Resourcesful News, Issue 9

George Yancy
Originally published on April 11, 2023, for Truthout.org
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission

What would it feel like for educators to truly reject the implicit positioning of whiteness and ability at the center of the teaching and learning that takes place in the United States? To do that, education professor Subini Annamma says, “we must consider all parts of our classrooms including pedagogy, curriculum and relationships.”

Annamma, the author of The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/abled Girls of Color in the School-Prison Nexus, encourages all of us to take a deeper look at how different modes of oppression operate in our world, and by doing so, compels us to reimagine what is possible in a world where suffering is dire.

As an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, Annamma works at the intersections of how students are negatively marked through a network of oppressive forces: racism, ableism, sites of incarceration, hegemonic forms of pathologization and criminalization.

Talking with Annamma has deepened my own reflection on how much of my work within the context of racism and anti-Blackness has focused on the experiences of Black men. This is partly a function of my own identity as a cisgender Black man. I write from that social location, that embodied place of being. I am under no illusions that in various ways I have failed to critically theorize and engage complex discourses vis-à-vis Black women/girls, especially those Black women/girls who contend with multiple forms of oppression. For me, this means that work must be done.

Annamma’s work passionately tackles those forces that Black girls and girls of color face as they struggle to find meaning in a world that sees them as inconsequential and invisible. For Annamma, anger, hope and abolition are not separate, but work in conjunction to infuse the structure and energy of political praxis and the aspiration for a more joyful world.

George Yancy: I would like to ask a question about your work within the fascinating area of disability studies (DS) and critical race theory (CRT)—what is known as DisCrit. What are some of the important generative assumptions embedded within DisCrit critical analysis? What sorts of insights are deployed within DisCrit that neither disability studies nor critical race theory alone provide? In short, what are some of the conceptual affordances of DisCrit?

Subini Annamma: Before I came to the academy, I was a special education teacher for youth with emotional and learning disabilities in public schools and youth carceral facilities. My students were mostly Black and Brown kids who were funny and thoughtful and yet often struggled in school. I had high school students who were said to have a first-grade reading level, yet could read all the directions on the video games they played; students who were said to have no self-control at school but had after-school jobs or took care of their siblings. I worked with Black and Brown students who were said to have criminal minds, but who showed compassion to their chosen families and themselves daily. I found Black and Brown disabled kids were incarcerated because they were trying to survive the interpersonal and systemic violence they experienced.

But when I got to graduate school and when I reflected on my training as a teacher, I could not locate these brilliant Black and Brown disabled kids in education research. When they were present, the perspectives that researchers brought were often saturated in deficit perspectives, pathologizing Black and Brown disabled youth. I struggled to find their voices represented. That doesn’t mean no one was doing that work, but it certainly does mean these Black and Brown disabled kids were not the center of most education research. I was drawn to critical race theory and disability studies because that is where I got glimpses of youth at the margins—Black and Brown kids were at the center of CRT in education work, disabled kids were at the center of DS literature on education.

What I found was that CRT legal scholars—like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, just to name a few—identified how racism was created to categorize and subordinate racial “others” while gathering ideological and material power for whiteness. Of course, they were drawing on a lineage of knowledge from folks such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglas, and [others], and used legal concepts to build out CRT’s tenets. Education scholars Gloria Ladson Billings and William Tate (and then other foundational CRT in education scholars like Delores Delgado-Bernal, Zeus Leonardo, Theodorea Berry, Marvin Lynn, Adrienne Dixson, Daniel Solórzano, David Gillborn, Laurence Parker, David Stovall, and [others]) recognized how racism and white supremacy became entrenched in education to support the hoarding of resources and opportunities.

DisCrit grew from the CRT commitment to intersectionality that was academically born in Crenshaw’s work—though its lineage reaches back to Anna Julia Cooper, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, and a host of others throughout history and into the present—and substantively developed through critical race feminism through work by thinkers like Adrienne Wing and others. This recognition of how multiple oppressions, not simply identities, impacted the lives of multiply-marginalized Black and Brown people expanded CRT’s theoretical and analytical reach. All this knowledge was the necessary starting point for CRT’s sibling, DisCrit.

