Can I let the campus disability resource office handle accommodations?
The short answer is no. Although disability resource offices offer an often invaluable contribution to many college campuses by supporting students in receiving necessary accommodations, scholars such as Brenda Jo Brueggeman suggest that disability resource offices are often limited in the services that they can provide, due to restricted budgets and personnel (797). Given these constraints, the disability resource office, alone, may not offer students the necessary resources to achieve success in the composition classroom.
Further, relying on disability services to provide accommodations puts the onus on students to both report and prove their disability (usually through physician’s note). While the National Center for Education Statistics estimated in 2011-2012 that 11% of college students have a disability, Shannon Walters claims that “Directors of Student Disability Services at two major universities estimate that only half of students with disabilities report their disabilities and note that students with disabilities often forgo accommodations for which they are eligible because they believe their instructors will treat them differently” (427). Thus, relying on disability services to identify which students need accommodations will not actually serve all students.
Finally, WPAs and composition instructors should avoid what Jay Dolmage refers to as a retrofit, which is the reactive approach of adding accommodations once a need arises (20). According to Allison Hitt, retrofits require students to access resources differently (3) and, as a consequence, causes students to lose face in front of peers or feel burdensome to their instructors.
References:
- Brueggmann, Brenda Jo. “An Enabling Pedagogy: Meditations on Writing and Disability.” JAC, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 791-820.
- Hitt, Allison. “Access for All: The Role of Dis/ability in Multiliteracy Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 1-7.
- U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. “Fast Facts: Students with Disabilities.” Digest of Education Statistics, 2015. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=60. Accessed 4 May 2018.
- Walters, Shannon. “Toward an Accessible Pedagogy: Dis/ability, Multimodality, and Universal Design in the Technical Communication Classroom. Technical Communication Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 427-454.