Tag Archives: the academy

Educating d/Deaf children: A deeper conversation

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Posted by maxporter on February 14, 2012 – 10:10 PM
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The other day on Tumblr, I had the chance to participate in a very insightful reblog conversation about education & deafness – you can read it here (I’m maxmovinghands).1

One of the things that we began talking about is that experience that nearly every child with some form of deafness significant enough to miss “normal” spoken conversation has experienced: walking up to adults who are talking and asking, “What are you saying?” Just – literally – I physically cannot understand you due to the language barrier because you are communicating in the audio channel that you exist in rather than in the visual channel where I reside; can you please fill me in because I have absolutely no access to the auditory realm whereas you have access to the visual world? In my head, this has always been a simple enough request, but Hearing people would become resentful or even angry when I was a child and say, “It’s not important,” and I didn’t understand why. I was simply asking for the same access to a conversation that every other human being in the room has.

As arfism pointed out:

I do feel that if you’re told over and over that it’s not important or I’ll tell you later and so on. It’s almost like they’re saying you don’t matter enough for me to take the time to explain this to you. It has to affect you psychologically somehow. Especially if you’re told that over and over from freaking day one pretty much.

I agree that it can have a negative psychological effect. My “friends” have done this to me in the past – heck, my parents have done it to me occasionally. Personally, I don’t really internalize things like that, so I just said, “fuck society,” but it is a painful experience to go through all the same and I can only imagine how much worse an internalizer would feel.

Really – it’s not fair. Since getting my CI and integrating more into Hearing society, I’ve discovered that people enter and leave conversations all the time. Yet when we deaf people try to do the exact same thing, it’s suddenly an inconvenience. Discovering this double-standard makes me even angrier at the hearing people who excluded me from conversation in the past.

And I do get pissed off at hearing parents/teachers sometimes for being so self-centered and not taking a moment to think, “Boy, this child is deaf; what does that really mean?” Like – I don’t care how big of an inconvenience it is have to put down the knife while cooking for two seconds to sign something to your deaf child – just goddamn suck it up and play by the rules of deafness because the child cannot play by the rules of Hearing society. And if deaf children simply cannot play by the same rules that Hearing society functions upon, so what? Their psychological well-being is so much more important than the *huge* inconvenience of having to take two seconds to translate your audio-based speech into a visual format.

Personally, I think that this prejudice from audist society is one of the reasons that some deaf children don’t do well in school. From day one, deaf people are told, “Don’t seek out information. Nothing is of importance.” Contrast this with the message that hearing children get from the world: they eavesdrop on their parents’ conversation about how to pay taxes, and although they may not understand all the words, it gives them more tools to put in their toolbox that they use to figure out the world. Well, what happens if deaf children don’t have the tools – worse, if the parents say, “No, these tools aren’t important”… which the child then reads as, “because you’re not important enough to repeat stuff to”?

When you combine this message of an active resistance to learning that deaf people get from society with some teachers’ tendencies to assume audist things – for instance, that deafness automatically equals mental retardation – you get a losing combination.

Like – when you read about educators who talk about deaf children, sometimes they focus on all our shortcomings and lacks and deficiencies. Well, what about focusing on society’s problems instead?

Personally, all the resistance from society sparked my super-stubborn nature and put me into overdrive to start learning everything about the world. And I know some other deaf bookworms/academics – I think that we tend to be more intense about intellectual topics than our hearing counterparts because we are constantly fighting that message of, “You don’t matter enough to share information with.” My reaction to that message was, “Well, fuck you, I’m gonna learn all the information in the world and then school you,” but I can definitely see how somebody with a more easygoing personality would be like, “Hmm, you know, maybe they have a point…”

I don’t know. Just thinking off the cuff. No real in-depth theory or research here. Just some ideas to start a discussion.

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  1. Edit: thatdeafdude, who created the original post, clarified that he was talking about his friends rather than deaf people in general and apologized for the confusion. Still, it generated an insightful conversation imo. [↩]
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Prejudiced students

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Posted by maxporter on January 16, 2012 – 9:20 AM
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In the past, I’ve talked about how prejudiced faculty members can be a barrier for students who are just trying to get through college without having to experience racism or sexism or whatever. But here is another piece: what happens when students alienate faculty members?

So, I used to go to a very “intellectually-rigorous” school; the student body was mainly composed of white upper-class individuals. Many were genuinely smart people who cared about intellectual discourse, but there were definitely some people whose parents had bought them education and schooling. One semester, I signed up for a course in African History that covered the slave trade, colonialism, and modern-day post-colonial issues. My class was pretty typical of the rest of the university: white upper-class prep-school graduates.

