Abstract This article offers a theory of action model for grading in first-year writing classes, as enacted at two public, suburban, Midwestern two-year colleges. First, it analyzes labor-based contract grading and specifications grading through this model, examining how these popular grading methods have manifested in unintended negative consequences for historically and multiply marginalized students. Then, it proposes a sociocognitive grading model designed to maximize course-level success rates for New Majority college students. The sociocognitive model was iteratively built on feminist standpoint theory, intersectional learning sciences, multilingual writing pedagogy, and disability studies. Thus far, student course-level success has improved, along with their learning in four domains of a robust writing construct: intrapersonal, interpersonal, cognitive, and health. While it does not prescribe specific patterns of response, this model nevertheless establishes an overall referential frame that holds the potential to incorporate empirically based best response practices.

Abstract At the University of Minnesota, Rochester, a small health sciences school, writing faculty piloted their own versions of ungrading catered to the accessibility needs of students. Ubbesen experimented with what she calls “credit-based assessment” where students receive a zero through four score on all assignments. Bruenger experimented with assigning credit or no credit to all assignments. And Lemer experimented with not assigning grades at all until the final required one. This article describes these ungrading schemes, analyzes student responses to them, and promotes ungrading as an accessible practice for teachers and learners.

Abstract While ungrading is gaining traction within higher education, many teachers still struggle with applying ungrading systems successfully in their classrooms. This article is designed to bridge the gap between an ideological commitment to ungrading and pedagogical praxis by focusing on the ideologies that are embedded in ungrading systems. This represents an important shift from the focus on tools or methods to a focus on the habits of mind necessary to adapt ungrading to individual classrooms. This article claims that one of the key challenges to implementing ungrading stems from attempting to tack alternative assessment onto existing pedagogical frameworks. By utilizing a disability justice approach, the author offers a praxis-based primer to support educators in shifting their habits of mind to facilitate ungrading. First, the article asks readers to examine their ideological assumptions surrounding classrooms and demonstrates how these ideologies influence and interact with ungrading principles. Next, the article explores how a disability justice framework provides important contextualizing guidance to enacting ungrading ideologies. Finally, it synthesizes key lessons from disability justice theory and localizes them in examples of classroom praxis, demonstrating how a reorientation away from a “best practices” approach to ungrading facilitates successful implementation in the classroom.

AbstractWork as a university teacher post(?)-pandemic must be rethought entirely. Creating better futures—or a future at all—does not mean getting back to some happy place, but it does mean faculty must engage institutions and communities courageously, ethically, and collectively. This essay links conversations about teaching in the pandemic to those about gender, race, class, and disability, and to academic labor and faculty fights for better pay and working conditions, shared governance, and academic freedom.

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

Abstract In a world of Google-age information accessibility and Facebook-fueled quick rants, the author is interested in teaching a process of reading poetry that does not include easily accessed “answers” or result in reactionary analysis. By using contemporary poetry in introduction to literature courses, the author invites students to resist any quick way of accessing information about the poem. Instead, using Billy Collins's poem, “Introduction to Poetry,” the author helps students explore slower, maybe more contemplative and welcoming ways to listen to the language of the poems they study. And, along the way, the author invites students to consider the particular intellectual virtues they are cultivating in order to read well. In this essay, the author uses Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem “Hummingbird Abecedarian,” published through the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, and a poem the author had only read a couple of times before introducing to a group of second-semester first-year “Introduction to Literature” students, as an illustrative example of how using contemporary poems can deepen students’ reading experiences when there are no academic resources around to save them from taking time to read well.

AbstractThis article reports on an undergraduate course centered on autobiographies written by people who manage mental illnesses. Students learned about neurodiversity from multiple perspectives, examined social and medical models of mental illness, developed interpretive skills, and advanced their ability to write compellingly about both literature and their own experiences.

AbstractThis article examines the value undergraduate research adds to writing centers in their role as anchor institutions within English and across college and university campuses. It focuses on a pilot project conducted by a team of mentored peer tutors who researched the accessibility of writing at Marquette University. Their successes and failures show how, beyond research findings, undergraduate research experience can be consequential for practitioners and their communities.

Abstract This article proposes that an unexplored avenue of pedagogy in undergraduate research lies in courses that merge English and the public humanities. These disciplines often have shared goals, including increased interest in the humanities and engagement with local communities, greater accessibility to scholarly materials, more research opportunities for and fewer burdens on instructors, and more frequent occasions for scholars at all levels to participate in knowledge making. Examining a course titled Writing About Public Problems, this article argues that undergraduates are capable of undertaking theoretical, creative, and practical writing and research when paired with empirical data collection on public stakeholders. Additionally, performance theory can facilitate experiential learning and a greater connection in undergraduate public humanities work between academics and the publics with which they seek to communicate.

