The same semester I was accepted to my master’s program in English, my younger brother gave up on his bachelor’s degree. He had struggled for eight years to finish; that spring, he decided that it was time to just accept an associate’s degree and move on with his life. The thing that had defeated my brother was the same thing that I loved: academic writing.
When my brother was in elementary school, he was diagnosed with what we (his not-as-kind-as-we-should-have-been siblings) called the triple package: dysgraphia, dyslexia, and dyscalculia. As I was several years older, I didn’t witness firsthand many of my brother’s struggles through elementary and secondary education; I only heard about them secondhand. When he was in college, I occasionally helped him with writing assignments when I visited for the holidays, not understanding why he couldn’t just imitate the MLA format handout I pulled up for him. As someone for whom writing has always been a strength, I didn’t grasp how college writing could present such a barrier. Later, I would atone for my callousness: my oldest son was diagnosed with dysgraphia in third grade. I experienced the frustration of a child with a disability trying to navigate a school system that demanded written proof for nearly every learning experience. As a result, my son was rarely ever graded on what he knew, but only on what he could stand to write down.
When I opened my course management software to teach my first-ever section of first-year writing and saw the icon indicating an accommodation letter next to two of my students’ names, my brother’s experiences returned to my mind. I didn’t know what diagnoses lay behind my students’ letters, though one disclosed some of their struggles to me. Given what I knew of how my brother and my son have experienced writing in a school setting, I wondered how I could teach a course that would not only accommodate students like them but also help them thrive.
As teachers, our personal experiences matter when it comes to our perceptions of our students’ abilities and accommodations. As new graduate student instructors, we are not only comfortable with writing but also accomplished as writers. Although we may have experience with other accommodations—for mental health, ADHD, or physical differences—we may be less empathetic to accommodations surrounding writing, given the subject that we’ve chosen to study and teach. It is difficult to understand the experience of someone who struggles with something that has always come naturally to you, something that you enjoy and value. With the rising number of students with learning disabilities enrolling in college, if you haven’t received an accommodation letter yet, it’s likely that you will soon.[1] Perhaps, like I was, you are overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching your first course—at trying to pin down how to instruct students in something that you understand intuitively—and can’t imagine how you can juggle accommodations on top of lesson planning. I spent so much time trying to wrap my mind around delivering the curriculum to an average student that trying to think about how to accommodate those who struggle seemed an insurmountable task.
However, helping students with dysgraphia doesn’t have to involve completely remaking our courses. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a simple shift in mindset. In this letter, I want to share some of the ways that I’ve started to understand how my course can help students with learning disabilities who may struggle with writing, whether they come with formal letters of accommodation or not. I’ll be using dysgraphia as an example case for two reasons. First, it’s the learning disability I have the most direct experience with and, therefore, can offer a unique perspective on. But perhaps more importantly, as a learning disability that directly involves the subject matter of our course, dysgraphia has a unique relationship with our teaching practices.[2] Dysgraphia sets up direct roadblocks for the ideas we’re trying to convey. A first-year writing course that removes these roadblocks for students who struggle most with writing can also benefit students who struggle with writing at a less clinical level.[3]
Principle #1—If you’ve met one student with dysgraphia, you’ve met one student with dysgraphia.
I’ve adapted this principle from the common saying about autism spectrum disorder because, like many learning disabilities, dysgraphia is a descriptive term for a cluster of related symptoms rather than a specific cause. Very few people without direct personal experience have even heard of it, much less understand what it means. Dysgraphia is generally less researched than its cousin disorder, dyslexia, and far from having a settled-upon definition.[4] Symptoms grouped under dysgraphia include trouble retaining and reproducing accurate spelling; difficulties with fine motor skills that may cause pain when writing; and a lack of spatial awareness that interferes with the placement of words and text on a page. While these may not seem relevant to college composition in the age of word processing, these difficulties have consequences for the development of the higher levels of the writing process. Susan McBride explains, “For those with dysgraphia, the physical act of writing words is so taxing that there are very few cognitive resources left for the rest of the thinking that is required for writing any kind of an essay or longer piece” (McBride 61).
