Disabilities and “Temporarily Able Bodied” Folks

[andrea_lunsford]

This last week at the Bread Loaf School of English, my team-taught class had a visit from Professor Brenda Brueggemann (University of Connecticut) and Professor Susan Birch (Middlebury College) to talk about their experience and work with disability studies and with what Brenda called the “temporarily able-bodied.” This class session produced a series of passionate and insightful postings from teachers in the class, all of whom work with students with various disabilities, but few of whom had studied much about such teaching. They had a number of “a-ha” moments. Maya wrote:

Amber added this:

Others wrote of their own experiences in teaching large classes including many students with disabilities – but with few if any resources and no real training in how best to teach such students. A few reported feeling despair. But the class discussion with Brenda and Susan, at last, gave them some good vocabulary (“well, I guess, I am ‘temporarily able bodied,’ but already I know I have pretty poor eyesight. I’m guessing that that ‘temporary’ is going to be very temporary for most people.”)

I’ve known Brenda Brueggemann since her graduate school days, and I’ve been inspired by her work for decades. If you haven’t read Lend Me Your Ear or Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places, I recommend them both, or any of Brenda’s other amazing scholarly work.

Perhaps I was once “temporarily able bodied,” but I’ve written before of a cognitive disability I discovered only in graduate school: great difficulty visualizing things. I learned to deal with that issue (as Brenda says, not a problem to deal with by “overcoming” but a part of my identity). As I write this, I am losing vision to macular degeneration. Another part of my identity.

So today feels like a good day to reassess, once again, what I know about teaching and learning with students with disabilities. Of all kinds. To hear/see some of Brenda’s insights, check out “Why I Mind on YouTube.”