Re: Dysgraphia (fwd)

[Eric Crump <wleric@showme.missouri.edu>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 23:13:49 -0500
From: MacLean Gander <mgander@sover.net>
Reply-To: "Moderated Writing Center forum." <WCENTR-L@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list WCENTR-L <WCENTR-L@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU>
Subject: Re: Dysgraphia (fwd)

I've been lurking on this list since presenting a workshop on writing and
learning disabilities at the NWCA conference in St. Louis last year, and
it's been a wonderful introduction to the rich, dynamic culture of the
writing center. I've hesitated to post, partly because my own college
doesn't have a writing center (we use a very expensive and highly effective
tutorial system instead), but seeing my own name appear in Phyllis's post,
in relation to a topic with which I have some experience, moves me to join
in this discussion.

For the past nine years I've chaired the English department of a two-year
college that exclusively serves students with diagnosed learning disorders,
including ADD, working at various levels with several hundred students
carrying a wide variety of diagnostic labels, including that of dysgraphia.
This experience has primarily taught me a deep mistrust of the pedagogical
value of labels, and a sort of fundamental belief in the reality of the
difficulties in learning--and often the gifts--that these labels
simultaneously gesture towards and conceal. The primary difficulty with the
labels--a sort of intrinsic problem with the sprawling field of learning
disabilities--is that they say as much about the theoretical perspective of
the diagnostician as they do about the person being labelled. For example,
the most common form of learning disability--a basic difficulty learning
and retaining the correspondences between the sounds of the English
language and their graphical symbols--may be variously labelled as
dyslexia, specific reading disability, phonological processing disorder, or
most generally, specific learning disability, depending on the theoretical
bias.

Dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia, like attention deficit
(hyperactivity) disorder, are medical diagnoses primarily. The first three
have come to appear less frequently as the LD industry has become
increasingly the domain of neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and
educational psychology. (Interestingly, part of the reason for the
increasing prevelance of the ADD diagnosis may be that it can be obtained
from an M.D., usually a pediatrician, without clinical testing and at a
much smaller expense than a full neuropsych. or psychoeducational workup.
It's the cheapest way to get a child struggling in school special services
under the law governing equal access to public education.Obviously there
are also enormous social and cultural factors at work behind the rise of
ADD as a diagnostic category.)

I'll be honest and say that I don't know of any useful current research
regarding dysgraphia, and my guess is that there isn't any, because the
label itself is somewhat antiquated. Students who are labeled as dysgraphic
do share some common learning problems, of which the most obvious
(following Sara Kimball's note about etymology) is a disorder of written
production. Depending on the developmental stage, this may express itself
primarily in problems with handwriting, which involve difficulties in
integrating the fine motor system with retrieval memory for the shapes of
letters. Problems with visual-spatial processing in general--including
functions like visual memory, and visual-motor planning (e.g., fitting a
sentence into the space provided on a test)--are also common phenomena that
may be associated with the label. Because learning problems do not exist in
themselves, but evolve developmentally and are deeply influenced by the
systems in which they are situated and the way in which they are socially
constructed by others, by the time someone who began their educational
career with these basic problems reaches high school or college, their
difficulties will probably have extended to include problems previewing
writing assignments and making plans, deploying writing strategies
effectively, monitoring writing production, organizing information in a
logical fashion, and, at a basic level, simply completing writing
assignments at all. My guess is that a lot of the students who are
identified as suffering from writing anxiety or writer's block share some
of the elements of this problem, whether labelled or not.

Interestingly, most of the students I work with who share this pattern of
diffuculty now come with the label of an attention disorder--sometimes an
apparently accurate diagnosis, given the problems they exhibit in staying
focused, but often an equally misleading or useless designation, since
paying attention and actively taking in and processing information may
actually be a strength. The most current research into this phenomena has
focused on the neurocognitive construct of "executive functions," which in
theory regulate activities such as motor planning and production,
self-monitoring, strategy facilitation, rate and consistency of output, and
other sorts of self-regulatory functions. Martha Bridge Denckla's chapter
on executive functions in Frames of Reference for the Assessment of
Learning Disoders (G. Reid Lyons, ed.) is a good place to learn about this
(the whole book is an important text for anyone interested in learning
disorders.)

I am sorry for going on at such length, and in such a dull fashion, when my
initial intention was merely to say hello. I think some of the people on
this list will remember me, either from coming to the summer institute in
Putney or from last year's conference--I'd like to say hi to you all, and
particularly to those of you who made me feel so welcome in St. Louis last
year about this time.

If anyone on this list does have specific questions related to learning
disorders and teaching writing, please feel free to use me as a resource--I
can be reached at mgander@landmarkcollege.org or at the address in this
post.

Mac Gander
Landmark College
Putney, VT 05346