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Writing is a personal, academic, professional and civic rhetorical act that is used to learn, communicate, create, criticize and change by negotiating views among diverse writers and readers. While writing is a rich mode of learning, it can be difficult for writers. In particular, students with physical and mental challenges may experience unique and intensified difficulties.
In the following pages, we will provide resources for instructors and tutors that highlight potential processes in our writing classrooms and tutoring environments that might be disabling. While many definitions of disability revolve around physical and mental limitations, we prefer to define disability as social, political, economic, and institutional barriers that may be removed by instructors who employ universal design principles in their teaching.
In this context, we have developed possibilities for accommodations. In each case, we contend that these accommodations are beneficial for all students because of the attention to multi-modal learning styles.
These pages should be useful for writing instructors and tutors at the University of Arizona for they will provide background information on physical and mental challenges and materials for accommodations that follow universal design for instruction principles. The materials correspond to our first-year sequence curriculum but can be useful for instructors in all of our writing classes.
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