DisCrit was born out of the lineage of knowledge that includes all mentioned above and also disability studies and critical disability in education scholars including Nirmala Erevelles, Alfredo Artiles, Beth Ferri, James M. Patton, Alicia Broderick, David Connor, Federico Waitoller, Kathleen King-Thorius, Edward Fergus, Susan Baglieri, Catherine Kudlick and Chris Bell, again to name just a few. These scholars were naming the ways ableism animated who we center as the “normal,” and how we draw boundaries around that conception of normal, and punish those outside those walls. In schools, we seek out youth we position as “abnormal” and try to cure, segregate or funnel them out of public spaces.

And of course, DisCrit wasn’t born just out of knowledge produced by the academy, but also the labor of activists and public intellectuals including Patti Berne, Ki’tay Davidson, Alice Wong, Heather Watkins, Vilissa Thompson, Leroy Moore, Anita Cameron, Keith Jones, Lydia Brown, Mia Mingus, T.L. Lewis, Dustin Gibson, Mia Ives-Rublee, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and [others], who all have led the way in a variety of work centering those most impacted, disabled Black and Brown people.

Those intellectual ancestors, both those who have passed on and those still with us, created a space for DisCrit to recognize that racism and ableism are interdependent, that they depend on and inform each other. That is, if racism is the ideology for situating specific people in subordinated locations, then ableism is how that goal is achieved—by situating the learning, thinking, and behaviors of Black and Brown people as “less than” and “inferior.” Racism and ableism are mutually constitutive because they need each other to survive; whiteness needed to “other” Black and Brown people, and did so through ableism.

Both CRT and DS scholars and public intellectuals left space for us to do this work; to seriously consider how racism and ableism inform one another and are normalized, not aberrant in society. DisCrit uses specific tenets to build on this conceptual foundation to name how, in a system of white supremacy, anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, whiteness defines the normal and desired individual; and positions all Black and Brown folks as abnormal.

Further, while all Black and Brown folks are impacted by racism and ableism, disabled Black and Brown people are targeted for labeling, surveillance and punishment. Yet they do not simply accept the ways they are pathologized; Black and Brown disabled people resist individually and collectively. DisCrit opened a space for my disabled Black and Brown students to not only exist, but [to] position them as knowledge generators, linking them to that lineage of resistance.

What you’ve provided here functions as a veritable primer for understanding the origins of DisCrit. Since I began teaching, I have taught at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). There is so much critical pedagogical work to do within those spaces. There are such concerns as curriculum change and representation, diversity and inclusion, hiring and retaining BIPOC faculty, forms of white racist microaggression, and the racialization of space and how spaces within colleges and universities function (consciously or not) to support white bodies. Speak to DisCrit’s contributions to critically engaging pedagogy, especially within those contexts where there are both explicit and implicit white/Eurocentric ableist forms of knowledge production.

Knowledge production, pedagogy, and ways of knowing have always been legitimated through white supremacy and ableism used those avenues to marginalize and target disabled Black and Brown students. The goal of DisCrit has always been to move disabled Black and Brown students from the margins to the center.

A DisCrit Classroom Ecology is about rejecting whiteness and ability as the center of our teaching and learning. To do that, we must consider all parts of our classrooms, including pedagogy, curriculum and relationships. So, I think, often we highlight critical curriculum, and that’s essential. Questioning how power is reproduced in society and how that power is entrenched in white supremacy, anti-Blackness and settler colonialism is in the work of Ethnic Studies, hip-hop, culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Yet with critical curriculum and pedagogy that are engaging, we still must make them accessible and refuse relationships rooted in management. For me, this pedagogy involves making complex curricular ideas accessible (e.g., videos, Tik-Toks, zines, traditional journal articles, popular articles, poetry); creating multiple ways into the work; and developing multiple formats for assignments (participation looks like the virtual chat; work in small groups; written, drawn and verbal responses). And relationships must be rooted in solidarity with my students, their struggles and their resistance. So, in my classroom, this is enacted by providing time to check in, giving space to be their full selves, having students reflect on what is working and what can be improved, and letting them come and go when they need while checking in individually if they are showing up differently than what I know they can do. Of course, the work of critically engaging DisCrit Classroom Ecology is not prescriptive, and can only be done with humility. Ultimately, we must recognize that our multiply-marginalized disabled Black and Brown students know things that educators do not.

