4 Amy Wolgemuth Bordoni – Neurodiversity and the Influence Mental Processes Have on Composing Practices
Amy Wolgemuth Bordoni (She/Her) is a graduate student from St. Charles, Illinois and is completing a Master of Arts in English in order to teach at the post-secondary level. Amy is particularly interested in creative ways to address the challenges and needs in a neurodiverse classroom. This exploratory research paper was prepared for Jackie Kauza’s ENG W501, and she states, “Amy’s exploratory research on neurodiversity in first-year composition classes asks salient questions about how to support students with different needs and weighs whether standing best practices meet student needs.”
Neurodiversity and the Influence Mental Processes Have on
Composing Practices
In May of 2007, College English published a piece called “Neurodiversity” by Ann Jurecic, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. Not much had been published specifically on teaching writing to neurodivergent undergraduate students and Jurecic was struggling to know how to address the differing needs of a student she calls Gregory who she “diagnoses” as having Asperger’s syndrome (AS) after observing his interactions, traits, and struggles with normative instruction. Jurecic recognized a gap in the research on teaching composition and sought to make sense of her firsthand experience with neurodiversity in the writing classroom and provide some insight and guidance for others. Interestingly, responses to Jurecic’s piece in the years that followed—both directly and indirectly—challenge her position on and approach to addressing neurodiversity in the classroom and even question normalcy itself. In this paper, I’ll set out to explore the evolution of thinking on neurodiversity, specifically as it relates to autism spectrum disorders (ASD), how neurodiverse mental processes may influence composing practices, and what this means for our writing classrooms.
Today, approximately 15-20% of individuals in the U.S. are considered neurodivergent, meaning that the way their brains function is atypical from what’s considered “normal” (Endlich). Over the last 16 years I have come to understand what being part of this minority means in education as the mother of a neurodivergent child. Throughout public-school primary and secondary education, ASD students like my son receive support and accommodations through an individualized education plan (IEP). However, in college most autistic students remain unknown to professors as neurodivergent students with IEPs or special education services in high school do not typically register with disability services in college and receive no special accommodations or even acknowledgment (Endlich). Considering that nearly one fifth of the students in an undergraduate classroom may be neurodivergent, and understanding that the majority go unidentified, what is a writing teacher to do?
Shannon Walters notes that with most universities requiring first-year composition (FYC) for all students, the lack of research about transitioning and teaching neurodivergent students entering as undergraduates is “especially critical for ASD students in the first-year writing and composition classroom” (Walters 340). Like Jurecic, professors may rely on what they have heard or observed about ASD students to self-diagnose those who have not disclosed and then use medical frameworks and cognitive theories to try to accommodate different learning styles. But as Cynthia Lewicki-Wilson and Jay Dolmage write in their published comment on Jurecic’s piece, “in exerting so much energy to chase down a diagnosis for her student and to develop a steady theory of what autistic writing looks like…Jurecic fails to recognize, assess, or develop strategies to change her own pedagogical practice” (Lewicki-Wilson 316). By consciously (or even unconsciously) taking an ableist stance on difference—assuming that it is inherently bad or in need of fixing and making it “a rationale for disqualification and for predicting determined outcomes”—teachers “can impose their order and will on those they deem deviant” (315).
