Second Article on Persons Who Stutter in College
I am continuing to publish my groundbreaking qualitative narrative research about undergraduate students as Persons Who Stutter. The first article was a critical interrogation of their experiences in the Review of Higher Education in 2024 which identified the phenomenon of the academic oratory tax. The second article “Cripping Narrative Stories of Student Involvement and Stuttering” is published in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. It is co-authored with colleagues Dr. Kristen Brown (Independent Scholar) and former student Dr. Lydia Richardson (Stephen F. Austin State University). This research is among the first research to provide voice to the experiences of Students Who Stutter. This study explores the co-curricular experiences of persons who stutter (PWS), an emerging area of ability as a form of student identities. We primarily use Crip Theory to frame the findings and implications for practice in this article.
The critical frameworks of Stuttering Ableism and Cripestomology supported the disucssion of the fluency experiences of PWS through student involvement. Crip negativity, intersectionality, spoons, crip trying, and crip time connect the analysis with participants' stories, acknowledging that ableism can dramatically shape the lives of people without access to the category of disability and operates in conjunction with racism, colonialism, classism, and cisheterosexim. PWS experience interpersonal and institutional ableism, leading to exclusion within co-curricular spaces. Their voices are often silenced by their peers, and PWS of Color experience aggressions at the intersection of racism and ableism. The findings confirm existing disability concepts of crip time, crip trying, and spoon theory. They also extend the higher education literature by showing how crip negativity functions within disabled students’ lived experiences and disabled ways of creating knowledge.
The study used a narrative approach and used similiar approaches to my previous research to focus on telling the stories of marginalized people and conceptualizing their lived experiences through storytelling. We used in-depth semi-structured interviews to collect data, covering experiences of ableism, identity, and how stuttering shaped engagement. Participants were offered accommodations including assistive speaking devices, audio captioning, volume control, and no assumed time constraints.
The study suggests that higher education scholars must think critically about normative narratives of student involvement. Co-curricular involvement has a strong positive relationship with persistence, retention, graduation, and sense of belonging. However, some students are omitted from existing narratives, as the dominant narratives focus on those who engage rather than exploring why some students do not get involved on campus. Existing literature on involvement and marginalized populations demonstrates that institutions must create environments that foster multiple methods of involvement and researchers must conceptualize involvement based on students’ meaning making. This research highlights the importance of understanding the experiences of PWS in higher education, particularly in terms of their experiences with co-curricular involvement. It emphasizes the need for higher education scholars to critically consider normative narratives and create inclusive environments for all students, regardless of their disability or speech disfluency.
There is limited understanding about the ways speech disfluent students or persons who stutter (PWS) experience the collegiate environment. Broader literature suggests that PWS may experience ableist systems, particularly in cocurricular spaces where educational accommodations are often not extended. The majority of disability research is conducted from an abled-vantage point, framing disabled people as "the objects of study" instead of being the producers of knowledge. This research contributes to existing scholarship by problematizing the concepts of student involvement and modeling how to integrate disabled ways of knowing into qualitative methodologies. Understanding the perspectives of PWS is important because it identifies ways in which postsecondary institutions can improve sense of belonging, persistence, and retention. Centering the expertise present in PWS embodied knowledge allows for deeper ways to understand methodological approaches rooted in oral traditions. Student involvement scholarship has expanded substantially since Astin's (1984) model, but barriers to involvement are specific to bodymind experiences and other aspects of the students' identity or social location. Accommodations, accessible environments, peer awareness of ableism, and peer desire to make student organizations or cocurricular experiences accessible were factors that supported disabled students' involvement.
Stuttering is a complex and exhausting issue that affects students of color of color. It is influenced by various factors such as bodymind, identity, expectations, environment, and self-referential assessments of fluency. To manage their stuttering, PWS of Color must navigate the intersection of race and disability to overcome these challenges. This will be the area of focus in my future research.
The article is available here and is not open-access (see link).
