In the fall of her first semester at Holy Cross, towards the end of the women’s soccer team’s fall season, midfielder Abigail ‘Abby’ Lorion ’29 tore her ACL, shorthand for anterior cruciate ligament. An ACL tear sidelines an athlete. Such an injury can take a year’s recovery time because tissue in the knee has either snapped or is completely torn.
Lorion had to learn how to raise her leg again, stand again, walk and then run again — no easy thing on a campus legendary for its inclines.
Call it chance or luck, but Lorion happened to be enrolled in a seminar, Accessibility and Ableism, taught by Hayley Stefan, a lecturer in the College’s Montserrat: First-Year Experience. Montserrat, as it is commonly known, is a seminal feature of the first-year college experience at Holy Cross and centers on a seminar in which students delve deeply into essential human questions through discipline-specific coursework. In Stefan, Lorion had a true subject-matter expert to process her temporary disability from both a scholarly and experiential perspective.
“In the Montserrat seminar, we focus on one content area and, alongside that, we fold in skills of reflection and revision aligned with Jesuit pedagogy,” Stefan says. “So the focus is on reflecting upon yourself, your skills and your growth over the course of the year.”
Lorion’s injury made theory a felt experience and deepened her understanding of how others live with disability.
“One of the things that I understood about Montserrat was that I would have one professor that I would get to have throughout the entire year, which was going to be really nice, given the fact that I was a freshman and was going to definitely need help on campus and such,” Lorion says.
The nature of that help, though, took on new dimensions post-injury. In her written work and in conversations with Stefan, Lorion observed how even temporary disability altered her experience of campus and the community-based learning she was doing as a volunteer in the Worcester Public School System’s Transitions program, which prepares high school students with disabilities for life after graduation.
“The students would ask me, ‘Why can’t you walk?’ And it was interesting to talk about my experience and ask them about their experience and to find common ground when it came to disability,” Lorion says.
“Which fits into our larger mission as a College: to be people for and with others,” Stefan says. “Part of that means interrogating how we interact with others.”
To help a student develop as a whole person
“It was really interesting, too, to see how disability intersected with my trying to get around on campus,” Lorion says. “I began noticing how we might be able to make campus more accessible to people who have to live with a disability every single day of their lives. That’s not something that I had thought of about Holy Cross at all.”
“Watching Abby go through this really difficult experience — and it was intense — was really hard and also rewarding because she was learning so much and I was seeing a lot in her reflections,” Stefan says. “We ask students to reflect on their own identities over the course of the year, thinking about who they were in high school, what goals they had for themselves, and how they're going to develop as intellectual and social citizens through their coursework, course experiences, community-based learning practices, and co-curricular activities within the Monserrat program.”
Lorion has made a full recovery. She says her Montserrat experience not only made a difficult experience more manageable but also that it expanded her understanding of empathy as a gift both given and received. In her Montserrat seminar, Lorion says she found a professor and classmates who understood her.
“My injury was so challenging, and it was nice to have a place to come every week that I was excited about,” Lorion says. “It was a constant in a moment when a huge part of my life was taken away.”
“Part of our goal with Montserrat is to help students develop as a whole person,” Stefan says to Lorion. “You are not just a student-athlete or a student who is temporarily disabled, but a person who’s growing into herself.”
