No More Learning

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
144 Linda Flower
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
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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. 38 To speak up for yourself and speak out requires both individual courage and a sense of social support.
I had seen this over the previous six years of working with SOS scholars in the CMU Decision Makers project as they talked and wrote about making difficult decisions at work, at school, and in their personal lives, reflecting on the options they saw and the strategies on which they relied. 39 But what this experience also revealed was the intensely rhetori- cal nature of self-advocacy, which demands not only self-expression but also understanding rhetorical situations, constructing new meanings, and creat- ing a dialogic relationship with others.
To begin with, self-advocacy starts with the difficult job of understanding yourself--your strengths and weaknesses. You must figure out what neither the generalized medical nor institutional discourse can give you--a functional understanding of how you learn--what causes you trouble, how you work around it, what you need from others, and where your alternative talents lie. Taking ownership of what a disability means (for example, asking for appro- priate accommodations when you need them) starts with a reflective, con- structive writerly process of meaning making.
In other contexts self-advocacy is even more directly concerned with chal- lenging limiting self-representations (that is, "coming out") and transforming the ways others understand difference and disability (that is, "constructive" resistance). To do this, the urban teenagers I meet from SOS do indeed need personal chutzpah and social support for speaking up. But to go public in this larger sense, they also need what emerges in community literacy as rhetorical agency--that is, the reflective power to interpret themselves to a public and to draw that public into deliberative dialogue. 40
The Think Tank gave us an opportunity to observe how such rhetors-- rarely identified as experts much less rhetorical agents in the public sphere-- might in fact contribute to a deliberative analysis of problems and options. Responding to problem scenarios that included encounters with teachers, supervisors, and peers, Think Tank participants were asked to consider first, "What is the problem here? " and "Whose problem is it? " They then began to develop a set of options and project potential outcomes, both supporting
148 Linda Flower
and rivaling one another. 41 The six Think Tank participants I focus on in this analysis included two college students, two adult participants, and two SOS teenagers, one of whom was described as a high-performing and the other as a lower-performing student by their teachers.
The transcripts from this forum reveal three significantly different kinds of rhetorical moves used by the SOS speakers: expressive, interpretive, and dia- logic. The four adults spent of lot of their time posing questions, so the teenagers often responded with an expressive move--telling their own story or expressing an opinion. In table 1, I have formatted a series of verbatim ex- cerpts from the transcript to highlight the familiar discourse moves named in the left column. The clarifying connective words in brackets are my addition.
[ table 1 ] Expressive Moves
1 Prompt [Agree? ]
Tell [Story-Opinion ]
2 Prompt [Story? ]
Tell [Story]
CMU student: We can move on to the second decision point. Dealing with the teacher when hindered by your [learning disability]. Which one of the story behind the stories would you agree with Don?
Don: I really don't think the teacher is mean like that to me.
Counselor: Do you guys use your IEPs? Do you say, Hey I have an IEP and you need to do what it says.
Don:
? That happened to me either this week or
last week
? and I had a test and I hadn't finished it and
the teacher was gonna collect it.
? She asked if I was having trouble with it
? and I was like yeah.
? I said it says on my IEP that I have more
time on my work
? and he said I could take it home to finish it.
Brandon:
? If they don't recognize it, I don't put it out
there.
? Until I really need help.
? And if I don't really need help, I don't
enforce it.
Tell [Decision ] Conditionalize Conditionalize Conditionalize
In table 1, "Expressive Moves," the discussion has turned to interactions with teachers. As the schematic representation suggests, Don responds to a "do you agree? " prompt with a counterclaim (disagreeing with both examples
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 149
in the briefing book). At another point he responds to a narrative prompt with a supporting story. As Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock have shown with other marginalized, typically silent speakers, this first, expressive level of par- ticipation can in fact be a significant act of asserting one's identity and a sense of one's self as a knower, a speaker, and an authority on one's own experi- ence. 42 In fact, the evidence of this normally silent student actively speaking out in this public space with strangers was received by Don's teachers with surprise. In example 2, we see Brandon also responding with an expressive move, though notice how in this case it is the story of a decision, embedded in a highly conditionalized account of what he sees as appropriate action.
Our images of marginalized, socially disabled speakers (like those of inex- perienced writers) often lead us to expect expressive discourse, but little more. However, the rhetorical performance of these teenagers asserts another level of rhetorical agency in which one responds as the interpreter of a problem or a conflict or a question. In table 2, "Interpretive Moves," we see Brandon being asked to respond with a truth claim (Do teachers really care? ). He replies not just by offering a yes/no expressive opinion, but by interpreting the situation: they care, but it demands time and effort as well as strategies and knowledge they do not have. His interpretation is laced with the condi- tions, qualifications, and justifications that mark a reasoned argument. More important, as a contribution to this public discussion of the teacher's role in learning difficulties, Brandon's contribution to the inquiry is a balanced, qualified, conditionalized, and insightful interpretation of the problem itself. Going well beyond a personal experience narrative, he addresses the complex issue of "whose problem is this? " exploring how and why teachers of good- will participate in turning differences among all into a disability for some.