What I especially like about DisCrit is its multidisciplinary mode of analysis. Social existence, as we know, is so incredibly messy and its complexity is not explanatorily exhausted by a single disciplinary vision. Understanding this complexity, please speak to how mass incarceration is a disability justice issue.

I know you’ve engaged in a discussion with the brilliant T.L. Lewis, and they have described how mass incarceration is a disability justice issue. So I’ll focus on how mass incarceration is a racial and disability justice issue because it targets disabled Black and Brown youth specifically. In other words, age does not protect disabled Black and Brown children because they are not imagined as innocent (what Black women and other women of color scholars, such as Jamilia Blake and Thalia González, have named as adultification) and they are also imagined as hyper-strong and aggressive. Instead, disabled Black and Brown kids are targeted and punished because of their disabilities. Moreover, Black and Brown youth are disabled by prison conditions, which cause trauma. Family separation through incarceration—whether in the name of rehabilitation, child welfare or mental health care—are all forms of punishment for perceived deviance. The abuse and neglect in these systems is well documented. We lock up what we are afraid of—if justice is what love looks like in public, then mass incarceration is hate institutionalized. And in the worst cases, our babies die in these hate-filled cages, babies like Cedric “C.J.” Lofton, Loyce Tucker, Cornelius Frederick, Gynnya McMillen, Elord Revolte, Andre Sheffield, Robert Wright, and more unnamed babies. Or they die while being rounded up to be put in these cages like Ma’Khia Bryant, Tamir Rice, Iremamber Skyap, Adam Toledo, and [others]. Mass incarceration is a racial and disability justice issue for Black and Brown disabled youth because it targets and creates disability, all while trying to eradicate their power and resistance.

I would like you to elaborate on the prior question through the specific lens of girls of color within the context of public schools. I’m thinking here of your book, The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/abled Girls of Color in the School-Prison Nexus. Speak to the specific ways in which girls of color are “framed” (pun intended) within racist and ableist pedagogical philosophies and practices.

Black and Brown disabled girls have a unique experience because they have been erased from the narratives of what is not working in schools. The focus on the numbers of Black boys who are being disenfranchised by schools—which is necessary and useful—can situate Black and Brown girls as successful and thriving by default, when that is often not the case. Black and Brown girls are experiencing high rates of suspensions, arrests and incarceration compared to white girls and some boys. Moreover, disabled Black and Brown girls are experiencing higher rates of these negative outcomes than their nondisabled peers. When these disabled Black and Brown girls are abused by the system and their stories become public, their disabilities are often erased. We imagine them as what scholar Michele Goodwin discusses as “too intersectional,” when their disability or queerness is viewed as something to disassociate them from, trying to cleave their identities into something closer to the norm. Yet, this misses the fact that these Black and Brown girls are being punished because of their disabilities, and that disability labels and laws are not protecting them. We must recognize that Black and Brown disabled girls are not broken, our systems are broken. Carceral geographies threaten Black and Brown disabled girls. We must respond by loving Black and Brown girls in their full humanity.

I want to end with what you envision as hope. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, I am not hopeless, but I am unhopeful regarding the racist attitudes, racist practices, racist habits, racist ideologies and racist structures within the U.S. This includes how racism toxically lives intramurally or extramurally, and this includes how racism functions through ableism—or conversely, how ableism functions through racism. This is another way of saying that racism exists within every nook and cranny of U.S. society. I can’t begin to express how angry I feel as I write about racism and other forms of injustice. This anger is not misplaced, and it has its place. You’ve worked as an educator in both youth prisons and public schools. You’ve been able to observe directly how forms of discipline negatively impact girls of color, how they suffer under panoptic surveillance and pathologizing discourses. I can only imagine that they have internalized such racist and pathologizing forms of captivity. How do you find hope in what you do without being seduced by a neoliberal sense of hope that fails or refuses to think critically about systems of racism and pathology? Does anger help?

