whom he has a major crush. However, Joel's learning disability makes it difficult to read new material quickly, so while she dives into the task, he tries his standard diversionary tactics (from conversation about the weekend to looking around the room) to avoid the problem. Until, of course, the teacher "helpfully" asks, "Joel, are you having a difficult time with the reading? " Joel is on the spot, and "Billy the Bully" cuts off his retreat:
Joel: Umm . . . I was just . . .
Billy the Bully (laughing and sarcastic): Pfssht! Of course he is . . . you
know Joel can't read!
Everyone is shocked, while Billy laughs rudely . . .
Shauna: What does he mean, Joel?
Despite his best efforts at avoidance, Joel has entered a public deliberative moment, which asks him to answer the definitional question: what does that revelation mean?
Educators who move out of the classroom in their work with socially dis- empowered students may find themselves in an oddly similar public space. Like Joel, we must decide how does one deal with the discourse of disability? In this case, some standard--and not entirely happy--ways of going public are read- ily available. How the LD difference is represented--named and interpreted-- has already been shaped by discourses over which we have little control.
Mediatized
One way the LD difference goes public is to become a media topic. For in- stance, a Newsweek cover story on children with dyslexia--those "otherwise intelligent children"--makes a point of explaining that "their brains weren't defective, just different. " Yet in doing so, such media accounts perpetuate stereotypes and rehearse the obligatory narratives of the victim, the struggle and overcoming, and the "famous and successful dyslexics. "10 The media also offer a deceptively cheery message, which White describes as the relentless nar- ratives of "overcoming"--stories that fail to note that "successful adults with [learning disabilities] are those with less severe impairments, from affluent fam- ilies, who had a positive educational experience (often in private schools). "11 Other images are more accusatory. For some educational conservatives, the
140 Linda Flower
exponential growth of diagnoses of learning disabilities is a faddish function of political correctness. As the president of Boston University describes it, stu- dents "'swaddled for years in the comforting illusions of learning disabled theory' [then] enter higher education and lower its standards. "12 Although language and self-definition have become a central focus of the disability move- ment, media labeling dies hard and thematic conventions even harder. 13
Medicalized
Medical diagnosis has emerged as a scientific alternative to older, invidious popular representations. Early-nineteenth-century perceptions of low-achiev- ing children (and/or low literate immigrants) talked about a "dunce," "loafer," or "reprobate," who was not only "stupid" but "depraved," "wayward," and "incorrigible. "14 As Hull and colleagues put it, "some of these labels imply that the students lacked intelligence, but the majority reflect a flawed charac- ter. "15 Later, with the growth of the IQ movement, diagnoses based on defects of character were replaced by notions of intellectual deficits and abnormal development. The pseudo-scientific measurement of IQ offered a "unitary mea- sure of cognitive--and human--worth. "16
Contemporary research has replaced the unitary image of a deficient per- son with an increasingly local account of specific neurological differences that can produce a variety of difficulties in perception, in integrating information (such as organizing and abstracting), in memory, and in production (such as expressing what you do know on demand). 17 Many students will have labored since third grade (when language-processing disabilities often show up) with the growing burden of an inexplicable, unnamed difference, with seeing their friends in school effortlessly "get it" while they must wrestle jumbles of letters, numbers, or spoken instructions into a meaningful pattern. Soon the process inside one's head turns into a problem in social relations: parents scold, teach- ers make failure public, peers laugh, and the child copes through the use of withdrawal, silence, attitude, or diverting behavior. A diagnosis or even the recognition that you are not alone can be liberating, relocating the problem from identity to information processing.
However, being appropriated by the professional/medical discourse comes at a cost. The designation "learning disability" is not a medical term, and the diagnosis of conditions such as attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a changing and decidedly interpretive process, while old stereo- types linger in the popular and educational press. 18 Although LD is a social construct without a firm scientific base, its standing as a medicalized, neuro- biological construct allows it to be used as a political tool. In education, it is invoked to replace holistic models of language learning and functional images of purposive reading and writing with a mandate for teaching fragmented skills through remedial drills and numbing repetition--the dreaded work- sheets that fill up Special Ed classes. As White puts it, such "LD specialists are
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 141
determined to keep meaning making out of their tent. "19 With a medical diag- nosis you acquire legal, financial, and institutional support and an institu- tional label--that is, an intensely problematic public identity.
Institutionalized
Going public by going through the process of diagnosis and placement within the public school system confers some significant advantages: your coun- selors and parents create an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which notes accommodations teachers should give you (like extra time on tests), and if you are really lucky you might make it into special programs like SOS.