Even though my brother and my son were both diagnosed with dysgraphia, their symptoms are almost entirely different. My brother has struggled with spelling his entire life and describes writing a paper as feeling like he has constant writer’s block. Typing is more comfortable than handwriting—which he finds almost impossible—but using a laptop for long stretches still causes him physical pain. He compensated for this by writing many of his college papers via dictation software. In contrast, my son had a nearly perfect memory for spelling from an early age, but even as a teenager, his handwriting is nearly illegible, with many malformed letters. People mistake his writing for that of an elementary school student. His struggles involve fine motor control and spatial planning, and being able to type his assignments almost entirely alleviates his symptoms. Yet, there are still difficulties with assignments that require drawing graphs or completing printed worksheets. We find accommodations together through trial and error because there’s no manual for a learning disability.
As instructors, we don’t know, and students are not obliged to disclose their specific medical diagnoses. Fortunately, diagnoses are less important than understanding how they experience the writing process. In order to be of maximum help to students with learning disabilities, we need to listen to our students’ unique experiences of the writing process. Instructors might have students describe what they experience through writing or interviews instead of making assumptions based on a disclosed diagnosis or assessments. When we pay attention to how the individual experiences writing, we may be able to use our own experiences to help them adapt the writing process to best serve their needs. Every student is unique, not just those with a learning disability. Don’t expect your students to have all the answers; start with their experiences, then work together to build a writing process. Be prepared to try different things over the course of the semester and pivot when necessary.
Principle #2—Focus on cultivating a positive attitude toward writing in your classroom.
Even as new instructors, we can perhaps intuit that our students’ attitude toward the material has a large impact on their ability to absorb ideas, experiment with new techniques, and grow their voices. Yet the gap between our writing abilities and those of our students can often lead us to judge student writing harshly. We may be frustrated with the gaps between what we thought we taught them in class and their ability to implement those ideas in written form. These problems are compounded for students with dysgraphia and other learning disabilities, where the implementation of ideas is compounded by their difficulties turning intention into written production. Thus, GSIs need to be cautious about the effect, or emotional tone, that may come across in our written feedback as well as our conferences. Corrections may be intended to help students grow, but for students fighting just to get words onto the page, these may come off as unreasonable, unfeeling demands.
In studies on the experiences of college students with dysgraphia, one issue that stands out is the strongly negative affective experience many of them have had with writing of all types.[5] I remember my brother frequently complaining about how unfair professors were in grading his writing, and from my research, this seems to be a universal experience for students with dysgraphia. Even when students succeed in higher education by conventional measures, they feel attacked by the educational system and their professors for things they cannot help. For example, Wanda Hadley, who has conducted several long-term studies of college students with learning disabilities, shared the experience of one student with learning disabilities who seemed traditionally successful, having graduated with a double major and a high GPA (20). Yet, this student still felt abandoned by the university. He judged the available accommodations inadequate and, as a result, rarely used them. He claimed that his university’s writing center focused on surface-level issues when he most needed “help with constructing my papers” (22). Hadley’s longitudinal study of seven students with learning disabilities revealed similar dissatisfactions with available services, along with a sense of insecurity that their fellow students and professors could immediately tell something was “wrong” with their writing (26). I have had similar experiences of judgment in trying to explain dysgraphia to my son’s teachers, in particular, an art teacher who assumed that my son’s sloppy lines and incomplete copying of shapes indicated a lack of effort rather than his very best effort filtered through fine-motor discoordination and struggles with spatial awareness.
Perhaps one of the best things writing instructors can do to help these students is to help them “unlearn . . . negative emotion” they might associate with the writing process (McBride 120). Our classrooms can become a place of unconditional positive regard (to borrow a phrase from psychotherapy) for both the student and their writing. We can acknowledge the effort that students put into their writing, which, for those with dysgraphia, might be more than the finished product might indicate. Instructors might ask students to recall positive experiences about writing and how it has affected their lives. If not something they have written, they may have been positively impacted by something someone wrote to them or a favorite book. We could offer low-stakes writing opportunities to experiment with multimodal genres the students might intrinsically value (a reading response as a text message or meme?) and use them to practice rhetorical skills that might be more cumbersome in longer written formats. Most importantly, we can give students a chance to feel successful by having some assignments that are graded only on completion and being generous about what standard of completion we are using. An atmosphere of joyful experimentation can go a long way to help students stay in a mental state conducive to learning.
Principle #3—Explore different technologies of writing.
