I was the Director of the First-Year Writing Program for a couple of years. I also directed the university writing center.
Many faculty members will use writing in some way, and so the more we know about how writing happens or doesn’t happen with students with disabilities, the more we can facilitate why it is we are asking them to do writing in the first place. Writing classes in the university tend to be a required GEC freshman-based activity, and that means students will often make it or break it in their writing classrooms.
One of the real powers of writing actually at the university, or anywhere, is that in fact writing can be a great equalizer. As we know, the ability to achieve certain levels of literacy can erase enormous gender, class, race, ethnic differences. The university is a place for them, a path for them to go to move towards better employment, better living standards, better knowledge. It’s just really important to get them here, an extremely underrepresented group on college campuses.
The writing module is very important, I think, in working with students with disabilities on campus because writing is something that happens everywhere in the university. It is kind of the hallmark of what we do. Scholarship is produced by writing and most classes in the university end up in one way or another asking students to write.
