Clint Gardner

I am curious to have community comments on this Wordle constructed from approximately 33 mission statements freely provided to me by WC administrators from various institutions. If you aren't familiar with Wordle (http://www.wordle.net), it crunches texts and represents the most prevalent terms appearing in the text by size. I don't believe color or position has any statistical significance, and is mostly chosen by the person who creates the Wordle based on her or his aesthetic sensibilities. In the following Worldle, I have removed "writing" and "center" as terms. I did this simply because those terms, quite expectantly, were ubiquitous in all the mission statements and, therefore, took up a lot of Wordle screen real estate:

Available from http://www.wordle.net. (Corrected version.)



While I am drawing my own nefarious conclusions from this smash-up for my CCCC presentation, I just wanted to hear what the WC community thinks; that is why I haven't …

While I was away attending the TYCA Southeast Conference in Chattanooga, the faculty/staff discussion group for the 2010 Writing and Social Justice Conference met to discuss Michael Berube's Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. I've been told that the discussion went quite well, and I had a few moments this morning to discuss Berube's ideas with one of the Student Writing Center tutors, Lori. As she is a person with a disability herself, I found her insights into the book profound, and useful in helping me to understand the broader cultural ramifications that Berube discusses in the book in the context of individual experience.

1) It would seem that many of the things that become so problematic about the treatment of the mentally disabled since the late 19th century is that such treatment were often "for the best" or had "good intentions" and were based on progressive thinking. In other words, the manner in which all di…