"From Where I Sit" Video Series

LaDonna's Story — Faculty Response Video Transcript

Dr. John Berteaux:
Basically I think the first thing I was struck with by with LaDonna's story was that her disability had such an immediate onset. I was kind of surprised that she was essentially a marine who was on her way to Iraq. Then things changed and it was just like that and her whole life changed... and I don't always think of that in the classroom. I sometimes think that if someone discloses a disability that they've probably been dealing with it for a long time, so that's a different perspective for me.

Dr. Jennifer Eagan:
One of the things I liked about this story, and I'm just gonna point it out because I'm not sure it was intended, was the political subtext, because on the one hand you have, you know her, you know, her beautiful marine pictures, the America the Beautiful and then she's in the classroom with the professor with the Tupac shirt and she's wearing an Angela Davis shirt. [Laughter] So the subtext is like, okay right, you tried the marines and that disabled you, so now you have to go in the class room and learn about African American radicalism. Well I like it, but if it's not intended, you know other people might read into it and I'm sure other people would not like it as much as I did.

[Laughter]

Dr. Hank Reichman:
There was a moment in it where you show she was in the classroom and she's sitting there and she had this sort of depressed, kind of solemn look on her face and a sort of little light bulb went off in my head. I don't even know if that was intended at that moment. I've seen a lot of students in my class who look like that and it's from the vantage point of the professor, if you don't know the student, it's impossible to tell whether this is a student who is like, 'Oh man, what do I need this class for?' you know, just with an attitude, or whether it's a student who is struggling like this woman is, to overcome something and is in pain, and that look is a look of pain, you know.

Dr. Donna Wiley:
Frustration.

Dr. Hank Reichman:
You know, that doesn't come from, you know, hostility to the class but from dealing with something. And it was a sort of light bulb, you know, a little moment there where I saw that, because I know, several times you see somebody slouched in the back looking glum and you don't know how to interpret it.

Dr. John Berteaux:
What she pointed out was definitely something I hadn't thought about and that's the early availability of textbooks. That's a point I had not considered before that regardless of what happens over the summer with last minute scheduling or assignment of new instructors and so on, that some people may want or need kind of a head start with knowing just what the books are going to be so that they can actually start reading them and figure out what's going on and that's just something I hadn't considered before so within our system, because we have a lot of part-time lecturers, who were often called at the last minute. If they want to add text books at the last minute, that's going to make it tough. So I see that as something for us to consider in a different way.

Dr. Hank Reichman:
One thing I noticed that she points out, is at one point she says "don't use handouts" yet in an earlier one, it was Kelly's story where it was "give us handouts".

[ Laughter ]

And I think you have to be aware of the sort of possible conflicting messages.

Dr. Donna Wiley:
Yeah, and that's the point. There's nothing that works for everyone. But again, I go back to the overwhelmingness of having to integrate everything to capture, you know, to everyone's needs is, can be daunting.

Dr. Don Gailey:
It reminded me of again, the artificiality of the class room lecture and a reminder to try to bring joy to the 70 minutes and that's it's not just a spitting out of information and that it's up to the students to absorb whatever they could in those 70 minutes. And that it should be an old fashioned, you know, maybe 70 minutes of technology is too much. There needs to be some individuality and some of the professor's life experience infused into that, so just going from PowerPoint to PowerPoint is not enough. Sometimes it's enough to know that there's some sensitivity and if I could use the word "love" from the professor's vantage, even if it's unspoken. Because again, if the student doesn't speak the disability then we don't know exactly what it is and yet we have to present this uniform picture of information in 70 minutes. I think it's a, it was a nice nudge.