[ table 2 ] Interpretive Moves
3 Prompt [True? ] Interpret
Claim Qualify
Claim
Claim
Claim Conditionalize Conditionalize
Parent: Do you think teachers care? Brandon:
? I think they do care,
? but the LD it will take them more time and
effort for a strategy and a work plan
? Most LD students they have mainstream
classes
? and mainstream teachers don't know how to
handle and LD student.
? Most of the time there's only one or two and
she don't know how to deal with them.
? If she slows down the process for the whole
class people are gonna get bored.
? And if she speeds it up the LDs are gonna get
lost.
150 Linda Flower
Claim Qualify Justify Claim
Claim
? In a way the teachers care,
? but in certain situations they don't enforce it. ? [Because] There's more students that need
her help that she knows how to help in
other ways
? than [there are] LD students who she doesn't
know how to help them as well as she would like.
However, not all interpretive moves are equally sophisticated. Should we really expect to see the more fully dialogic, self-conscious, reflective, and strate- gic moves that we associate with higher levels of literacy and rhetorical agency? Is that not a lot to ask of young students from urban schools who may even be struggling to succeed at what Freire calls knowledge "banking"? What form would such agency take in this public deliberation with unknown adults? 43
In table 3, "Dialogic, Re-interpretive Moves," example 4, one of the adults tells the story of his own child who flunked his first year of college and then went for help, offering this as a prompt (and implicit advice? ) to Brandon. Brandon, however, responds by reinterpreting the other speaker's story (that is, it is just that your son's strategy failed). Brandon then justifies his alterna- tive scenario, and at the same time rivals himself. That is, the Achilles' heel of Brandon's own solution (that is, don't ask for help; don't tell) is that his strategy has not failed--yet. By the end, his analysis has connected a condi- tionalized analysis of when to get help with a reflection on the motivation to remain silent--pride. Once again, this student's situated understanding of a problem has yielded bona fide insight--evidence of expertise. But even more significant is that as a member of a deliberative public, he has contributed a reflective reinterpretation of someone else's image of the problem. He has engaged in that essential dialogic move of listening then building on, chal- lenging, qualifying, or expanding our understanding, creating a more com- plex and negotiated meaning.
[ table 3 ] Dialogic, Reinterpretive Moves (Reinterpret the other's image)
4 Prompt [Opinion-story? ]
Tell [Opinion] Dialog [Reinterpret]
[Parent: Tells of own child who flunked 1st semester in college; then went back asking for help. ]
What would stop you from doing that? Brandon: Pride mostly.
? From your son, he actually went through
everything
? and the strategy that he tried to do it, it
failed.
Justify Rival
Prompt [Recap ]
? So, in other words he had to come straight up front about it.
? From my point, my strategy hasn't failed yet. Counselor: He tried a way and that didn't
work out so he doubled back and tried
Rival self /
Conditionalize work
Claim Reflect
? So when I get to that and my strategy don't ? then I'll just have to confront my own self.
? My own pride.
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 151
another way. But you haven't failed yet. Interpret Brandon:
My final example, table 4, "Dialogic, Adaptive Moves," takes this dialogic process one step further, demonstrating a dialogic rhetorical agency that not only interprets but also adapts to other speakers. Asked how he might speak to his friend Travis, who is afraid to admit that he has a learning disability, Brandon begins by imaginatively projecting what Travis would be thinking. Then he begins to lay out a rhetorical plan for drawing his friend into this local public, into an inquiry about learning disabilities as both a reflective and physical space. Notice how he is not only planning how to adapt to his audience, but he is considering reasons, justifying his move, and then, in a wise and reflective move, he qualifies his own rhetorical ability: "I can tell him, . . . but until he opens his mouth its not going to happen. "
[ table 4 ]. Dialogic, Adaptive Moves (Adapt to the Other)
5 Interpret
Claim
Justify
Prompt [Opinion-Act? ]
Dialog [Plan-Adapt]
(In discussing going public, Travis gets men- tioned)
Brandon:
? I know Travis
? I know that he plays football,
? he don't want to get his personal life like his
LD out there.
? [Because] He plays football
? and they'll call him stupid and bring him
down.
Parent: (How would you coach a peer like
Travis who is afraid to admit his LD and get
help? )
Brandon:
? I would have him come into things like this,
meetings like this.
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Linda Flower
Justify ? So he can get more comfortable with that. ? Being one on one with him I can tell him
everything he needs to know,
Qualify ? but until he opens his mouth its not going
to happen.
