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Literature on Students with Learning Disabilities in the BW Classroom

When working with students who have an LD, it is important to consider what has been said before and to look briefly at previous literature discussing the issues inherent in teaching in this area. It is important to note that most of this literature did not appear until after the 1980s. Li Huijun and Christine Hamel, in their own review of the literature up until this time contend that during this time “more and more students with LD were entering college and thus enrolling in composition courses and laboring through written assignments (29)” as Huijun and Hamel point out, these students were most likely to encounter teachers who were not likely to have experience in working with their learning disabilities, either in identifying said disability or in helping students to develop ways to work through them.

This lack of literature at the time presented problems for teachers, largely because, as Carolyn O’Hearn pointed out, “the relative absence of scholarship in this area is indeed unfortunate because composition is crucially important to the success or failure of the college student (O’Hearn qtd in Hamel and Huijun, 29).”

This success or failure heavily impacts LD students, because as Amy Milsom points out the percentage of students with learning disabilities who have entered or graduated from college since 1989 is 53 percent as opposed to 64 percent of the general population (Milsom, 436). She also adds that without college, many students with learning disabilities are likely to ‘end up working in low paying jobs with few benefits and little job security (Milsom, 436)”. Because Basic Writing courses are so important in determining College success, it is easy to see why it is important for LD students to succeed in them.

When it comes to helping students to succeed, it is important that teachers know what to do and suggest to help their students who often do not know themselves. Heather Hartman-Hall and David Haaga are quick to point out that “only a minority (Hartman-Hall and Haaga, 263)” of college students with a learning disability seek out academic support services offered by universities. Because these students are in the minority, sometimes it becomes the teacher’s job to point these resources out to those students who are having problems, despite the fact that, as Carolyn O’Hearn points out, “Composition teachers with learning disabled students in their classes, “often find themselves nonplused by the apparently inexplicable inability of those students to perform writing tasks that seem to them to be so simple (O’Hearn, 295).”

When these teachers find these students to be having problems, O’Hearn urges that they look beyond their first impressions of the student and to put them in touch with the proper resources such as those offered at most universities, pointing out that it is “an abdication of professional responsibility (O’Hearn, 301)” to allow the learning disabled student to simply flounder in their class and to allow them to fail unassisted. She also points out that it is important for composition teachers to remember that students do not submit error filled essays out of spite and urges for these teachers both to remember this fact and to help their students as required.