About Andrew Lucchesi
I am a PhD student and college writing teacher, living and working in Harlem, New York. My research focuses on issues of diversity and inclusion in public colleges and universities. As a teacher, I specialize in using a mix of digital technology and responsive, student-centered practices to promote welcoming and engaging writing environments. As a researcher, I am investigating the history of disability access programs in public colleges and universities, from the earliest programs in the 1940s to the present.
I regularly present my research at national conventions, including the Modern Language Association, the Conference on College Compassion and Communication, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators. I also frequently give workshops for faculty across a range of disciplines on topics including writing-intensive assignment design, uses of digital technology in the classroom, and Universal Design for Learning.
You can find out more about my past education, professional achievements, and teaching experience by exploring the Academic Portfolio page.
Learning/Doing Blog
This blog features current projects, drafts-in-progress, personal musings, and self-published versions of conference presentations.
Recent posts:
Learning/Doing Blog
- Workshop: Universal Design for the Writing Classroom August 25, 2015
I designed this workshop for the CUNY Graduate Center’s English program orientation for new teachers, held on August 25th, 2015. It was designed to give a 50-minute introduction to the principles of Universal Design for Learning and to help first-time teachers think about how they apply to their writing-intensive humanities courses. Please feel free to ...- Institutional Archaeology: What We Learn By Digging Up Dead Programs (CWPA 2015) July 17, 2015
I presented this talk on July 17, 2015 at the annual conference of Council of Writing Program Administrators in Boise, Idaho. I would be grateful for feedback, either as comments to this post, or via email at a.j.lucchesi@gmail.com In the last few years, WPA studies has begun to look seriously at the challenges of improving access ...- Conference Presentation, CCCC15: Memories of “Subtle Triage” March 19, 2015
This talk was presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, FL on March 19, 2015. It is part of panel E.24, titled New Directions for Disability-Studies Research: Using Mixed Methods to Appeal to Wider Audiences in Higher Education. Memories of ‘Subtle Triage’: Histories of Academic Disability and Institutional Practice Today I will ...
Annotated Bibliography
This section contains semi-structured reviews of scholarly books and articles. It began as a study tool for my oral exams, but since I passed that hurdle in 2014, I have continued to use it to gather my thoughts on recent scholarship. Feel free to recommend books or articles for me to review via email or Twitter.
Recent posts:
Annotated Bibliography
- Images of Attack: Response to David B.’s Epileptic
I’ve spent the last couple of months reading from my lists with Joe (on disability studies) and Mark (on writing program administration). I’m now starting to dive fully into Jason’s list, which explores cognitive impairments, literacy, and academic life from a range of perspectives including educational theory, neuroscience, and memoir. It’s my most challenging list, ...- Writing as Therapy?: Response to Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power
Peter Elbow’s 1973 Writing Without Teachers was one of the first composition books I ever read. I carry its insights with me every time I teach or sit down to write. During the years I spent struggling through my own stuck place–when I could not write without extreme anxiety, when I piled up incompletes, when I was ...- Response to Tobin Seibers’s Disability Theory (2008)
In his 2008 monograph, Disability Theory, Tobin Siebers presents critiques of major theoretical thinkers of culture and identity including Freud, Butler, Sedgwick, and Foucault. By theorizing from the standpoint of disability identity, Siebers mixes cultural criticism with a progressive identity politics, ultimately proving the intellectual insights made possible by including disabled experience within the realm of ...- Response to Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature
At the moment, I’m working through the canonical Disability Studies texts–if there can be such a thing for a discipline so young–and there are few works more iconic or influential than Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies. Arguing that literary and cultural critics have neglected serious study of disability identity and representation, Extraordinary Bodies establishes a critical methodology ...- Response to Patricia Dunn’s Learning Re-Abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies
Nearly twenty years after its publication, Patricia A. Dunn’s Learning Re-Abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies (1995) remains the most thorough and insightful study of learning disability within the field of composition. By bringing together decades of debate from fields as diverse as developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, special education, critical pedagogy, composition and rhetoric, ...
