First-Year English: Welcoming Different Learners to the Table

Abstract

An increasing number of students with learning disabilities (LD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are coming to our colleges these days. As longtime first-year English composition professors of LD learners at Landmark College, in Putney, Vermont, we struggle to meet the challenge of teaching a variety of learners without losing anyone along the way. Landmark is unique among colleges in that all of our students come with a diagnosis of LD, ADHD, ASD, or some combination of these. We believe that many of our first-year colleagues at other institutions share with us a tension between caring deeply about their students and yet not wishing to lower course standards in order to accommodate special needs students. And, while many of us also feel overworked and stretched to our limits, we acknowledge that federal laws obligate us to address disability issues. We offer here an approach that recognizes these tensions and addresses them by suggesting ways to integrate individualized instruction with universal design classroom strategies. Federal Laws and Equal Access Having taught English at a state college in New Hampshire in the 1980s, one of the authors of this paper now sheepishly admits that she was aware of only one student with a diagnosed learning disability. And, this awareness was only because another professor had discovered this and had become the student’s advocate. With her naive good intentions, your author remembers meeting with the student several times in her office to discuss an assigned reading but doing little else. She does not remember being well-informed about the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the federal law that had already existed for some ten years to address learning disabilities in higher education. Section 504 of this law extends civil rights to young people and adults with disabilities by opening up opportunities in education and employment. The law allows for “equal access” to post-secondary education, non-discriminatory treatment of LD students, and “reasonable accommodations” in educational settings. It puts the responsibility for requesting those accommodations onto the student yet stipulates that the accommodations must not compromise content or academic standards of the course. The subsequent Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 further ensures only access, not necessarily