As a graduate student who does a lot of writing, you may not think much about the significance of the technologies you use to accomplish this task. Or perhaps you are a connoisseur of pens, notebooks, and specialized writing software. Either way, the various technologies of writing become more significant when considering students with dysgraphia or other learning disabilities. Universal design means paying attention to these technologies and the way we use or introduce students to them in our writing classroom. Composition via typing is fairly standard in modern university culture, but for students with dysgraphia, it may be an essential accommodation, one we might accidentally undermine. As GSIs who are still learning to manage our students’ attention, we may be anxious about technology in the classroom, justly worrying about the distractions afforded by the internet. Since dysgraphia often occurs with ADHD, having judiciously chosen tech-free time can be of benefit to these students as much as any other. The key is to be intentional about the technology we use to have students write and to consider whether having alternative technologies might benefit the students.
Having students close laptops or put away phones can have an outsized impact on students with dysgraphia, and not just because of typing. Whether they have an official accommodation or not, these students may rely on a laptop to be able to take notes in class, either by typing or by recording audio. Since we are comfortable with written text, we might not think about audio dictation as a valid method of composition. While my brother started out in the early 2000s using expensive specialized software for his dictation, the rise of speech-to-text on smartphones means that this method of composition is now accessible to most.[6] However, without the explicit blessing of the instructor, students with dysgraphia may find it impossible to use dictation in a classroom environment without singling themselves out.
Non-digital in-class writing, such as rush-writes or brainstorming on paper to be handed in or traded with a peer, can cause anxiety or embarrassment for students who struggle with handwriting neatness or spelling.[7] Many dysgraphic students are worried about their writing being able to “pass as normal.” Even requiring students to share typed work composed in class may inadvertently “out” their issues with mechanics, conventions, or composition speed.
In-class writing is an important pedagogical tool that cannot be done away with without seriously impacting our ability to teach. However, a few modifications to our practice might help students with dysgraphia feel more comfortable. We might ask all students to experiment with composing via various methods, including dictation for an in-class writing assignment early in the semester, and then have them reflect on how different technologies affected their writing. Rather than asking students to exchange their written work, instructors could have them explain their ideas and experiences or ask them to read it to each other, allowing students to keep their spelling and mechanics private. When writing needs to be exchanged directly, we could provide advanced notice, such as a peer review that is listed on the course schedule, to give students with composition difficulties time to prepare their writing to a standard they feel comfortable sharing.
Principle #4—When possible, decouple the writing process from written production.
One of the most difficult parts of teaching first-year writing is encouraging students toward a writing process that allows time for planning and revision instead of a last-minute rush to meet a word-count requirement. Implementing progress milestones as class assignments has been one way I’ve been successful at opening up this space. It can seem simple to assess the state of a student’s current writing process by having them turn in a written document or summary, which can be quickly scanned over and checked off. Yet, there’s no inherent need for these assignments to contain a written component. The conceptual parts of writing can be difficult for dysgraphic students to engage in while also trying to produce legible, correctly spelled text.[8]
Process-oriented assignments, such as considering possible arrangements of research for a paper, completing a rush-write, or writing a reflection, could provide opportunities for instructors to allow dictated writing or recordings to be submitted, or possibly permit students substitute a meeting for a submitted product.[9] Classroom management software might allow students to turn in an audio recording of their current thesis, argument, or research progress, making the process almost as friction-free for the instructor as a written check-in.
New GSIs might also consider engaging in more “micro-conferencing” by assigning the class a specific revision task to work on while checking in with each student individually for a minute or two, in lieu of requiring the submission of a written product. This ability to report orally has been one of the main accommodations that has allowed my son to show more of what he knows rather than give a perfunctory written response.[10] At parent-teacher conferences, my son’s teachers were often flabbergasted by his low scores when his in-class interactions demonstrated that he understood the material. Speaking more frequently to our students about their ideas and composition process might mitigate the temptation to judge their knowledge from the end product of the writing process. Conferencing can help us differentiate between students who don’t understand what we are asking them to do and students who have difficulty implementing those ideas, whether for learning disabilities or for other reasons.
Principle #5—Provide as much direct instruction as you can.
As you may be learning from your pedagogy seminar, there are many different theoretical approaches to the instruction of writing. The current-traditional approach to composition—with its focus on helping students meet one “correct” standard of composition—sometimes gets derided in favor of other less didactic methods that encourage more freedom in student writing. It’s not currently popular to insist on academic American English or to spend a lot of classroom time on formulas for creating “correct” paragraph structure. There are many good arguments that an over-emphasis on a singular standard of academic writing is not only unhelpful but perhaps actively harmful to students.[11]
However, some of these justifications may leave out the needs of students with learning disabilities. For example, many neurotypical students are able to pick up advanced grammatical constructions by intuition and experience and then decide whether to apply those structures or use more diverse language patterns. However, students with learning disabilities need direct grammatical instruction to produce their own spoken languages in a written format. Without it, they are not making a rhetorical choice to write in a different way; they are restricted from having a choice to make.