For Black and Brown people, our anger is the antithesis of white supremacy and ableism that centralizes docility and compliance masquerading as kindness and civility. I draw from Audre Lorde who wrote about the uses of anger and Brittney Cooper who writes about eloquent rage. Lorde describes the power of our anger when it is focused with precision on the systems that harm us. So, I try to focus my anger on dismantling those systems, like the abolition of youth prisons, and all prisons. I draw from Mariame Kaba who reminds us to practice hope regularly; I practice hope by being in relationship with disabled Black and Brown youth, many of whom are being pushed out of public schools, and/or are currently or formerly incarcerated. I work to support our community as we labor in violent systems. We can create a world that is less violent, more humane, and even joyful. I believe in abolition, so my anger and hope are rooted in the ways I show up, I experiment and fail, and keep showing up to be in community with Black and Brown disabled youth. And those Black and Brown disabled youth are constantly pushing me to be more radical, to develop a clearer abolitionist imaginary. That is hope.

Hope is recognizing how our fights are all connected and cultivating solidarity. The attacks on trans that are so prevalent right now are built on ableism, misogynoir and white supremacy. Therefore, we must be in solidarity with our queer and trans siblings. One study found that 20 percent of youth in detention centers identified as queer and trans: 13 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls. Eighty-five percent of these incarcerated queer and trans girls are girls of color. Trans and queer youth of color often stay longer in family policing systems (known as child welfare) and juvenile incarceration systems, increasing the likelihood of negative impacts of both systems. Queer and trans Black and Brown youth deserve our solidarity and our protection. These same systems are harming Black and Brown disabled kids; our struggles are connected, and liberation means fighting together. Solidarity, the kind where we recognize our common fights and allow our differences in oppressions and experiences to inform our resistance, is what gives me hope.

Also exciting is the work of my contemporary colleagues and earlier career scholars, public intellectuals and activists who are also thinking critically about race and disability while not stopping there, like Jamelia Morgan, Mildred Boveda, Hailey Love, Maggie Beneke, Jenn Phuong, Tami Handy, Adai Teferra, Ericka Weathers, Sami Schalk, Jina B. Kim, Therí Pickens, Liat Ben-Moshe, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Keah Brown, Akiea Gross, D’Arcee Charington Neal, plus a whole host of students who are doing it better than us. They are thinking with less binaries and more interconnected systems. They are more radical and hopeful. And those of us who are developing a sharper analysis because we are listening to them, filling in gaps of our work we missed the first time around. I wanted a theory that centralized the lives of Black and Brown disabled youth, and DisCrit is what grew. DisCrit isn’t the best theory, it’s the one we created when we needed something better. We have always said we want to see it expanded and pushed until its borders break open and something better is born. That’s the beautiful thing about theory, it must continually evolve. As long as we are listening to Audre Lorde and focusing our rage with precision, our theory will evolve to meet us in the moment.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Leonardo "Leo" Zamora (he/him) is a Psychology student at Lesley University and an advocate for mental dignity and health in his home country, Venezuela. He has a special focus on the power of love as a force for social and climate justice. He is also passionate about botany and a self-taught artist and illustrator. In this interview he explores diagnosis, identity, and the power of special interests.

How do you like to explain your neurodivergence to others?

First of all, I was recently diagnosed with autism, that's literally the name, right? So that would be my neurodivergence. But also I was thinking that autism can be such a broad spectrum, right? Autism can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. I would like to say, perhaps, “What does autism look like on me?” You know, based on my own experience with it and all of this.

So maybe we can go back to my childhood when I was obsessed with nature and documentaries. Of course my parents were kind of proud of it, right? Because it's like, “Oh my god, our son is a scientist.” All the other kids were watching cartoons and Discovery Kids. I was watching full-on Discovery Channel or Animal Planet.

I was so obsessed with nature and wildlife. Particularly  there was a point at which I was obsessed with butterflies. Also insects in general, but I think butterflies were my favorites. My mom would agree that my favorite was butterflies, specifically the monarch butterfly. There was this documentary that my parents downloaded for me, and I would watch it every day. I knew the whole life cycle of monarch butterflies, the travel that they do, all of these things, and I would rehearse their whole life cycle to anybody.

That was what  autism looked like for me from an early age. On the other hand, there were other parts that were not as nice. I was very emotional as a child—maybe too emotional. I was very emotionally reactive in the sense that minimal things would trigger a tantrum or an emotional breakdown and I would start crying.