The professor was the chair of the department, and he had a PhD in the medical history of an African region (which I won’t name because I want to maintain my privacy). He had been studying African History for thirty or so years, and he had actually grown up in Africa, so I definitely respected his knowledge and range of experiences. One of my friends who had taken one of his classes said that he was very good at bringing in all of his knowledge and experiences – for instance, he told stories about the atrocities that colonizers had forced his grandparents to do, and then he’d tie it back to the lesson. So I was looking forward to the class.

However, from the very first day, many of the students acted as if they had superior knowledge to him. They were smart enough to get into this elite school, so they acted as if they were the smartest people in the world – which is a common problem at Ivy-League type schools. It’s just insulting how little they respected his expertise – it’s like a group of first-graders thinking that they are smarter than their teacher. Even if the student is naturally bright, the teacher still has more experience.

I don’t know if the students realized just how prejudiced and rude they were being, but they often would just keep carrying on the discussion among themselves instead of letting the professor chime in – they’d often talk over him, too. They would talk about their interpretation of the text, which was often full of racist and inaccurate notions that had absolutely no basis in fact. And they would often disrespect the terminology that my professor had outlined at the start of the semester – for instance, he pointed out that it is offensive to call African countries or ethnic groups ‘tribes’ because of the association of African peoples with primitive peoples, but the students would constantly say “tribe” in a context where it was not appropriate.

On the last day of class, our professor just didn’t moderate the discussion at all. He just sat back and let all the white kids say crap about Africa. That discussion was pretty horrible.

Throughout that entire semester, it was clear that the students’ unconscious or conscious racism – “black men are unarticulate and unintelligent” – was leaking through and affecting the class. It was awful. I had no idea how to handle it at the time. I ended up not doing anything, which I probably wouldn’t do today. Our professor often seemed weary in class, as if he dreaded coming to class – and, honestly, with that hostile attitude of the students, I don’t blame him.

It was disappointing because he couldn’t share his knowledge and expertise and experience. I did learn a lot from that class – for instance, we had to read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, which caused me to completely rethink the relationship between Europe / the US and Africa. But I really wish that my fellow students could have respected my professor enough to let him share the knowledge that he had gained over his life of studying African history.

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Teaching progressivism

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Posted by maxporter on January 3, 2012 – 10:46 PM
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I had a pretty interesting convo with one of my students today. I’m not a high school teacher, but that’s definitely one of my possible careers. In my opinion, part of being a good, effective progressive teacher, especially when working with social studies, is learning how to lead the student to their own conclusions.1 You don’t want to come right out, state your opinions, and expect the student to adopt them – which, unfortunately, is exactly what some teachers do.

This particular student is rather ethnic-nationalist. I can’t get into specifics due to confidentiality, but let’s just say that he belongs to an ethnic minority (not Native American – you’ll see why this matters in a moment) that was shat upon by the U.S. and that he knows more about the history behind that than many white students do. We get a lot of students like that – and it honestly just makes me glad to see people taking history seriously. I am just glad to see students reading about history, especially a lesser-taught history, even if the impetus to learn comes from nationalistic motivations. I’ll gladly talk about that aspect of history with them and help them keep it fact-based (for example, Tuskegee did happen, but abortions as genocide did not).

Because this student has already figured out that the American Dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, this student also asks a lot of questions, which I think some teachers2 find really exhausting – but I love it. Honestly, it’s partly because I can relate to that attitude – I didn’t ask teachers questions, but I definitely questioned everything (and still do). And it’s partly because I’m just glad to see him engaging in something (ie, school) that will help him to say ‘fuck it’ to The Man and create an awesome life.

Today, I was going over the questions on a test that my student had missed. We began talking about a question on the test; he had bubbled in an answer that said: “The U.S. Government respected the Cherokee right to have their own land and their own laws.” Now, you don’t even have to read the question – if you know the history of Native Americans, you know that that’s probably not the answer because this simply did not happen because of how hostile US/Native relations were.

I tried to communicate this to my student – “So, the thing about this answer is, it’s just not true. It never was.”

“Oh,” he said, “But I thought that the U.S. respected the Native American right to their own land, because they got these independent states and stuff?”

“Well,” I said, “That’s true, but the U.S. didn’t allow them to keep their territory. They went from this,” I indicated a large area, “to this,” I indicated a smaller area in a different spot.

So then my student got off into this tangent about how he had read that some contemporary Native Americans had tried to go back to a more traditional way of living but they couldn’t afford to so they went back on federal government assistance.

“I don’t know about that,” I said, “But the struggles that modern Native-Americans face is different than what they faced in their history. So, back to this question – the thing that you have to understand is that the U.S. was very very…” I frowned. “Not friendly to Native Americans.”

“Oh,” he said, “Like immigrants?” I’m pretty sure he was trying to get a rise out of me but who knows, really.

I just kind of wagged my head and said, “That’s possible, but that’s outside of the scope of the test. Now, back to this question.” (I wish I’d said, “We’re talking about Native Americans, though” or something similar. The gifts of hindsight.)

