Price: "What Do You Need?"
"Irrational" (read: non-normative) Students in the Composition Classroom
- Teachers opening up space for each and all students to voice their needs
- A space of negotiation
- Digital and/or face-to-face feedback from peers and teachers
- Anonymous and/or identified work for classroom dialogue
- Multi-modal and/or more "traditional" projects
- "Crip time" for the delays, limitations and constraints that might arise during the writing process
- Teachers' always critically reflexive about their expectations for student "presence" (read: norms and rules of "appropriateness" for classroom behaviors and speaking)
- Radical tolerance
- Rhetorical Listening
- "Reason Dazzled" approach to writing for not only neuroatypical students, but for all.
What Can be Done in the Composition Classroom to Make Space for the Legitimization of "Irrational" / Non-Normative Students?
- "Irrational" -- Non-Normative--Foucault's Reason Dazzled
- Price wants to open up space in the Composition classroom for students with mental disabilities to voice their needs
- [But...] everyone has a mental health....
- Psychosocial (read: psychological effects of being a social agent--racialized/ gendered/ classed subject)
Who is the "Irrational" Student
- Thought about in terms of "Irrationality" --by both teachers and peers
- Disappointing and/or deviant in light of the dominant discourse (read: in light of hegemonic prescriptions for normalcy), its conventions and dialect
- The troubles with continuing to name non-normative students' identities in terms of race, gender, class....in our scholarship
"Irrational" Students:
The Rhetorical Black Hole
Margaret Price
- Rhetorical Black Hole
- Rhetorically Disabled
- "We speak from positions that are assumed to be subhuman, even non-human; and, therefore, when we speak our words go unheeded [...] presumed not to be competent, nor understandable, nor valuable, nor whole" (Mad at School 26).
Presumptions: Students of Reason and Rationality, Students who "Speak well"
Price
- Berlin's New Rhetoric
- Student is encouraged to "order and make sense" of her reality' (Mad at School 39).
- Price asks, what about rhetors "whose worlds may not be simply marked by, but composed of, ways of knowing fundamentally invested in dis/order and non/sense"?
- Critical Pedagogies and Process Pedagogies
- "sharing" and "dialogue", rhetorical listening
- How does this work to exclude students' whose classroom "presence,' speaking, writing, work to figure them in terms of irrationality?