No More Learning

36. Reeves, "Owning a Virus"; Mitchell, "Sacrifice. "
37. Keller and Longino, Feminism and Science; Happe, "Rhetoric of Race. " 38. Sullivan, "Keeping the Rhetoric"; Taylor, Defining Science.
39. Ceccarelli, Shaping Science; Miller, "Genre as Social Action. "
40. Brockreide, "Arguers as Lovers. " 41. Ehninger, "Argument as Method. "
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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. .