I don’t want to pretend this happens all the time, but let there be no questions it happens as it did in professor Chris Foss’s dis/lit course. And when it does, how sick is this for a student? Can there be any greater testament to the power of networked thinking and learning?
From author Keith Banner’s 2+2=5 blog:
Anyway, a student named Amanda Grace Gorman in the ENGL 375A2 DISABILITY AND LITERATURE class at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia wrote a paper about my story. (I copied it and pasted it below.) I read it yesterday and burst into tears. I’ve been writing now for 25 years or so, and have had reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice, Boston Globe, Publisher’s Weekly, and blurbs from famous writers and editors who say my stuff is great, etc., but this was the first time I cried reading something somebody wrote about my fiction. I think it has something to do with the no-nonsense connections Amanda has made with what I write and the way people with developmental disabilities are perceived and relegated. It also has something to do with her sympathetic yet strategic way of reading my story. There’s a moral code Amanda is targeting and she finds it in my work: what an incredible gift to me as a writer. [link added was mine]
Wow!!!