But as the college half of the Think Tank team discovered by shadowing our student partners and talking with the school staff, there are equally signifi- cant costs to going public under this institutional label. In seems that many teachers simply do not understand learning disabilities: how a learning dis- ability works and what is actually happening when students cannot read in class, do not finish tests, or fail to follow instructions. Teachers often do not read the IEP or report that its generalized list of accommodations does not help them when they do: it simply tells an already overworked public school teacher to create (unspecified) individualized assignments, conditions, teach- ing plans, and grading rubrics for each diagnosed student. Others teachers we interviewed simply refuse to acknowledge the need for accommodation: they assertively choose to "treat everyone the same," arguing that the LD stigma is the greater evil, and since students will have to make it in the big world without breaks, they better start now.
For the students, what is worse is how the institutional label can get you placed apart from your friends, in a Special Ed history or English class that frequently makes little distinction between a learning disability and mental retardation. The SOS students often dread these classes, which they complain are dumbed down and subject students to endless repetition and a constant, numbing diet of worksheets. But, according to Mooney, the most painful way students go public happens when the bell rings: your friends go into junior English and you look for an excuse to delay, so they will not see you make that long, embarrassing walk down the hall to the Special Ed resource room. The place the "dumb kids" go. 20
Damage Control
So how do students, as rhetors in a discourse not of their choosing, respond to the dilemma of going public? When the authors of the Joel problem sce- nario tested their first draft with the whole team, the tension over the issue of going public was palpable. We were not even sure the SOS teens would feel comfortable enough to talk about the subject in the combined group. Here we are discussing what Joel--outed before the cute girl--should say to Shauna. What should he do? 21
142 Linda Flower
Amber: Ask her for help.
LaMar: I think he should tell her. He's got nothing to be ashamed of. Christina: I think he should tell her and try to explain what his disability is.
And say, could you help me out?
Flower: So guys, does that sound like a good idea or do you have a rival to
that?
Brandon: Personally, if I'm in his situation and I like the girl, I'm not going
to tell her nothing at all. I'll make up a lie or something. LaMar: I don't feel like reading.
Brandon: Yeah. I'm not going to straight up tell her . . . LaMar: Later on.
Brandon: But like yeah, later on. I'm trying to talk to her. I'm not going to tell her that up front.
Some students challenge that when it "pops out . . . she's probably going to dump you because you lied to her," but a young man, suggesting he speaks for others, replies:
LaMar: We're not saying that we're never going to tell her, we're just saying that we're probably going to wait.
And when students do go public, it does not appear to create an educative moment. As one student puts it:
Christina: I think some of us just say that we have a difficulty in the subject but we don't all the time tell our friends that we have a disability. . . . We just make it . . .
Trista: So they understand?
Christina: Yeah. I guess we don't want them to know.
At this point another student asserts that "I just say straight out, I have a learning disability. I'm above average but I have difficulty in certain areas," and another male chimes in, "I tell my school friends 'If you can't accept me for who I am, you shouldn't be my friend. '" But Brandon suddenly moves assertively back into the conversation.
Brandon: I don't let no one know what my disability is. At any stage. School, teachers, jobs, I don't let them know at all. If you let them know . . . I cannot read that good . . . so if you let them know up front they're not going to put you, they're not going to make you, how do I put this, they're not going to try to help you to do what you got to do . . .
LaMar: They'll give you easy work. Brandon: Yeah. They'll give you easy work. Frank: They'll let you slide.
LaMar: You get slack.
Christina: I don't think . . .
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 143
LaMar: You don't get challenged.
But, Brandon is asked, what if your job has a task that zeroes in on your
disability?
Brandon: If I see that I'm going to have to do that more and more, then yeah I tell them, but if it's just like . . .
Flower: You hold out to the bitter end . . . Brandon: Yes.