Likewise, not teaching a specific “correct” method of paragraph organization opens up academic discourse to consider alternative ways of constructing knowledge, particularly from minority communities. However, it also leaves behind students whose working memory is occupied by the production of any written language, making it difficult for them to produce intentional organization of any kind. Research on secondary school students consistently highlights the importance of direct instruction for dysgraphic students.[12]
While I do not propose a complete return to current-traditional assessment with its condemning red editorial marks, our classrooms must balance the need for greater openness and diversity with the need to provide tools and formulas to students who will otherwise struggle to generate their own. A first-year writing classroom should employ a balanced approach, giving students specifically implementable strategies and tools alongside an understanding of the writing choices available to them. As new GSIs, fitting direct instruction and more exploratory writing practices into one course might seem overwhelming. Start small by including instruction on the tools and formulas you use in your own writing, as well as on common “errors” or difficulties you notice in your students’ writing. To be less didactic, consider asking students what grammar principles they want to learn or review and set aside a few days to address these. A balance between direct instruction and openness to diverse language patterns enables all students to make rhetorical choices about their language. I believe direct instruction can help all students, not just those with diagnosed writing deficits, to have more control over how they express themselves.
Principle #6—Run your classroom on “crip time.”
As a new GSI, I was very tempted to have very strict classroom policies, both to mitigate my meager sense of authority and to exert some control over the flow of the constant stream of papers in need of grading. However, as Birdwell and Bayley have suggested, many of the automatic failure conditions imposed in first-year writing classrooms target behavior that learning-disabled students cannot help, such as frequently missing class or failing to turn in assignments promptly. I encourage GSIs to borrow from disability studies the concept of “crip time”—the idea that giving disabled people more time or flexible deadlines to complete assignments is a matter of equity. [13] You might be resistant to offering more time to turn in essays, thinking “it [isn’t] fair to other students” (Wood 263). However, writing takes up more of the disabled student’s time than it does the neurotypical student.[14] Eliminating penalties for lateness, when possible, greatly increases the chances of success for students with dysgraphia, who often have to spend longer composing than neurotypical students.
Just last week, my son turned in a project proposal three hours late—during class rather than at the beginning of the school day. The perfect score his teacher gave him on the content he’d worked so hard to produce was automatically reduced to 70%, reflecting not his inability to produce the desired result but his inability to adhere to the typical time schedule. This semester, I have a student who has asked for a week’s extension on almost every written assignment. I’ve gladly assented to these extensions and have found that it’s not as big of a deal as I thought it would be. I’m rarely done grading the rest of the assignments before his submission comes in. While he sometimes uses the full extra week, often his assignments are in on time anyway; the extension merely provides needed relief from the pressure of the deadline.[15] We need to ask ourselves whether our commitment is to teach the principles of writing or the principles of promptness and executive function. Being extremely lenient with extensions and late work policies can be a way to show empathy for the executive function struggles that learning-disabled students experience.
Adapting our Mindset
I don’t think any of us go into our classrooms planning to put up roadblocks for students who struggle. Yet the assumptions we have as proficient writers can sometimes block us from seeing the obstacles that block our students. Hopefully, these principles can help illuminate some of the invisible challenges that exist specifically for students with dysgraphia; however, I think these ideas can be helpful to all students. I grieve when I think of how my brother struggled to have his pedagogical needs met at college. Writing will never be something that comes easily to him. Still, outside of college expectations, he’s found reasons to engage with it of his own volition—he’s now working on a webcomic inspired by Norse mythology. His organized charts of characters and potential plotlines display a positive regard for written text that college never taught him. I’m hopeful that by the time my son enters college, greater awareness of dysgraphia will have created an environment where he can succeed at writing because his instructors will see beyond his inherent challenges to a person with worthwhile thoughts. Hopefully, his instructors will be able to help him learn the tools he needs to bring his ideas to the world.
Works Cited
Alliance for Excellent Education, et al. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools. A Report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Alliance for Excellent Education, 1 Jan. 2007, www.all4ed.org.
Anderson, Kevin J. “Dictating, Writing, Hiking.” Kevin J. Anderson’s Blog, 9 Apr. 2010, https://kjablog.com/dictating-writing-hiking/.
