Composition Forum 39 - Summer 2018 - Towards an Understanding of Accommodation Transfer: Disabled Students’ Strategies for Navigating Classroom Accommodations

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay

This article introduces “accommodation transfer” to explain the rhetorical skills disabled students carry with writing knowledge when they enter college writing assignments and classrooms. Based on five qualitative interviews, it shows how students adapt writing processes and learn to negotiate accommodation needs with instructors over academic careers. Negotiations involve evaluating instructors’ stances on disability and selecting genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability. The article concludes with two teaching suggestions for “cripping” transfer pedagogy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time30 min

AccessFree to download

Composition Forum 39, Summer 2018

Towards an Understanding of Accommodation Transfer: Disabled Students’ Strategies for Navigating Classroom Accommodations

Defining the Relationship between Transfer and Accommodation

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 39, Summer 2018 Towards an Understanding of Accommodation Transfer: Disabled Students’ Strategies for Navigating Classroom Accommodations Neil Simpkins Abstract: This article offers the term “accommodation transfer” as a way to understand the rhetorical skills disabled students transfer alongside writing knowledge as they access college writing assignments and writing classrooms. This study is based on five qualitative interviews with disabled college students and draws upon both writing transfer research and disability studies. The author explores how participants adapted writing process knowledge and learned how to negotiate their accommodation needs with instructors across their academic careers. Specifically, these negotiations include assessing instructors’ stances towards disability and testing effective genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability with instructors. The article concludes with two suggestions for cripping teaching for transfer: embracing and teaching crip time for writing, and highlighting the relationship between mentorship and interdependence. When Abigail began experiencing symptoms related to autonomic dysfunction, her understanding of her body shifted in relation to both health and writing. Abigail’s chronic illness emerged as she started college, and she measured the impact of her chronic illness against her completion of academic writing tasks. As she describes,“There were a lot of times where I was like, ‘I can’t write this right now. Maybe it’s because of the antidepressant I’m on, which I may or may not need because they’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. But also I’m not sleeping right now, so I can’t turn this in.’” For Abigail, the bodily experience of figuring out her chronic illness merged with her experience of navigating college writing. As she learned how to write in academic contexts, she also learned what writing process worked best with her disabled body and how to ask for the accommodations she needed to complete academic writing tasks. Abigail’s intertwined experience illustrates how disabled college students negotiate both having a disability and writing in college.{1} In the interviews with disabled college writers collected in my research, participants discussed the challenge of this negotiation, revealing that having a disability in college requires learning specific rhetorical skills connected to broader transferable writing and rhetorical knowledge. I call this accommodation transfer—the process of learning to transfer the rhetorical skills and knowledge needed to receive disability accommodations for writing in academic settings. In composition and rhetoric, studies of writing transfer explore, question, and describe how students transfer knowledge about writing across contexts and develop a relationship to writing. The consideration of accommodation transfer offered here details how disabled students transfer the knowledge about accommodations needed to access college writing tasks, using key writing and rhetorical skills gained across interactions with instructors; this transfer of knowledge affects how students relate to both writing and accommodation. Influenced by experiences across classrooms, disabled students learn how to ask for accommodations while also adapting writing skills across academic contexts. Accommodations are rhetorical, meaning they depend on personal and institutional values and communication. Moreover, because of the structured inaccessibility of higher education, students have to argue for accommodations in higher education classrooms. In this article, I will explore how disabled students learn how to adapt their writing processes and argue for their accessibility needs around writing through a process of transferring rhetorical knowledge across contexts. To conclude, I will turn t

FAQs

What is “accommodation transfer” in this article?

It is the process of learning to transfer the rhetorical skills and knowledge needed to obtain disability accommodations for writing in academic settings.

How does the study examine students’ negotiation of accommodations?

It uses five qualitative interviews with disabled college students to explore how they adapted writing process knowledge and negotiated accommodation needs with instructors.

What teaching suggestions does the article offer for “cripping” transfer?

It recommends embracing and teaching “crip time” for writing, and highlighting how mentorship relates to interdependence.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay