Scholarship on collaboration has long extolled its benefits, which include developing student awareness of audience (Howard, 2001; Newkirk, 1984), promoting better writing (Bruffee, 1984; Foote, 1998), promoting increased understanding of the topic (Bruffee, 1984; Wolfe, 2005), and developing crucial social skills (Bruffee, 1984; Foote, 1998; Smith & MacGregor, 1992; Trimbur, 1989). The scholarly conversation on collaboration began with the field’s shift towards the social turn (see Bruffee, 1984; Cooper, 1986; Faigley, 1992; LeFevre, 1987; Lunsford & Ede, 1990; Reither & Vipond, 1989). Kenneth Bruffee (1984) famously articulated “To think well as individuals we must learn to think well collectively—that is, we must learn to converse well,” emphasizing the importance of collaborative learning in the writing classroom. For the most part, we have assumed that collaboration is an implicit skill that students know and value in classroom spaces, and as a result, we have not yet complicated our understanding with the perspectives of disabled students. By disregarding this population of students, the unspoken assumption is that all students are nondisabled and that collaboration is universally accessible. However, as nearly 11% of our national student population reports a disability, this is not representative of our student population (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). Consequently, we have under theorized and studied the ways disabled students grapple with collaboration. This dissertation addresses this gap beginning to investigate neurodivergent students’ experiences with collaborative writing. Neurodivergence is commonly defined as neurological functioning that diverges from societal norms (e.g. depression, autism, attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, etc.) (Walker, 2014). This subset of disabled students is important to study for two reasons. First, scholarship on disability tends to focus on physical, apparent disabilities (e.g. blindness, deafness, mobility impairments, etc.) over nonapparent, nonphysical disabilities. Second, the majority of student disabilities are related to neurodivergence (United States Government Accountability Office, 2009). By considering disabled students’ experiences in our pedagogical approaches, individual instructors can become advocates and activists in their classrooms by creating more inclusive and accessible educational spaces. To guide my exploration into this topic, I outlined five research questions: (1) What do students self-report regarding their experiences working on collaborative writing assignments? (2) What strategies do neurodivergent students report employing when working on collaborative writing assignments? (3) How do neurodivergent students describe the support their teachers do or do not provide during collaborative writing assignments? (4) How do neurodivergent students describe their relationships with their teammates during collaborative writing assignments? And, (5) what recommendations do neurodivergent students have regarding accessible collaborative writing assignments? To answer these questions, I drew from an interdependent qualitative research paradigm methodology and collected qualitative and quantitative data through surveys and interviews. Finally, I analyzed my data using an inductive thematic analysis. From these methods, I was able to make several tentative findings and point towards pedagogical implications and further areas of study. Drawing from this data, this study offers some insight into how neurodivergent students navigate collaborative writing assignments and provides some tentative pedagogical starting places to improve collaborative writing assignments.
