Toward a Personally Situated Approach to Advocacy: Expanding Community-Engaged Rhetoric to Parent Advocacy in Special Education

ABSTRACT

A “personally situated” approach to community-engaged rhetoric highlights the personal and performative dimensions of advocacy, which are often obscured in public and community-oriented frameworks. When applied to the advocacy practices of parents of disabled children within the context of special education, personally situated advocacy reveals how a strong personal commitment to advocacy within a highly institutionalized space can create unique and often difficult rhetorical challenges. By making these challenges more visible, personally situated advocacy suggests new possibilities for affiliation between community partners and community-engaged scholars.

Notes

1. I would like to thank RR reviewers Lora Arduser and Barbara Heifferon for their generative comments. Additional gratitude to Linda Flower for her feedback on early versions of this article and to Will Penman for his useful insight.

2. The original title of the law was the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975.

3. I use the terms “disabled people/children/individuals” and “people/children/individual with disabilities” interchangeably, recognizing that both naming conventions are imperfect. While “disabled person” is critiqued because it refers to the disability first (rather than the person), “person with a disability” is criticized because it diminishes the extent to which disability is a valued part of person’s identity. I choose to use both terms, recognizing that: (1) disability representations should be the choice of the individual, and (2) all linguistic choices are political choices.

4. I use the term “parent” inclusively to describe any person who has legal authority and/or moral obligation to care for a child, recognizing that this person is often a grandparent, other relative, or unrelated guardian.

5. I use rhetorical “capability,” rather than the more familiar term “agency” to highlight how rhetorical action and activity always depend on people’s situated access to certain social, cultural, and economic resources—access that is always shaped by their intersectional positioning. “Capability” also describes how embodied experience—including physiological ability, personal goals and commitments, and experiential knowledge—shapes why and how they do the things they are compelled to do. Conceptually, this focus on “doing” is informed by the “Capabilities Approach,” a political theory of justice and human rights developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The capabilities approach envisions freedom and rights not as abstract potentialities, but as live opportunities, asking that we look at “what people [are] actually able to do and to be” in light of what “real opportunities are available to them” (Nussbaum x). A capabilities approach to rhetoric makes visible “what resources and possibilities we have and what our difficulties might be” (Nussbaum 28). James Crosswhite develops rhetorical capability as a philosophical “openness,” an ontological capacity or potentiality—“an ability to go out of ourselves and meet each other in language of some kind” (61). My sense of rhetorical capability depends on this ontological possibility but prioritizes how people realize it through concrete rhetorical actions.

6. Such a response to “failed advocacy” aligns with the medical or individual model of disability, which conceptualizes disability as an “individual tragedy” that can only be “fixed” through therapeutic intervention (Shakespeare). This lens makes it easy to categorize disability advocacy as little more than an individual response to a personal tragedy. A more empowering alternative, the social model of disability, redefines disability in relation to the external social and structural forces that oppress people with bodily “impairments” (Goodley). Under this model, it’s possible to view failed advocacy as a public issue demanding collective action.

7. I’m reporting on my understanding of this advocacy experience based on my work with parents, research in special education and disability studies, and the support literature available to parents.

8. This essay, for example, relies largely on secondary research; however, I have also interviewed parent advocates and worked with my own family.

9. IDEA established that “all children with disabilities have available to them a free and appropriate education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living” (Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975).

10. Depending on the situation (including the nature of a student’s impairment, disability, or difference), parents may also need to know other disability rights laws (such as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act), as well as state and local education policies, education testing measures and metrics, and medical and therapeutic procedures and diagnoses relevant to the student’s learning capabilities.

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Notes on contributors

Mary Glavan

Mary Glavan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University where she teaches courses in rhetoric and writing. Her research bridges writing studies, community literacy, and disability rhetoric and seeks to facilitate educational alliances among community members, students, and scholars. She has published and has in-progress work in writing center studies, community literacy, and argumentation; among her long-term goals is to develop a mobile community writing center. She can be reached at [email protected].