So then he was like, “Oh wait, so they took their land away?”

“Yep.”

“That’s fucked up, man.”

At this point, I was like, I think he understood, and I said, “Yep. OK, you feel good about question 12?” He did. “OK, let’s go to question 18 now…”

It feels good, dude. Looking back, it’s exactly what my best teachers in high school did – they guided us to concepts, and they showed us the knowledge necessary to become better people. I don’t know how I feel about being in the same room as 30 hearing teenagers all day long, but becoming a high school social studies teacher would be pretty nice in some ways.

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  1. Really, I was thinking about it – and, as long as the student uses logic and the opinions of all affected persons, I’m okay with whatever conclusion the student comes up with. It can be radically conservative for all I care, but the problem with radical conservatism is that it only focuses on the concerns of a few and is therefore logically inconsistent. [↩]
  2. To be fair to the other teachers, it doesn’t help that he’s chauvinistic – I can imagine that they wouldn’t want to be degraded by him all day. But he’s great with me, which gives me mixed feelings. I’m glad that I can be a male role model for him, but it bums me out whenever he talks about women in a demeaning way. It’s just gross. I’m usually just like, “Respect women,” and then I change the subject. [↩]
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How a narrow definition of literature can be problematic

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Posted by maxporter on December 30, 2011 – 9:00 AM
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I recently read a discussion about whether Harry Potter can be considered literature. The forum’s admin admitted that she had “my own, limited definition” of literature. It bothered me, to be honest, because the narrowness of what is considered ‘literature’ is why I stopped being an English major.

You see, all too often in high school, I got these white male English teachers who taught only old white men. For instance, I had an English teacher who assigned us Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad but didn’t discuss any of the racist/colonialist aspects of it. He idolized Edward Abbey and William Faulkner but never discussed work by people of color or females or anything. That attitude alienated me – I wanted to read stories about myself that I could relate to, not stories about “good ol’ boys.” Furthermore, I knew there was something fundamentally wrong about considering one cultural standard to be more “worthy” of the label ‘literature’ than other cultural standards, but I couldn’t exactly articulate it.

Granted, I had an amazing English teacher who acknowledged that the definition of ‘literature’ is too narrow. But he was the exception rather than the rule. That changed in college to some degree – for instance, I took a “women in art history” class that introduced me to an amazing essay that argued that art historians have traditionally excluded the contributions of women artists. The notion of the artist as a ‘great man’ is patriarchal; sexism gets codified when historians and curators decide what work is “worthy” of belonging in the canon of “great art” and exclude women artists.

That essay caused me to realize that the problem that I had with the narrow definition of ‘literature’ and ‘art’ is the fact that prejudices – racism, sexism, whatever – are codified into the idea of ‘art’ and ‘literature.’ If curators, historians, and academics don’t think that the voices of minority people or new ideas are worth hearing, they won’t be included in the canon of ‘art’ or ‘literature.’

And, unfortunately, I did experience that phenomenon firsthand in college.

Before I transferred, I went to a very, very white upper-class college. At first, I enjoyed its focus on academia because I love learning and contributing to an intellectual conversation, but after a while, my problems with it grew and I began to experience negative things. One of the most major negative experiences that I had in college was my creative writing course – it was so negative, in fact, that I stopped writing for a while after that course.

I had many, many, many problems with that course. I’ve talked about it before in this blog, so I won’t dwell on it too much, but one problem that I had with the class was the fact that my professor was an older white female with an extremely narrow definition of what she considered ‘literature.’ She was extremely prejudiced but believed that she was in the right because of the very narrow, specific definition of ‘literature.’ Looking back, I’m not sure if she knew that she was bigoted – maybe she thought she was totally justified in her approach to creative writing because of her narrow definition of literature.

Here’s a story. One day, an African-American student with a very “black” name brought in a first-person story that she had written in ebonics. We all read the stories and peer-reviewed them. When I read her story, my impression was that it was an extremely good story – the characterization was completely natural, the dialogue was superb, the grammar was generally quite good with a few quirks here and there, and the plot itself was very engaging. And her use of ebonics was totally justified – it added to the overall feel of the story and lent it a distinct rhythm/cadence that I enjoyed. It was only the first two or three pages of a larger story, but I wanted to read more.

She never said why she chose to write it that way, but my guess is that, since she had grown up in this specific minority, she wanted to write a story that would immerse the reader in the reality that she inhabited. In that particular city, white people and African-American people had distinctively different speech patterns. She spoke “white” at school, but I’m sure she probably went home and switched into a more natural mode of speaking. She wasn’t a white writer, so why write like one?

That story, however, did not go over well with my professor. The very next day, she gave us an angry lecture – she spoke about the purity of English and how the writing of Shakespeare and a bunch of other old dead white men are the highest standard of literature. She didn’t care whether or not we aspired to write books like theirs – she wanted us to learn how to write like old dead white men (eg, a superior form of writing) before writing in an “experimental” manner.

