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How does one balance dedication to two communities that are never served equally well? I consider a theoretically based response through Gramsci’s hegemony, the Brazilian sociologist José Maurício Domingues’s collective subjectivity, and Laclau and Mouffe’s particular brand of post-Marxism. Together, they provide a way to think about leading, holding onto the traditions of the academy while trying to change those traditions so that those who are perforce Othered can be afforded greater than mere recognition or accommodation. I argue that one must adopt a necessary mindset that places the emphasis on the collectivities to which one belongs, relegating the individual to the backdrop, to the extent that is possible.

The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

By examining the literate practices of persons with aphasia, or language disability after stroke or other brain injury, this essay develops the concept of literate misfitting—the conflicts readers and writers encounter when their bodies and minds do not fit with the materials and expectations of literacy. I analyze how literate misfitting reveals both how persons with disabilities are often excluded from normative conceptions of literacy and how their experiences adapting and innovating in the face of literate misfits offer vital insights into the social and material aspects of literacy.

This article examines the rhetoric and pedagogies of employment and workplace guidebooks for adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) to demonstrate how the texts reflect and reinvent cultural desires or fantasies about contemporary employees and also work to norm real autistic employees to be closer to a neurotypical ideal. This norming is achieved in large part through the guidebooks’ surprising appropriations of and appeals to rhetorical training.

By understanding the verbal and nonverbal manifestations of autism as a rhetorical imperative “a perspective that involves applying Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening” scholars can do much to dissolve the idea of otherness that appears in discussions of this topic.

Drawing on the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the author examines how—in order to explain their positions in the academy—many students of color (including those who are both first-generation Chicano/a and first-generation college students) unfortunately rely on dominant color-blind ideology concerning freedom of choice and equal opportunity.

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Freak-show theories developed in disability studies can help us analyze how students with disabilities rhetorically represent these in college admissions essays. In particular, such theories draw attention to the social conditions that affect how disabilities are conceived and treated as well as depicted.

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers’ responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies’ tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more recent constructivist theories.

Booth and Elbow engage in a dialogue about what has become even more important in recent years, namely how we come to believe what we believe and convince others to believe with us. Booth speculates that one needs to commit oneself to combating both dogmatism and skepticism by embracing the rhetoric of assent, and offers rules to help us “learn how to listen”; Elbow agrees with Booth on a number of points but argues for the special value of dissent, perhaps even “unreasonable” dissent, before going on to offer specific classroom practices that can advance their common goal of critical thinking.

The author recalls her struggles and adaptations—to school, to anti-Semitism, to her family’s history, to her feelings for other women, to her learning disability—before there were terms to make what she experienced a familiar part of our discourse. She suggests that,because the words that might have exempted her from effort or locked her into one category or another were never spoken, she found ways to do what was required and methods of coping that have served her well in life.

Investigates how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. Argues that the implementation of an autobiographical pedagogy must extend beyond the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality and must include disabled persons in these discussions as well.

t was not until I had embarked upon my coming out as a deaf person that I considered my rites of passage, and dwelled on my acts, both deliberate and unconscious, both past and present, of passing. Because my coming out was a mid-life event, I had much to reflect back on and much, too, to illuminate ahead of me. This through an identity crisis, as it were, and the rites of passage then involved in uncovering the paths of my lifelong passing as hearing, took place in a hall of mirrors. (Later I would come to know this place as the art and act of rhetoric.) I first saw myself mirrored in several students I met at Gallaudet University (the world's only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students). I was thirty-two and finishing my PhD, writing a dissertation-that quintessential act of literate passing. What's more, I was finishing it by doing an ethnographic sort of study on deaf student writers at Gallaudet University; thus I was using the guise of an academic grant and a PhD-producing project as a professional foil to make a personal journey to the center of Deaf culture. I was always good at finding a way to pass into places I shouldn't normally be. So, there I was, doing time as a teacher and researcher at Gallaudet, collecting data for my study, taking a sign language class, living with a Deaf woman and faculty member at Gallaudet, going to Deaf gatherings, tutoring some of the students. Mostly, I was trying to pass in ways that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me: to pass (unfamiliarly) as D/deaf-and doing a lousy job of it-and to

Describes a doctoral student’s experience of studying the deaf or hearing culture from the standpoint of her life and work as a hard-of-hearing person. Discusses the student’s (almost) passing in and among the “D/deaf and H/hearing” worlds.

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Our profession's recent focus on the social construction of knowledge and the roles that discourse and community play in this construction have made some of us aware of disturbing characteristics in our classrooms. We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms-group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments-generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine appropriate and inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patterns disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority. In creating such non-traditional forums to supplement the work now going on in our classrooms, we tacitly argue for the importance of discourse in learning, the importance of students talking and writing to one another as well as to the teacher as they attempt to come to terms with the theories and concepts raised in their courses. This particular kind of learning does not take place often enough within the forums characteristic of our traditional classrooms, where interaction-at least the approved kind of interaction-is all too often dyadic, emphasizing the role of the all-knowing teacher discussing a topic with quiet, attentive students who may respond to the teacher but not directly to one another. Socrates tells Phaedrus that this is the ideal learning situation: lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons on justice and honor and goodness

Learning disabilities were included among the list of handicaps for which special educational services were mandated and reimbursable by the federal government when the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) was passed in 1975. Although the term disability is difficult to define, probably the most useful definition for the educator is the widely quoted federal definition of learning disabilities provided in the December 29, 1977, Federal Register.

IN THE FALL OF I 97 5 the 94th Congress passed Public Law 94-142, which maintained the equality of rights of children in the pursuit of education and made mainstreaming the rule rather than the exception. Although much has been said about the disparate burden this mandate places on the classroom teacher, the intent is humane and just: all persons have a rightful place in society, and society must accommodate certain individual differences. One handicapped group that has already begun to assert its rights and claim its space in the larger society is the community of the hearing impaired. Because of the nature of this particular handicap, it almost seems that PL 94-142 was written especially for them. The only handicapping feature of hearing impairment is the restriction or loss of the ability to communicate with the larger, hearing population. Consequently, this handicap is bilateral: the larger society is also by its inability to communicate except through written or oral language. Therefore, mainstreaming the hearing impaired at a very early age, in spite of the difficulty teachers will have writing individual learning programs, will bring both of these groups to a point of mutual understanding and acceptance, enlarging and enriching the mainstream these students join. The future is bright and hopeful. However, what do we do with the young adults who have finished their public schooling and now, facing forty to fifty years of participation in the adult world, need additional training and skills? The post-secondary schools already in existence that provide programs or services for the hearing impaired are few and widely scattered. And the only liberal arts college for the deaf, Gaulladet, couldn't possibly bring this kind of education within reach of the multitude of qualified persons within this group. This relative dearth of post-secondary opportunities for the deaf, coupled with the increased emphasis on education of the in general, is going to have a definite impact on many colleges that may have never even heard of Public Law 94-142. As more and more hearing impaired individuals who are now in high schools recognize their equality of rights in the pursuit of education, their goals will rise. And being unwilling to travel to Minnesota, Louisianna, or D.C., they will begin to knock at the doors of their own state insstitutions. Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act (PL 93-112) prohibits these institutions from using a person's handicap as a determining factor in admissions, and there seems to be evidence that the institutions will have the responsibility of accommodating the handicap to whatever extent possible. However, many of these institu-