Barber-Fendley, Kimber, and Chris Hamel. “A New Visibility: An Argument for Alternative Assistance Writing Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 55, no. 3, 2004, pp. 504–35.
Barnard-Brak, Lucy, et al. “Accommodation Strategies of College Students with Disabilities.” Qualitative Report, vol. 15, no. 2, Mar. 2010, pp. 411–29.
Birdwell, M. L. N., and Keaton Bayley. “When the Syllabus Is Ableist: Understanding How Class Policies Fail Disabled Students.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 49, no. 3, Mar. 2022, pp. 220–37.
Chung, Peter J., et al. “Disorder of Written Expression and Dysgraphia: Definition, Diagnosis, and Management.” Translational Pediatrics, vol. 9, no. Suppl 1, Feb. 2020, pp. S46–54. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.21037/tp.2019.11.01.
Conference on College Composition and Communication. “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 1974, pp. 1–32.
DaDeppo, Lisa M. W. “Integration Factors Related to the Academic Success and Intent to Persist of College Students with Learning Disabilities.” Learning Disabilities Research & Practice (Wiley-Blackwell), vol. 24, no. 3, Aug. 2009, pp. 122–31. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540–5826.2009.00286.x.
Feifer, Steven G. “Psychopathology of Disorders of Written Expression and Dysgraphia.” Psychopathology of Childhood and Adolescence: A Neuropsychological Approach, edited by Andrew S. Davis, Springer Publishing Company, 2013.
Hadley, Wanda. “The Four-Year College Experience of One Student with Multiple Learning Disabilities.” College Student Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 19–28.
Hadley, Wanda M. “The Transition and Adjustment to First-Year Students with Specific Learning Disabilities: A Longitudinal Study.” Journal of College Orientation, Transition, and Retention, vol. 17, no. 1, 1 Dec. 2009, https://doi.org/10.24926/jcotr.v17i1.2711.
Huijun Li, and Christine M. Hamel. “Writing Issues in College Students with Learning Disabilities: A Synthesis of the Literature from 1900 to 2000.” Learning Disability Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, Winter 2003, p. 29. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.2307/1593683.
Inoue, Asao B. “What Labor-Based Grading Contracts Look Like.” Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, 2nd edition, University Press of Colorado, 2023.
Kryger, Kathleen, and Griffin X. Zimmerman. “Neurodivergence and Intersectionality in Labor-Based Grading Contracts.” Journal of Writing Assessment, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020. Zotero, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0934x4rm.
McBride, Catherine. Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD: A Global Perspective. Routledge, 2019.
McCloskey, Michael, and Brenda Rapp. “Developmental Dysgraphia: An Overview and Framework for Research.” Cognitive Neuropsychology, vol. 34, no. 3/4, June 2017, pp. 65–82. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1369016.
Samuels, Ellen. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, 3 Aug. 2017, https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824.
Skinner, Michael E., and Bobbie D. Lindstrom. “Bridging the Gap Between High School and College: Strategies for the Successful Transition of Students With Learning Disabilities.” Preventing School Failure, vol. 47, no. 3, Spring 2003, p. 132. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/10459880309604441.
Tal-Saban, Miri, and Naomi Weintraub. “Motor Functions of Higher Education Students with Dysgraphia.” Research in Developmental Disabilities, vol. 94, Nov. 2019. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2019.103479.
Womack, Anne-Marie. “Teaching Is Accommodation: Universally Designing Composition Classrooms and Syllabi.” College Composition & Communication, vol. 68, no. 3, Feb. 2017, pp. 494–525, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc201728964.
Wood, Tara. “Cripping Time in the College Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017, pp. 260–86.
Wood, Tara, et al. “Moving Beyond Disability 2.0 in Composition Studies.” Composition Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2014, pp. 147–50.
[1] In 2010, “individuals with disabilities represent a population of college students that has tripled and by some estimates, quadrupled over the past twenty-five years” (Barnard-Brak et al. 411). As for dysgraphia itself, though you may not have heard of it before, it’s more common than you might think: “Between 10% and 30% of children experience difficulty in writing, although the exact prevalence depends on the definition of dysgraphia” (Chung et al. 47).
[2] Despite its presumed relevance, there is surprisingly little literature on dysgraphia in the college composition classroom. Barber-Fendley and Hamel’s summary of research on learning disabilities in relevant journals describes some of the symptoms of dysgraphia but never directly mentions it. Birdwell and Bayley’s article mentions dysgraphia, dyslexia, and dyscalculia, but fails to define dysgraphia as it does with the other two.
