Written by Psyche Ready, with support of the DAC team.
This essay is about the “News Chat,” an assignment I developed a few years ago that was an unexpectedly amazing addition to a class I’m teaching now at UConn, “Disability in American Literature. The News Chat assignment is simple: find a news article on a topic that is relevant to our class. Read the article, come to class, and summarize the article for the rest of the class. Then, we will spend a few minutes talking about it as a group.
I developed this assignment because I wanted to break up long class sessions, and to give students an opportunity to share, present, or teach information to their classmates, and to initiate a discussion. Rather than a formal (and stressful) presentation, I wanted it to be low-pressure, which is why I gave it a casual name: the News Chat. “Chat” implies conversation and dialogue, but it also feels light and dynamic, the sort of thing that happens spontaneously. To keep it casual, I made two rules: no visuals, text, or graphics can be presented; and the presentation can take no longer than 5 minutes. I did this because I just *knew* that my go-getting students would try to impress me by creating a 15-slide presentation, and I really wanted to ensure that students would not do too much advance work.
I originally assigned this in an upper-level Advanced Composition class, and it was outstanding. It got us all talking about world events, social justice issues, and it helped some students to break out of their shells and share their opinions and ideas. I loved it and continued to assign it because it got us all talking – sometimes we’d talk for a half hour about the article, and many productive conversations emerged that were applicable to the course. But, I will also say that often the news articles were not *super* relevant to the (writing) class…but that changed when I gave this assignment to my class on Disability in American Literature. I nearly didn’t assign it, because it is a 50 minute session, which flies by, and I really needed all of that time to cover the reading. But I’m so glad I did. This is the first time I’ve taught this class, and it’s been a learning experience. We read classic American literature that features disability as a theme (“Of Mice and Men” and “The Miracle Worker”), but we also read more recent literature written by disabled authors (El Deafo and Hyperbole and a Half’s “Adventures in Depression”) alongside theoretical writing about the central concepts of Disability Studies
In August, I looked at my reading list and knew it was far too divorced from reality for college students. The texts were abstract or old, which might give students the impression that Disability Studies is abstract and old, and nothing could be further from the truth. Disability Studies, and Disability Rights, are not stuffy, abstract topics, they are not just historical–disability justice is not a struggle we overcame a long time ago – these are real, live, issues that impact each of us, every day, in our lives, families, and communities. I wanted my students to feel that; to be able to apply the principles and concepts to their own lives, and to see themselves and their own struggles and achievements in these texts.
I could have, of course, selected news articles for them on disability topics–but part of what’s great about this assignment is the searching. If I did the searching for them, being 25 years older than they are and with a very different life and interests, I’d likely fixate on topics they didn’t care about. And this is the beauty of the news chat: searching for a news article involves a series of complex, iterative steps and critical thinking. To find an article, a student must choose which site to begin their search (Google News? Fox News? Tiktok?), choose search terms, and then evaluate the results (sometimes over and over) to find sources that are not only credible, current, and relevant, but are also interesting to themselves, their classmates, and their professor.
Next, they have to find a way to summarize the article out loud, in less than five minutes.
As I tell my students often, summarizing is a very sophisticated act, and it’s really hard to do: if I asked 100 people to summarize the same article, we’d get 100 different summaries, based on our personalities, interests, reading comprehension, biases, and how our brains work. The ability to take in a text and then summarize and share is such an important skill in college and in life, and I love, love, love to read or listen to a strong, clearly explained summary. To summarize, you have to consider: what are the main points of this text? What was the author’s goal? What will be interesting to my classmates and instructor? And what am I most intrigued by in this article? Finally, how much can fit into five minutes?
For all of these reasons, I love the News Chat assignment. But I hadn’t experienced it in its full potential until this Disability Studies course. We started our semester watching the outstanding film Crip Camp, which is a stunning documentary about a camp for disabled kids back in the 1970s, and about the revolution for Disability Rights that it helped to foment. The film centers on stories about adolescence and coming of age that I knew my students would relate to–and they did. But as we talked about it in class the next day, I noticed that we kept talking about Disability Rights in the past tense, as if it were a civil rights movement that ended with the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, in 1990. We were talking about the tragedy of how disabled folks “used to be treated” before society evolved, and the important strides made since. Of course, and unfortunately, humanity rarely evolves so quickly or neatly.
This became very clear when students began presenting their News Chats. While Crip Camp ends on the happy note of the ratification of the ADA, the articles we discussed in class continued to detail the MANY ways that the protections of the ADA are not currently being adequately enforced. Students were appropriately frustrated: we fought hard for the ADA, and we won, over 30 years ago. Why is it still not happening? We heard about the lack of wheelchair access in a variety of places, including airplanes and the New York City subway. Many of our News Chat articles were about disparities in healthcare settings, from dentist offices to family doctors to lack of representation in NIH-funded research. When we discussed the New York Times article “It’s Time to Rethink the Americans With Disabilities Act,” all of us easily agreed. We also heard about (several) public school districts that fail to act on student Individualized Education Plans or IEPs, which ensure that disabled students are provided access to education (legally mandated in 1975 under the IDEA act).
After each News Chat, I tried to dwell on the stories, and how they connected to the larger themes of Disability Studies. I encouraged students to speak up. As they did, we heard remarkable things: my students shared their own stories of friends or family members who had been in situations; some of them spoke up about their own experiences of ableism and exclusion. Some of these stories were difficult to hear–we got angry, we got sad. We also got philosophical and we got creative, and we laughed at ourselves and each other.
I asked my students to keep journals every week, where they reflected on the readings and class discussions. While I hoped that the texts I so carefully chose would inspire them, I found them reflecting more often than not on our in-class discussions. Students were existentially troubled by the News Chat articles more than they were by the literary or philosophical texts we read in class–perhaps because these news articles were published just in past days, weeks, and months. When we confront the early struggles of the Disability Rights movement, I think we tend to rationalize that information by relegating it to a distant and ignorant past–this is something that happened a long time ago, that we would not let happen again. But these news articles paint a very different picture–of a world where disabled people have to fight for basic access and inclusion in the most essential of human activities. In their journals, my students began to connect these stories to their own lives and interests. A student studying nutrition began to wonder how disability was impacted by diet; a student who had interned for a dentist wondered how often dental offices were inaccessible to patients with mobility aids; several future educators attempted to unravel the complex bureaucracy of special education in public schools.
We also learned through our News Chats that Disability Theory is not really a niche topic–in fact, it intersects with other issues in the news, such as the Britney Spears conservatorship case, the use of AI tools by the federal government, representation of disabled lives in popular media, and the aftereffects of the COVID pandemic and the shift to remote work.
As my students carved out their individual research topics based on their interests and lives, I saw how much they were influenced by the discussions that took place around our News Chats. Their papers were not about Disability in literature or in history–they were about Disability in the PRESENT. Each of them found a way to connect their own lives and lived experiences to the key goals of Disability Studies: access and inclusion.
Disability & Access Collective 