Abstract Five graduate students reflect on their experiences in multiple roles to address the question, What does a good teacher do now?—during a pandemic, in a moment of reckoning with white supremacy, in the face of uncounted griefs and challenges. We contend that good teachers craft communities of care for students, colleagues, and themselves. We advance trauma, accessibility, surveillance, and labor as particular sites for that project.

Neutrality is often impossible when disabled teachers are at the front of the classroom. This article unpacks three domains in which neutrality needs to be cripped: in response to students’ resistance to disability content, when considering the audiences for our pedagogy, and when teachers need accommodations.

This article explores how to use science fiction, particularly texts centered on android protagonists, to open up discussions of marginalization, race, and oppression in the introductory literature classroom. In response to the hateful rhetoric directed toward asylum seekers, this author developed an entire course around personhood and rights. She first examines how, in particular sci-fi works, paranoia and prejudice compel citizens to delineate between kinds of personhood. She then illuminates how students were invited to make parallels between the othering that the androids endure and historical and present-day examples of human rights abuses. After a semester of examining and debating these issues, students selected an android or robot in a television show, film, or video game of their choice and first assessed how the android’s personhood was delimited by human and then articulated why humans placed these boundaries on the android. Throughout the article, the author explains the kinds of texts she used for the course, the assignment students were tasked with, and how the course broached other issues of power dynamics, such as consent and disability rights.

This article discusses how the experience of caring for my severely autistic son, Charlie, and my academic research in disability studies have given me insights into teaching the ancient Greek and Latin languages to university students. My efforts to teach Charlie, who is almost nonverbal, to talk and communicate have inspired me to create strategies that help students review grammatical material for exams in a highly effective way. Teaching, I have learned, can happen in the absence of speech. My research about the history of the treatment of individuals with intellectual disabilities has shown me how to make mundane vocabulary-building exercises come alive. For example, explaining what certain ancient Greek words mean with reference to contemporary medical and ethical questions about the care of children with disabilities, born and unborn, has been of great benefit to students learning medical terminology for their science classes and preparing for careers in the health professions.

This article offers readers a case study of a course-based tutoring partnership that frames and enhances the focus on the stories of three participants—two with learning disabilities. The first part engages arguments involving connections between learning-disabled and typical basic writing students to ask the important question: should learning-disabled students receive more institutionally sanctioned time, attention, and pedagogical care than mainstream students, especially if they are also in basic writing courses? I offer course-based tutoring and peer review and response groups as loci for exploring that query. In the article’s second part, I narrate the sorts of ethical choices that emerged as I began to focus on the participants in this study. I describe the interactions of the participants as they worked together, and with other students, in two peer review and response sessions. The article’s third part provides a more intimate gaze into the backgrounds and experiences of all three participants, offering readers a sense of just how compelling and unexpected the participant stories proved to be, behind the scenes and beyond the classroom. The article concludes with some thoughts on how this poignant experience with two students with learning disabilities taught us all the value of what it means to struggle, to persevere, and to make the most of what “others” of all backgrounds and abilities have to offer.

This article describes the unique journey both of a blind student in our Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) Program and of the faculty who taught him as they all navigated through uncharted territories. We were unable to identify any programs that had enrolled students with this particular impairment; thus, there were no previous parameters set by other PTA programs, nor were we able to seek advice from any other physical therapy educators. For instance, we knew that we needed to make certain accommodations but were very aware, as was the student, of the necessity of not overaccommodating. Despite the fact that the physical therapy profession trains practitioners to help clients with disabilities to maximize their physical function and teaches them how to adapt to the challenges of daily activity, we initially assumed that a blind student would not be able to complete the program or be able to become a self-sufficient practitioner. We were very wrong. This article describes our learning process over the course of an eighteen-month program and details a valuable pedagogical experience pertinent to anyone in the teaching profession. We particularly stress the importance of being flexible and open in modifying one's teaching style to accommodate the needs of the individual student and offer tips on doing so without bias or overcompensation.

This prototypical disability studies course raises unusual issues of ethics and engagement because of its focus on sensitive, sometimes taboo matters of bodies and minds by autobiographers, physicians, theorists, and artists. These works enhance awareness of disability and human rights and help inculcate an ethic of care, concern, and social activism. The University of Connecticut has made human rights a university priority, enrolling eighty to one hundred students annually in its human rights minor, one of the largest in the country; a human rights major was inaugurated in 2012-13.