Representation and Identity
Going public about learning disabilities, just like going public about race and racism or about gender prejudices, is one of the most powerful ways we have to expose misrepresentations, prejudices, and discrimination, and to counter- act simple ignorance and misguided goodwill. But who would willingly take on the identities that come packaged with media, medical, and institutional discourses? In these professional discourses of disability, the learner rarely fig- ures as an agent or source of expertise, but is instead the object of someone else's definition. The learner is represented as a news topic, a social, educational, and legal problem--a public commodity. The "LD student" exists because he or she has been identified, assessed, diagnosed, labeled, and placed by pow- erful institutions. In an activity analysis of school placement, Hugh Mehan has shown how the "politics of representation" construct an LD child into a "social fact" through the routine practices of the educational referral process. Here the psychologist's technical representation silences contradictions posed by a parent's and a teacher's narrative and historical accounts of the child. 22 A study by McDermott shows even more vividly how the institutional obses- sion with testing and the structure of learning activities in school (versus everyday life) are designed to make disability visible--to allow a disability to "acquire" a child. "We might as well say there is no such thing as LD, only a social practice of displaying, noticing, documenting, remediating, and ex- plaining it. "23 Going public in this way (being commodified, represented, and acquired) does not allow a person to represent his or her own sense of self or the problem as he or she experiences it. The discourse of disability enacted at school constructs the student as the object of discussion, not the agent. And learners preoccupied with dodging the bullet have little chance to develop the rhetorical agency to shape these representations.
Since the 1990s, disabilities studies has aggressively challenged what Good- ley calls the "discourses of personal pathology, of individual difficulties, and of dependency in the face of care" with what advocates in the U. K. call a "social model" focused on the sociocultural bases of disability. 24 In this coun- terdiscourse, an individual may have a physical or neurological impairment, but disability is a disadvantage caused by social practices that fail to take such people into account and exclude them from participation in mainstream social
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activities. "Physical disability is therefore a particular form of social oppres- sion. "25 For example, I may need technical support or face-to-face contact to "hear" you, written instructions or a demonstration to fully "understand" you, wheels to be mobile, or extra time to organize my thoughts in writing, but I am disabled because "normal" buildings are designed with stairs instead of ramps, teachers (who talk to the board) assume oral instruction should be the norm, and schools judge my intelligence, learning, and potential through the social practice of timed tests. "This social oppression," Swain and Cameron argue, is orchestrated through both "techniques of exclusion" and authorita- tive "discourses on disability" that include "cultural stereotyping; identifica- tion of impairment with loss or lack of some attribute necessary to be fully human; and the assumption that treatment or cure, rehabilitation or therapy or control, pity or compensation, is always the appropriate response. "26
This approach to disability studies suggests two paths for rhetorical work. One is the rhetorical and critical discourse analysis of disabling language and social practices. 27 The other points us to rhetorical action, with implications for both research and community literacy. For researchers/advocates like Good- ley, the social model signifies a proactive shift away from "a focus on what people can not do to what people can do"--a shift to self-empowerment and self-advocacy. 28 Concerned with the "meaning and affects of interventions," it leads us to observe what "disabled" self-advocates actually do, often in col- laboration, and how others might support this. 29
Because the discourse of disability-as-a-personal-deficit so forcefully shapes identity and social representation, the metaphor of "coming out" in these dis- cussions often implies public action. "Coming out, then, for disabled people, is a process of redefinition of one's personal identity through rejecting the tyranny of the normate, [through] positive recognition of impairment and embracing disability as a valid social identity. Having come out, the disabled person no longer regards disability . . . as something to be denied or hidden, but rather as an imposed oppressive social category to be challenged or bro- ken down. "30 However, Davies cautions that resistance strategies, from speak- ing out, to humor, to avoiding confrontation, may not work as "constructive resistances. "31 That is, they fail to dislodge the oppressive discourse practices to which they respond, because "this 'alternative' discourse exists outside the meaning structure recognized and legitimated by the school authorities. "32
Going Public in a Deliberative Discourse
If going public with a disability is hazardous for your identity, putting you at risk of being mediatized, medicalized, or institutionalized, how might a speaker stand with the researchers cited above and challenge "the politics of representation"? I suggest that in theory, a deliberative discourse in the con- text of local public dialogue asserts an alternative to disabling discourses. It allows marginalized speakers a way to "come out" that
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 145
asserts a "valid social identity" (which includes learning differences); supports self-empowerment through a focus on "what people can do"
(as knowledgeable analysts and problem solvers); and
engages in "a constructive resistance" to mainstream practices (drawing
others into a search for better options).
However, in practice, as in the community Think Tank, public discussion alone is not the engine of change. The public work of rhetoric cannot be sep- arated from--it depends upon--the literate practices of the Think Tank and the constructive work of individual speakers. In the remainder of this essay, I look first at the literate practices or techne that create a scaffold for rhetorical agency in this space, and, second, at the way these youthful rhetors actually took such agency.