In Jurecic’s defense, much of the research on autism and ASD, particularly in the U.S., from the 1930s until just the last decade or so have nearly exclusively regarded neurodivergence as a disability where individuals need to be fixed, modified, or forced to conform to (or at least moved toward) normative standards. Most psychologists and neurologists based their research and theories about ASD solely on observation, second-hand reports, and medical data, believing the divergence from “normal” behavior and thinking to be psychosis or intellectual disability. Interestingly, in the early 1900s, doctors in Vienna thought differently. One of these was Hans Asperger who recognized that children in his care (who would later be identified as ASD) were not “flawed, broken, or sick,” but rather “were suffering from neglect by a culture that had failed to provide them with teaching methods suited to their individual styles of learning” (Silverman 84). Clinical psychologist Eric Endlich describes this as the social model of disability, “which argues that disability is not inherent in the person, but rather a condition created by an environment that is not sufficiently accommodating or supportive.” Lewicki-Wilson and Dolmage identify this radical thinking of “disability as social construction” as disability studies, not diminishing the fact that disabilities exist, but arguing that “meaning and values attributed to the disabled are enacted by the culture, not nature” (Lewicki-Wilson 315). Walters, too, weighs in, stating that “rather than understanding disabilities as problems to ‘fix’ in the classroom, a disability studies approach values the possibilities of disability” (Walters 342). In looking for these possibilities, several of the authors I read argue convincingly for going to the source: the neurodivergent students themselves.
In 2008, in another response to Jurecic’s “Neurodiversity” piece, English professor Paul Heilker noted that “we all are guilty of speaking, for, about, and through the people on the spectrum rather than with them” (Lewicki-Wilson 320). As the father of an autistic teen, he advocated for hearing from students on the spectrum in order to eliminate stereotypes and understand autism as a diversity issue, positing that autistic students should be included in the Committee on CCCC Language Statement “Student’s Right to Their Own Language” from 1975. Heilker quotes from this statement, saying that claiming the idea of autism as a diversity issue would “affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style” (Lewicki-Wilson 320). Four years later, Heilker published another piece with an autistic PhD student Melanie Yergeau that extended this idea further, reframing autism as “a rhetoric, a way of being in the world through language” (488) and ultimately asks the reader to consider why neurotypical is the more desirable or ideal way of being. Through both research and personal anecdote, the authors recast autistic traits like shifting conversation topics without warning, identifying connections between texts that others don’t see, echolalia or repeating stock words and phrases, and even silence as meaningful forms of rhetoric. They note that by thinking about autism as a rhetoric we can re-envision what have historically been called language deficits as language differences.
Walters also calls for rhetorical listening to prioritize and value the insights, recommendations, and requests of ASD students to learn how they see themselves and what they need to excel. She interviews two college students who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome about their transition from high school to college, specifically in the first-year writing and composition classroom. Through these detailed firsthand accounts, Walters shows how important it is to put aside stereotypes about students with ASD having social deficits and see their literacies as social and socially meaningful. Although the students in her research did not appear neurotypically social, they both were very interactive writers, fully engaged in writing as a social activity and “forged their own definition of what it means to be a neurodiverse writer” (353). Walters found that writing pedagogy based on processes and stages—prewriting, writing, rewriting— didn’t work well for these ASD students because most of their composing happened in their minds. They also did better when focusing on a single topic of interest in one longer assignment than writing about multiple topics that were of little or no interest. Generative themes or lists were helpful as well as flexible due dates to reduce time constraints.
In a qualitative research study, Tara Wood interviewed 35 students with disabilities asking for their perspectives and experiences on disability, access, and college writing in order to “interpret and expose the normative underpinnings of college writing pedagogy” (263) and found that the topic of time emerged in all student responses. Students, as she puts it, “whose bodies and minds don’t adhere to expectations for commonplace pace” (261) can be disenfranchised by assumptions in the writing classroom that everyone can abide compulsory measures of time. In response, Wood reconceives time in college writing classrooms, which she calls “crip time.” The idea of cripping time in composition pedagogy is borrowed from a concept in disability culture that means adopting a flexible approach to normative time frames. Wood specifically addresses timed writing, writing assignments and their strictly defined durations, and conflicts of time, and ultimately concludes that teachers need to be more flexible with the boundaries of time that define writing inside and outside the classroom. Through student voices, she finds that cripping time by “increasing flexibility, avoiding rigidity, and lowering the stakes of writing (particularly in the beginning stages of a course) can alleviate anxiety among neurodiverse students” (270). Echoing Heilker, Yergeau and Walters, Wood emphasizes that “pedagogical designs should be negotiated with disabled students” (278) and offers crip time to encourage teachers to “start thinking about how normativity may be privileged in some of the most commonplace pedagogical practices of a given writing classroom” (281).
