No More Learning

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. 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.
152
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' . . . (that reduce a human to his or her impairment), with modified terms, i. e. , 'people with a learning disability. '" Haller, Dorrier, and Rahn, "Media Labeling. " See also Morse, Introduction.
14. Hull et al. , "Remediation. "
15. Ibid. , 311.
16. Ibid. , 312.
17. Silver, Misunderstood Child, 38-55. 18. White, "Learning Disability," 709. 19. Ibid. , 717.
20. Mooney and Cole, Learning Outside the Lines.
21. All the speakers in this sequence, identified by pseudonyms, are high school stu-
dents, except for Trista, a University of Massachusetts student, and myself. 22. Mehan, "Beneath the Skin. "
23. McDermott, "Acquisition," 272.
24. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 373.
25. Swain and Cameron, "Unless Otherwise Stated," 69. 26. Ibid. , 79.
27. See Corker and French, Disability Discourse.
28. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 373.
29. Goodley, "Supporting People," 441.
30. Swain and Cameron, "Unless Otherwise Stated," 76.
31. Davies, "Discursive Production," 239, quoted in Priestley, "Transforming Disabil- ity," 97.
32. Priestley, "Transforming Disability," 97.
33. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27.
34. See Nancy Fraser's influential critique of the Habermas ideal. Fraser, "Rethinking
the Public Sphere. "
35. See Hauser's coherent framing of this new view in his discussion of what he calls
the "vernacular voices" of the "reticulate" and "rhetorical" public sphere. Hauser, Ver- nacular Voices, 44-64.
36. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114.
37. For Gloria Anzaldua, a mestiza (mixed) voice is one that embraces rather than avoids conflict and contradiction: "I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue--my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. " Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, 81.
38. Goodley, "Locating Self-Advocacy," 367-79.
39. For an overview of "The Decision Makers Assessment: A Web-based Assessment Tool for Reflective Decision Making Based on Writer's Planning and Self-reflection" (2006), visit http://English. cmu. edu/research/inquiry/decisionmakers/index. html (accessed June 21, 2009).
40. For an extended discussion of this notion of rhetorical agency and the collabora- tive, meaning-making processes of urban rhetors, see Flower, Community Literacy.
41. For an overview of the rhetorical structure of the Community Think Tank, see Flower, "Intercultural Knowledge Building. "
42. Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock, Tradition.
43. For Habermas, "strategic" is a manipulative alternative to "communicative" action; in my perspective from classical and cognitive rhetoric, the art of inquiry is itself
Going Public--in a Disabling Discourse 155 a heuristic and strategically self-conscious process. Habermas, Theory, 258. Freire, Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed.
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