For example, you know a paper plane, when you throw it? It would hit the wall or whatever and then the tip would twist a little bit. I would just lose it with that. I always started crying and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s ruined. It doesn't work anymore.” My mom would be like, “No, look, it works.”  And she would straighten the tip. “It works!” It would still fly, but just that aspect of it, I would be like, “No, it's ruined, it doesn't work, I'm going to do another one.”

That's just one example, you know? My mom says as kid I had a very low emotional tolerance. I would get very frustrated very easily. In general there was this emotional dysregulation, right? So that's the other side of it.

Also, in a way that’s more representative of autism, I had a lot of difficulties with social interactions. Throughout elementary school, I studied in another city, so I didn't really make friends. Normally if you study close to home, you also make friends and meet peers there that live close by. Then you are able to hang out when you are out of school and everything. But I wasn't able to do that because my peers from school lived in another city. So I was isolated in a way. The peers that I met in school and that I was friends with in school weren’t close to where I lived, so we weren’t able to hang out as much. Most of my childhood friends were my cousins—they did live very close by—and also adults, like my parents’ friends and all the adults that were around me.

That is one reason why perhaps I was diagnosed late—the social interactions that I was having were with adults and my cousins, but mostly adults. Perhaps if I were interacting with peers my age, my autism would’ve been more evident. In school, it was also kind of difficult for me to find a group of friends, so that's also something. Even with the peers that I would interact with in despite of the external elements of my social life, like living away from school and being surrounded by mostly adults, my social interactions would fail. I often ended up being bullied or excluded because I found things that others found interesting to be boring and vice versa. There was very little common ground in a way.

What is the most challenging part of being a neurodivergent college student?

I think there are several things. One of them—perhaps you don't need to be neurodivergent to agree with this—is you have to take courses that you don't really want to take. I say that within this context because as an autistic person I have very restricted interests. It's like, “Okay, well, there are a lot of courses in the general education curriculum that do not necessarily fall into my interests.”

You know, if it were my choice, I would take psychology courses and courses about nature and ecology and things like that. But I cannot, and I have to take courses like English Composition. I ended up enjoying that, but yeah, I think that it is sometimes challenging. There have been courses that I just had to take, even if I had no interest at all and even if it was hard for me to concentrate to focus on the readings.

But I also think that in college and education in Western society there is this legacy of industrialization in which you have to endure the most amount of things that cause the most distress. If you are able to do that then you are worth a degree or you are worth payment or whatever. I think that that really comes back to the legacy of industrialization, which is not disabled people friendly. A lot of college education and education in general is like, “You have to do this and that,” maybe not because it's going to help you grow as a person or as a professional but because it is just a way to test you, to see how functional you are in society, and that's not friendly for disabled folks.

How does your neurodivergence intersect with other aspects of your identity?

In addition to being neurodivergent, which, to a degree, is disabling, I'm also queer and Hispanic. I also struggle with all of these things, and there are places in which the three things intersect. For example, I mask because I am neurodivergent, but I also mask because I’m queer. Nonbinary and trans and queer people in general tend to mask, just while existing, just as autistic people do. For autistic and queer people that's another level of masking.

Even if I am not masking my autistic traits, maybe I'm masking my queerness. I'm talking about my life years ago when I was not in such an open sort of environment. Right now I'm in more of a safe place and I feel safer to express my queerness, at least.

But it is very true that it is not a conscious thing to do, to mask, right? So it is kind of hard not to mask. Even if I feel safe and I recognize that it is okay that I'm autistic and I accept my autistic traits, I have been literally trained by society to mask, you know? That's one way in which they intersect. Another way in which they intersect has to do with me being Venezuelan. The situation in Venezuela is terrible right now. The humanitarian crisis, the political situation, the economic instability, and all of those things. I could also add that during most of my life I lived in a very low-income environment. I could add being poor.

One way in which that also intersects with my autism is, well, how could I get a diagnosis as a kid? Mental healthcare in Venezuela, and in general, it's a privilege, right? To afford to work with a counselor, a psychotherapist, that's a privilege. Not everybody can afford it if they’re saving as much as possible for food. So that's one thing. I was not diagnosed until I was an adult. When I was raised, I was expected to be normal. That also brings forth masking.