Looking back at the Think Tank as an experiment in counterpublic delib- eration, this analysis suggests that taking rhetorical agency in this setting draws on an embedded set of rhetorical moves that build on one another. At the core are expressive moves--identity-asserting statements that tell a per- sonal story or opinion. Speakers expand their reach with broader interpretive moves that respond to conflict, claims, or questions with new claims, rivals, or contributions that justify, qualify, or conditionalize our understanding. And finally, speakers may rise to what I have argued is the most powerful form of rhetorical agency in community literacy--a fully dialogic, knowledge-building engagement with the understanding of others. In acts of complexity and so- phistication, we see these speakers reinterpret the image of another speaker, rival or compare their own points, plan a response, or actively adapt to others.
This supported performance also helps us name three aspects of going public in the face of a disabling discourse. One is the way a structured discur- sive space, such as the Think Tank, can not only enfranchise speakers but also scaffold their rhetorical work--encouraging them to construct rivals and op- tions in response to others. Another is the way these two students use the occasion to grow and achieve in their own ways. Brandon, who had a history of denying he had a learning disability even within the SOS program, is look- ing publicly and reflectively at his own decision. In this public forum, he has found a way to affirm a "valid social identity" that embraces his learning dif- ficulties. But in other ways, it was Don's participation, speaking up in this public room that astounded his teachers. Don does not talk much; he strug- gles with academic tasks more than most students in the program. Yet here he is, to everyone's surprise and delight, volunteering his story and interven- ing in the discussion with the authority of a person with something to con- tribute.
Finally, in Brandon and other students we are seeing evidence of a distinc- tive form of rhetorical agency. The moves made in this Think Tank dialogue demonstrate a thinker who is entering into a public deliberation, choosing to engage with complex problems. Brandon is not only expressing himself (tell- ing his story or opinion) but also entering this event as an interpreter of prob- lems and as a dialogic meaning maker. In doing so, in going public as a rhetorical agent, he is, in his own way, transforming the discourse of disability. That may seem like a big claim, but in casting his bread on the water, throw- ing his words into circulation, he is helping shape a more public dialogic deliberation about a common good, and in joining that public (created in
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 153
Warner's sense) we too are in turn implicated in the life success of students with learning disabilities. As collaborative-critical activists (as teachers, researchers, and college students) the public work of rhetoric need not be about our own voice, but can rest on our ability to help call local publics into being, to nur- ture the rhetorical agency of marginalized speakers, and to use the power of rhetoric to document agency and expertise in a way that challenges and per- haps even transforms the discourses it enters.
Notes
1. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 119.
2. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 76.
3. For examples of the range of literacy practices, see Coogan, "Community Liter-
acy"; Cushman, "Toward a Praxis"; Higgins, Long, and Flower, "Community Literacy"; Hull and Katz, "Crafting"; Rousculp, "When the Community. " For synthetic, critical overviews, see Deans, Writing Partnerships; Long, Community Literacy. The specific prac- tice of community literacy referred to here supports public engagement through in- tercultural inquiry. Developed at the Community Literacy Center, grounded in the prophetic pragmatism of John Dewey and Cornel West, it supports rhetorical problem solving through community-university partnerships. See Flower, Community Literacy, for a study of this literate practice and a textual archive in the CLC "Snapshot History" at http://English. cmu. edu/research/inquiry/two. html (accessed July 12, 2008).
4. Brueggemann et al. , "Becoming Visible," 371. The authors' excellent multifaceted overview of the meaning of disability for composition studies highlights the difficulty of "becoming visible," while I focus here on the hazards of recognition. The problem in both cases is being represented in the language and categories to which you have contributed, to bring about, as they put it, "nothing about us without us. " Ibid. , 391.
5. Although "claiming disability [is a] a move that will necessarily 'disrupt the social order,' as disabled people come out," that is not a necessary or immediate effect. Ibid. , 373.
6. Andrea Lowenstein treats identity-making as a personal narrative of discovery, understanding, and accommodation. Lowenstein, "My Learning Disability. " Self-repre- sentation shapes many arguments in LD OnLine www. ldonline. org; in Mel Levine's "All Kinds of Minds," www. allkindsofminds. org; and the powerful Mooney and Cole, Learn- ing Outside the Lines.
7. Brueggemann et al. , "Becoming Visible," 391.
8. Director Stacie Dojonovic's SOS program, which offers support for the transition from school to work for students with learning disabilities, has been recognized as a model by the National Organization on Disability. Most of the SOS students in this Think Tank team had already been scholars in my Decision Makers community literacy program at CMU (Carnegie Mellon).
9. An outgrowth of the Community Literacy Center, the Carnegie Mellon Community Think Tank had already addressed a series of workplace/worklife problems, bringing marginalized employees into problem-solving dialogues with administrative and policy people. Its methods and findings are at www. cmu. edu/thinktank (accessed July 12, 2008).
10. Kantrowitz and Underwood, "Dyslexia. " 11. White, "Learning Disability," 727.
12. Ibid. , 720.
154 Linda Flower
13. See Haller, Dorrier, and Rahn's description of the partly successful campaign to "replace holistic designations, such as 'the mentally disabled' .