Re: Guidlines on working with LD students

[cph@wiley.csusb.edu (Carol Haviland)]

Sara--We've been asking some of the same questions, stimulated by some
collab work with the Students With Disabilities staff.  I'm expecially
interested in two questions:
1)  How does the disability fit within our hierarchies of fault?
        If, for example, a student is congenitally blind, we have little
difficulty providing "seeing" aids.  However, if that student was blinded
when the meth lab he was making millions off of exploded, do we feel
differently?
Are we more understanding of PSTD if we were sympathetic to US involvement
in Vietnam than if we resisted or moved to Canada?

2) How familiar and visible is the disability?
        We can see the absence of a limb or blindness, but we have to
believe in learning or attention disabilities on someone's word--do we treat
them differently?  Are we more understanding and inclined to be helpful if
we know someone else who has a particular disability than if it's one we
know nothing about and have never known anyone to have?

The category is large, but all of us construct it and our responses to it
with our own locations.

Carol
>Hi.  In some ways the question I have picks up a theme in Clinton's 
>message about active learning and collaboration.  I'm doing a conference 
>course with a couple of graduate students on learning disabilities.  
>They're both very much interested in figuring out ways that we as a 
>writing center can work more productively with LD students on writing 
>issues.  One of the grad students is tutoring a severely dyslexic grad 
>student in biligual special ed.  This is an arrangement made through our 
>university's dean of students office and has no connection with the 
>writing center.  The tutor spent most of last weekend working with the 
>student on a literature review and paper for one of her courses.  She's 
>concerned that the work she was doing stepped over a line between 
>tutoring and providing necessary accomodations on the one hand, and 
>unauthorized collusion on the other. From what the tutor was saying, I'd 
>be concerned too; I suspect the student doesn't quite see a difference; 
>e.g. the student apparently handed the tutor a bunch of notes and asked 
>the tutor to "make them into a paper."  Although the tutor said she 
>couldn't work this way, apparently the session became a sort of 
>colaborative writing project, and that's not was was intended.  The tutor 
>is also not enrolled in the student's class.
>
>Anyway, I was wondering whether any of you out there had guidelines on 
>working with LD students or how you address these issues in staff 
>training.  I suspect we all address collaboration/collusion/who owns the 
>paper in training for working with all students, but I think the degree 
>of physical help necessary here raises difficulties, especially in 
>distinguishing between transcribing ideas someone else is assembling and 
>contributing to the composing process in ways that don't help a student 
>learn.
>
>Sara Kimball
>UT Austin
>
>