In 2023, Jacquie Ballantine and four co-authors (three of them autistic) published a qualitative study with autistic university students and autistic and nonautistic instructors to “make space for different ways of communicating in all modalities” and “make writing education more accessible for all” (138). Through composite narrative portraits developed with the data, rich and complex “personal stories” resulted. The authors summarized the commonalities in these portraits as “sensory sensitivities, anxiety, expansive reading habits, and love of detailed information” (146). I also noted an intense dislike for small talk, a propensity for facts, challenges organizing, and difficulties with real-time processing in spoken conversations. These firsthand responses suggest to me that neurodiverse writing classrooms may be best supported through clearly stated expectations, including rubrics, organizational structures, written discussions rather than verbal conversations, quiet spaces, fact-based assignments, and crip time. The authors also documented that “students believed that written assignment prompts, clearly defined rubrics, and emails were very important to their academic success” and “written transcripts or subtitled videos were very helpful in understanding what was expected of them” (148).
Clearly, as we are hearing from ASD students themselves, a wider-ranging change in approach to composing practices and writing process is needed to address what is inevitably a neurodiverse student population in every FYC class. Heilker and Yergeau suggest we “unlearn everything we think we have learned about autistics, who, as a group, are about as amorphous and diverse as neurotypicals” (496). In other words, we are all neurodiverse and highly individual and trying to force sameness and upholding rigidity in our classrooms won’t be successful. Thankfully we have some guidance from students themselves due to the work of Walters, Heilker and Yergeau, Wood, and Ballantine et al. With insights into the experiences of neurodiverse students, we can begin to better understand and support all students in our writing classrooms. But there is more work to do to fully embrace neurodivergence as a diversity issue and not only accommodate all different kinds of learners and mental processes in our writing classrooms but learn from them as well. As recently as 2023, Ballantine and her co-authors were asking, “Are academic institutions ready to accept neurodivergent, transformative pedagogies and distinct ways of communicating knowledge rather than try to guide autistic and other neurodivergent students to behave (and think and write) in normative nonautistic ways?” (153) This suggests to me that research into universities that are embracing autism and other neurodivergent ways of being in the world as diversity rather than disability could be highly beneficial and help spark a movement to more broadly transform writing pedagogy across campuses and classrooms, for the benefit of all.
Works Cited
Ballantine, Jacquie, Natasha Artemeva, Jess Rocheleau, Jasmin Macarios, and George Ross. “A Distinct Rhetoric: Autistic University Students’ Lived Experiences of Academic Acculturation and Writing Development.” College English, Vol. 86, No. 2, 2023, pp.136-161.
Endlich, Eric. “Neurodiversity in College Admissions.” Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA), https://www.iecaonline.com/quick-links/ieca-news-center/insights-newsletter/insights-summer-2022/neurodiversity-in-college-admissions.
Heilker, Paul and Melanie Yergeau. “Autism and Rhetoric.” College English, Vol. 73, No. 5, 2011, pp. 485-497.
Jurecic, Ann. “Neurodiversity.” College English, Vol. 69, No. 5, 2007, pp. 421-442.
Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia, Jay Dolmage, Paul Heilker and Ann Jurecic. “Two Comments on ‘Neurodiversity’.” College English, Vol. 70, No. 3, 2008, pp. 314-325.
Silberman, Steve. Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. Avery/Penguin Random House, 2105.
Walters, Sharon. “Toward a Critical ASD Pedagogy of Insight: Teaching, Researching, and Valuing the Social Literacies of Neurodiverse Students.” Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2015, pp. 340-360.
Wood, Tara. “Cripping Time in the College Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, Vol.69, No. 2, 2017, pp. 260-286.