Being Venezuelan, I have experienced a lot of discrimination. My student visa to go to the United States was rejected because it was assumed that I was not going to return to my country. It’s funny because the interview didn’t last more than five minutes, and they just assumed that they knew exactly what my intentions were. I didn't even get to talk about my plans, going back to my country, or what I would do. They presumed that I was just going to go to the United States and stay. It’s maybe less clear how that would intersect, but for someone with emotional regulation issues, a situation like that is not easy.

There was also this situation in which I was flying to Mexico to meet my now husband and I was not allowed into the country. I was basically asked to return to my country. I was put into a waiting area with a whole bunch of people. It wasn’t sanitary or friendly for a person with autism or for people with disabilities in general. This was mid-Covid, and one was required to wear masks and keep social distancing in the airport but in that room there were four or more people sleeping on bare mattresses on the floor or sitting all together in the same areas because there were a lot of people. That's another way in which they intersect. It's like, “Yes, I struggle with all of those things individually,” but they often intersect. They do aggravate the suffering, the struggle.

What is your favorite part of being neurodivergent?

I think that came up a little bit in the first response. I think that it's very common for people on the autism spectrum to have some sort of special interest involving nature. You know, people with dinosaurs. I think that that's the most stereotypical interest for autistic children.

It’s a generalization, but I think for me it was nature. Even today I really love nature and I really love learning about nature. I am very curious, and I feel very connected with nature. I was so interested in it as a child, getting to build all of these connections with nature from such an early age.

My family members are Seventh Day Adventist. It’s funny, when I was a kid, we would go to these camps. Often people would find snakes. When they found a snake everybody was running towards their camp to find shelter and I was running in the opposite direction to go see the snake. My parents or my sister had to run behind me to go get me.

I think that autism got me to pay attention to nature and all of these connections and interactions and I'm really grateful for that because nature is really, really important for me today. Right now I'm obsessed with orchids. I literally don't lose any opportunity to mention that. I am proud of myself for all that I know about orchids because they’re such a niche thing. I enjoy having them with me and looking at them or talking about them to people because they're so interesting. They're really complex individuals and human beings can learn a lot from them.

What would you like to add, if anything?

I would like to say that it was really important for me to be diagnosed with autism. That was an important part of my journey towards personal growth. Growing up, I felt like there was something wrong with me. If I was supposed to be normal then I was not very good at being normal. Knowing that I was autistic, then I didn't have to be normal anymore, so I was able to find self-love and I was able to accept myself as I am.

It is still challenging sometimes. I struggle with social interactions even today. It's very hard for me to keep eye contact, which my husband does not like. Other people might find that rude. Those aspects of it are still challenging. But from a personal growth perspective I think that it was really crucial for me to discover that I was autistic in order to accept myself.

With widespread information, social media, and the visibility on the internet, more and more people are able to identify certain autistic traits in themselves. I think that part of the medical community does not like that. It’s like, “Oh, then why am I doing my job?” They take it personally.

When I was starting to explore my diagnosis, I was reaching out to people that I knew and people on Instagram who are activists and advocates. There was this person from the UK, and I was asking, “Oh, do you know any organizations that offer a free or affordable autism diagnosis?” He said, “Oh, I don't know of any, but I run a company that does one for $1000 pounds.” I was like, “Oh, wow, is that affordable?” Of course people would seek self-diagnosis instead of an official diagnosis. At the beginning, I thought, “Autism spectrum.” It’s just two words, right? But it conveys so much.

Q: I am working with a student who has “Short breaks during class as necessary” as an accommodation. I am happy to support the student, but how can taking a break during class be helpful? What if they lose out on information or have trouble re-engaging with the subject matter when they return?

A: Great question! While it might seem disruptive or counterintuitive, having the opportunity to take a break during class is of benefit to students with a range of diagnostic needs. Lapses in attention and focus can make it difficult for a student with ADHD to sustain attention for long periods of time. Pain and discomfort can interfere with comprehension for students with chronic health and pain conditions. Students with anxiety disorders may find themselves overwhelmed by a pileup of worries or recurrent thoughts.

This accommodation is very much premised on the idea of self-awareness. Students with disabilities are the experts on their own needs and how to position themselves to be successful students. This accommodation is a means to capitalize on this self-awareness. In a way, the short break time can be whatever a student needs it to be, within reason, and with brevity. Does running up and down the stairs a few times press the mental reset button on concentration? Great! Can a walk up and down the hallway and some gentle stretches ease pain? Awesome! Can a short meditation invite slowness and soothe that anxious brain? Excellent!