[3] This idea that strategies originally intended to compensate for a disability can actually benefit all students is called universal design. See Womack’s discussion of teaching as accommodation and her example of how universal design can make a syllabus more accessible to all students. Wood et al. also argues for this approach in “Moving Beyond Disability 2.0 in Composition Studies.”
[4] Michael McCloskey and Brenda Rapp’s overview of the current state of dysgraphia research is perhaps the best understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie dysgraphia symptoms. Unfortunately, they purposefully omit any examination of the parts of dysgraphia that pertain to “higher level writing skills, such as those involved in composing sentences and combining them into coherent texts” (65). Catherine McBride presents a more holistic perspective on dysgraphia in Routledge’s Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD: A Global Perspective.
[5] For more on the experience of learning disabled college students, see Skinner and Lindstrom; DaDeppo; Tal-Saban and Weintraub; W. M. Hadley; W. Hadley; and Huijun Li and Hamel.
[6] Of course, this isn’t an entirely new invention. Science fiction novelist Kevin J. Anderson has “dictated nearly fifty novels on an innumerable number of microcassettes, speaking the words aloud, rather than typing them into my word processor.” He often does this while hiking in national parks (Anderson).
[7] Though we often think of handwriting as an issue to be dealt with in primary school, considerations of fine motor issues are still important. These deficits do not disappear when students reach adulthood and still affect their daily functioning as college students (Tal-Saban and Weintraub; Rosenberg-Adler and Weintraub).
[8] I found some discussion of this idea in an article by Stephen G. Feifer, a professional in the learning disabilities space with a background in both school psychology and neuropsychology. He explains that junior high and high school students with dysgraphia benefit from a focus on what he calls “executive processing” in writing by separating out the roles of “author” and “secretary” (115–16).
[9] GSIs might follow McBride’s suggestion that, when possible, students ought to be “allowed to dictate (speech-to-text) . . . or report orally” (63).
[10] An article by Wood et al. suggests this idea from another angle. They believe that looking at writing and the writing process through the lens of disability may enhance all students’ understanding by providing diverse ways to accomplish a writing task. Perhaps the instructor can teach students about writing techniques while also learning from them what methods work with their unique thought processes. Such a classroom would lean more toward a process-oriented methodology, helping students to build a writing process that works for them.
[11] See the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s statement “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Also, consider the general lack of evidence on whether direct grammar instruction actually improves student writing.
[12] Steven G. Feiefer, a licensed psychologist and expert on learning disorders, including dysgraphia, suggests focusing on “remediating various aspects of executive functioning domains, thereby allowing the students to better organize, plan, sequence, and marshal attention resources” (117). We might do this by teaching specific strategies for managing the college writing process, especially for research papers. A study by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin found that the teaching methods that most helped struggling middle school writers improve were direct and didactic writing strategies as opposed to process-oriented approaches or content study (Alliance for Excellent Education et al.). For example, they list a specific paragraph construction strategy— “the TREE mnemonic”—which resembles the often-criticized five-paragraph essay, along with specific instruction in “how to summarize readings, chapters, and information in print,” and “specific, concrete, and achievable goals for student writing.” All of these practices are shown to significantly improve the quality of student compositions (table qtd. in Feifer 117). The dropping of this kind of explicit instruction in first-year writing might explain why dysgraphic students often feel abandoned and misunderstood by the university.
[13] In her article “Cripping Time in the College Composition Classroom,” Tara Wood notes that most time-based accommodations for students focus on test-taking, which doesn’t usually apply to first-year writing classrooms. In her qualitative study of disabled students, “many expressed a desire for flexibility with deadlines and with processes of writing, along with a resistance to timed writing” (Wood 264). To accommodate this resistance, we should consider not only assignment deadlines but also reducing the pressure to produce in-class writing under tight time constraints.
[14] Labor-based grading contracts, such as those suggested by Inoue, may also be valuable in taking the pressure off of learning-disabled students. However, GSIs may lack the institutional power to implement such changes, and some dysgraphic students may find tracking time to be an additional burden (Kryger and Zimmerman).
[15] An essay on crip time for Disability Studies Quarterly pointed out that disabilities can require extra time from students not only for the physical processes of completing a task, but also for the emotional labor of coping with being different in a world that doesn’t acknowledge their needs (Samuels). Offering more time is a simple way that instructors can create this space for students with dysgraphia.