English 568: Topics in Composition: On Access, Accessibility, and Writing
(cross-listed with Disability Studies 535).
This class begins with the question of writing (or composing, to use a different term that helps unlink some associations that “writing” has with alphabetic literacy) and its relationship(s) to access and accessibility. How and in what ways is writing (in)accessible? What does it mean to write and compose accessibly? How can we use our writing and composing skills as a means of contributing to projects of accessibility? These are huge, complicated questions, and they are even more fraught when considering the many ways that questions about access and accessibility do not have straightforward answers or resonances even among people who may share access needs or disability experiences.
In this course we will think together about what it means to center disability and to design for access and accessibility. We will also consider how theories for writing and composing can help us deepen our enactment of accessible practices and pedagogies. Because composition has long been a field closely associated with teaching (although that connection is shifting as the field continues to grow and reshape itself in myriad ways), we will often return to questions of pedagogy and pedagogical praxis, but we will also take up questions about publishing and how texts circulate–in academia as well as in public and community-based contexts.
The quarter is divided into four approximately 2-week long units, with the final two weeks of class reserved for collectively designing a peer workshopping space for final projects as well as a concluding “end of quarter take-away” celebration event that may or may not be open to folks outside of our classroom community (depending on collective class decision-making/design) on our last day of class.
Unit 1: “Situating Composition and Disability Studies + Embodiment and Writing”;
Unit 2: “Multimodal Composing, Design, and Access/Accessibility”;
Unit 3: “Composing to Enact Access/Accessibility” (captions, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, audio description, plain language, collaboration);
Unit 4: “Circulation, Materiality, and Making Composing/Texts Accessible.”
Throughout the quarter, we will use writing and composing as a means of engaging and deepening our thinking. Specifically, students will take turns leading class discussion(s)/activities (likely in pairs); will produce weekly/regular/in-class compositions that explore and connect with course texts and individual/emerging research interests; and will collaborate to build a collectively-accessible classroom environment practicing with concepts, tools, and resources we are learning and discussing together.
As a final project, students will research and design/produce an intervention of some sort that problematizes, complicates, deepens, and/or engages accessibility within a space/environment/text/intellectual space(discipline?) of their choosing. The projects will engage with disability, access and accessibility as core concepts animating their composition and emergence.
- What does accessibility mean in this space/place/environment/text/intellectual space?
- What dimensions / elements of access and accessibility are centered in different forms surrounding this text?
- How does the text’s means of production/composition/emergence into being matter to its accessibility?