In theory, the discourse of the public sphere offers a space in which ordi- nary, concerned people are drawn to deliberate in order to understand and respond to a shared problem for the common good. In Habermas's influential normative vision, a "public competent to form its own judgments" rose with the tide of eighteenth-century capitalism and its middle class. 33 The power, the glory, and the trademark of this public sphere is a discourse based exclu- sively on critical rationality. That is, people talk as disinterested parties about public matters--which means that advocacy, activism, and the private are inappropriate here. Because the goal of such deliberation is truth and con- sensus, a policy or idea must be examined from all sides, and the argument that carries the day (because it wins/demands our warranted assent) is one that withstands refutation on the basis of a generalizable principle (not a local factor). And because critical rationality is the ticket that gets you into the public sphere, it is open to anyone, or at least anyone who is "competent" to engage in this particular rule-governed discourse. Differences in status, Habermas asserts, are temporarily "bracketed" as people deliberate as social equals.
This public sphere, however, could be a problematic place for an urban teenager with an identity as a person with a disability. First, this postulated bracketing does not happen in practice. People do not ignore differences in race, class, gender, status, or (dis)ability. 34 Moreover, excluding "private issues" is not even ideal: it deprives marginalized people of the right to speak about their particular experience and to assert that such status is, in fact, a public con- cern. It prevents people from using public talk to discover shared concerns. Second, the practice of critical rationality dismisses the epistemic potential of narrative, situated knowledge, and embodied rhetoric to create knowledge and new options. Its elite forums deny access to those unprepared or unwill- ing to play by its deliberative rules.
By contrast, other accounts of how the contemporary public sphere actu- ally operates contend that if you want to understand participation, do not
146 Linda Flower
look for it in the single comprehensive public sphere. Look instead in the vibrant network of local rhetorical spaces and the plurality of competing publics, including the subversive, agitating counterpublics we see in feminism and queer studies. Such publics, Hauser argues, do not operate solely by the rules of disinterested critical rationality, but speak in vernacular voices, oper- ating from positions of interests and passions, creating a vernacular rheto- ric. 35 Unlike the unified, homogeneous body envisioned as the Public Sphere, these local (small p) publics are called into being by discourse itself. They are created, Warner argues, by the mere act of attention and process of people engaging in the circulation of discourse. 36 Academic sessions and edited vol- umes, like community meetings, can help create a public around the questions.
In this model of competing local publics, it is the counterpublics, from the civil rights and labor movements to feminism and gay pride, that have chal- lenged the elite, male bourgeois public and its claim to be The Public--to be the source of informed opinion that should shape policy. Counterpublics offer marginalized groups and individuals a rhetorical safe house--a place to try out their voices, to grow, to plan, to recuperate, and to regroup. But in asserting their own vernacular rhetorics, these counterpublics frequently insist on re- naming the issues and building embodied arguments through narrative and performance. They are not only a place of retreat but also a force seeking to reshape the larger public discourse on their own terms. They are experiments in transformative public rhetoric.
The Community Think Tank could be described as a counterpublic experi- ment in how to support a local public rhetoric of transformation. Like the dis- cursive bodies described by Frazer, Hauser, and Warner, it creates a public called forth by common concerns. It speaks in vernacular voices in which nar- rative and situated knowledge share authority with research claims and pol- icy talk. It creates a space for the circulation of ideas and identities through scenarios that document and dramatize problems and through the distinctive structure of its public forums. The ideas and identities it draws out are in turn documented as published findings--a multivocal record of rival readings and options for action--which are then circulated back to their creators as tools for operating within their own local publics as students, parents, teachers, administrators, or policy workers.
The Community Think Tank is also a rhetorical experiment in inquiry. Structured as a collaborative problem-solving dialogue, it is first of all a delib- erate effort to create what I have described as a mestiza public--an intentionally intercultural body that asks its members to collaborate across the boundaries of race, class, status, power, and discourse. 37 It depends on difference to pro- duce a more inclusive kind of knowledge. Like a counterpublic, it has an addi- tional subversive agenda: to translate the concerns of marginalized people from the status of private and therefore excluded issues into shared public
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 147
concerns, and in doing so to support the performance and transform the rep- resentation of marginalized rhetors as rhetorical agents in their own right.
The foregoing is a theorized statement of intentions and aspirations. The performances to which I now return document some ways students can in fact step into such an agentive space and the kinds of representations they can build within a public deliberation structured as an intercultural inquiry.
Taking Rhetorical Agency
Within the community of people with learning disabilities, self-advocacy is the starting point for changing both one's situation and one's representa- tion.