Basics About Disabilities and Science and Engineering Education

by Ruta Sevo

An introduction to disability issues, history, laws, and research for educators who have little or no experience with students or colleagues with disabilities. There is a short overview in the form of a presentation script. A section looks at the need for inclusion and recruitment of students with disabilities to science and engineering fields, and gives examples of resources for faculty to improve instruction. The Short Reader and Syllabus is a digest covering topics often included in full Disability Studies readers written by experts. An annotated bibliography is provided for those who want further depth. It draws from syllabi used for undergraduates. 220 pages. Kindle book on amazon.com

222 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2011

About the author

See my website for all my books, available as ebooks and paperbacks.

We read to enter the realities of other people. We want to feel their emotions and hear their secrets. We want to know what really happened; what was under the surface. My fiction will probably involve foreign travel, spirituality, and finding yourself.

A couple of principles guide my writing. First, we all want to break out of conventional and routine life. The proper surfaces of life are often hiding truths and secrets. Most of us wish we were more free and did things that we couldn’t because they were not permitted, or we didn’t have the money, or we didn’t have the chance.

Second, Sanskrit poetics say that works of art are designed to evoke one or two key emotions: love, humor, anger, sorrow, disgust, fear, energy, and wonder. (These are called “rasa” which means “essence.”) The pleasure of art is the pleasure of having the experience of one of these feelings. In literature, the story and characters are designed to bring the reader into the predominant emotion.

Writing has to work for the author and for the reader. We find compatible authors to take us to places that are interesting, happy, enlightening. A story is like a friend: you like something there and you want to spend some time there.

Some of my favorites: Salinger, Hemingway, John Barth, Karen Blixen, Annie Proulx, Paulo Coelho, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell, Thomas Mann. Recently I was gripped reading Alexandra David-Neel, a Victorian woman who walked out of China into forbidden Tibet in the 1920s. I love being taken places by Paul Theroux.