When students utilize this accommodation in whatever manner works best for them, they can actually return to class better able to take in information, respond to questions, and dialogue with their peers. They can be more fully present in mind and body, and they can feel like they are truly learning rather than fending off the interruptions of symptoms. Of course, like all accommodations, this one should be brought out only as needed, and breaks should be short. If you have any questions about how this or any other accommodation applies for a particular student or course, please refer to the Accommodations Toolkit.

Spring Over Lil Robbie

Antonia Ruppert, MFA in Visual Arts

The Poplar Tree

Lorna Tanner, BS in Design for User Experience

A soft wind rustled the trees and her feather earrings fluttered around her face. She knew that this day was special, magical even. She had opened her door that morning and the sun had greeted her with a shimmering light that melted away the pain she was still struggling to release from the days before. Charlie still laid by the stove, lightly snoring and reminding her that there was still peace to be found in her home. She looked across the acres of grass to see a small owl perched in a poplar tree, its eyebrow prominent, giving it a look of severity and seriousness. She wanted to let all of that go, the writhing on the floor of her cottage, no one to call out to for help, except the animals stalking through the woods behind her home in the night. Regardless of how she felt, she was determined to live whatever life she had left with such vigor and spontaneity that even her sister would be impressed.

Walking towards the tree she felt the grass brush gently against her ankle, tickling the hairs as if to say hello. The universe had something more than suffering in store for her, she knew it with all of her heart, and all of her soul. As she approached the tree the owl took flight, magnificent silver wings carried it up above the branches and leaves to where it was no longer visible. She felt tears well up in her eyes as she thought of what it must feel like to fly away, the freedom that she had been craving all her life. She knelt down in front of the tree, a spot she had claimed many times before. The small carving of S+P encircled in a heart reminded her that no matter how alone she had felt, crawling to bed without the energy to eat supper, tears streaming down her face as she took shelter beneath the covers, she had been loved at one point. She remembered the bundle of tansy he had brought to her and placed upon the windowsill, the faint aroma of honey and grass wafting through the kitchen. Those days were magical too, but not like this one.

Visually Camouflaged

Mia Jewell, MA in Dance/Movement Therapy, Clinical Mental Health Counseling

With a smile and a painted face, we once again prepared for the day's battle.
Hunters use it in the woods and forest.
Animals use it to hide from their predators.
In militant fashion, the sea of camouflage conceal themselves from the enemy.
Not altogether different, we pose, hide and mask what we don't want others to see.
The concealment creates a lifestyle in which we get lost in reality.
The facade becomes quicksand, pulling us further away from life’s truth.
We’ve convinced ourselves of the need to hide, for they may not like what they see.
As a result, we have created an illusion while dodging the shrapnel of the labels, stigma and lies.

What Battle do you ask?
The warfare of societal Isms.
Too short, too tall.
Wrong color, wrong class
Too thin, too fat, too old.
Wrong sex, wrong gender.
Not enough.
The labels that go on and on.

As humans together, we are bombarded with messages to measure up.
These messages are driven by politics, social media, television and magazines, the challenging endeavors of oppression and even by the chatter in our own head.
Anything that strives to falsely determine our value and worth.

Visually Camouflaged behind a smile and painted face, I tell the world that all is okay.
However, if you are willing to take a closer look and sight in past what is first seen, you’ll see much more than meets the eye.
While the surface is polished and put together, not far behind lies a silence that screams to be heard and the secret of an untold story.

Student Statement: As an aspiring Dance Movement Therapist with an unseen military service connected disability, I have explored the creative process, combining writing and movement with symbolism and imagery, to express and address challenging memories and emotions. Integrating these elements in my own wellness journey has been a powerful and unique outlet for self-expression and healing.

It’s Time

Pari Kim, BFA in Animation and Motion Media

It’s time to face the wind
It’s time to face the world
No more holding back
Even when I get setback
I just push myself to work harder
And turn that negative into a positive
It may take me forever to get there
But I am getting there
Progress is progress
As long as you never give up
You will get there
Every seed will sprout into a flower
And it will grow and grow
Until one day its light touches all corners of the world