The fact that our professor got angry, frankly, upset and scared me – her reaction was disproportionately intense and we could all tell that it was fueled by her intense racism/fear. Also, by giving us a lecture immediately after a black student dared to write differently about the value of “great literature” that ignored anything that wasn’t by an old white man, she basically told us that the stories by people of color are worthless. I mean, this girl’s story wasn’t that “experimental” – all she did was write in a pattern of speech and a first-person point of view that immersed the reader in what she had grown up with. This is a well-established tradition – in fact, the first thing that came to my mind was Catcher in the Rye, which academics often consider ‘literature’ and, like this student’s story, also narrates the story in a very colloqual/immersive manner. Furthermore, it’s ironic that she expected us to write like Shakespeare because he was very ground-breaking.

I think that the root of her negative reaction was the fact that the girl’s story immersed our professor in a black person’s reality. And she was so racist that she absolutely did not want to experience that reality. Her attitude was, Who would want to know what it is like to be a black person for a few moments? I can’t imagine how that girl felt about being rejected in this manner.

That class is what alienated me from writing for a while – in addition to witnessing her bigotry, I also experienced it on the deaf and queer fronts. This made me realize that those who oppress other minorities will most likely oppress you, too, even if you’re in an unrelated minority. Like I said in my previous post, I was like, “If there are experts this bigoted in the writing world – agents, publishers, etc – who have the power to dictate the landscape of contemporary literature, how am I going to get my foot in the door? Will my deafness and queerness forever bar me from participating in the writing world?”

Literature is an ever-evolving and ever-changing phenomenon. If students are alienated by the prejudices of an earlier generation and their literary aspirations are quashed, how will literature evolve? It’s like that saying: “We kill the caterpillars, then complain that there are no butterflies.” What is “cutting-edge” today will be a “classic” work of art in a few centuries – historians too often appreciate the contributions of artists long after they’re gone.

Now, I don’t have a problem with the fact that some people prefer certain types of literature over others. If you like As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, that’s great! Where it gets problematic for me is when people act like certain types of literature are superior to others; the novels within their favorite genres (classical 18th century English authors, early-twentieth century American, novels by dead white men, etc.) are the only things that they consider to be ‘literature.’ All too often, adopting a narrow definition of ‘literature’ ends up excluding the contributions of minority writers simply because their stories don’t fit in with the cultural ideals of the academic. And that’s not right.

In the end, who cares what is ‘truly’ literature? There’s no such thing, really – it’s simply that the prejudices of old white academics have been codified into this list of “great” books. We need to set that aside and let young writers push the boundaries of what we consider ‘literature.’ We may end up with something trashy, or we may end up with something truly amazing and groundbreaking.

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Codifying transphobia into media

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Posted by maxporter on December 29, 2011 – 1:16 PM
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In college, I had a negative experience with a bigoted creative writing professor and experienced both audism and homo/transphobia from her. I went into depth about the deaf thing in an earlier post, but I didn’t talk about the queer aspect of it.

The TL;DR version of it is that I wrote a story about a trans man who goes home for Thanksgiving – he began transitioning two years ago, so he is not newly out. At this point, his family is quite accepting, for the most part. However, his mother is unaccepting, so the conflict that arises between them is the central plot point.

Our professor had individual conferences with us periodically, and my conference with her about that story was absolutely horrible. She told me that some of my characterization was impossible because nobody could possibly be that accepting of a trans man. Obviously, transsexual people were inherently disgusting and wrong, so my story was unrealistic because nobody could accept them at that level. Furthermore, she said that there was no way that his brother could accept him as a male only two years after transition because he wasn’t really a man. To top it off, she said that his mother’s prejudiced feelings were quite valid and understandable, then went into this whole long thing about how a mother holds her daughter in her arms and has all these dreams and hopes for her future life as a woman – and, when that child transitions to male, it completely shatters all those dreams. It was awful.

Basically, she was saying that prejudice is part of human nature. I absolutely don’t believe that that’s true – it’s part of a specific cultural ideal that has come to dominate the world. Also, it bothers me when people say this – it’s an excuse for them to not work on their prejudices. Rather than being ashamed of their prejudices, as they should be, they proudly flaunt them as part of ‘human nature.’

Thinking about it, that’s definitely one reason that I decided not to make a career out of being a writer, which I’d considered before. I was like, “If there are experts this bigoted in the writing world – agents, publishers, etc – who have the power to dictate the landscape of contemporary literature, how am I going to get my foot in the door? Will my deafness and queerness forever bar me from participating in the writing world?” I decided that I’d rather work in a nurturing and affirming environment that values diversity rather than constantly have to butt my head against ignorance every day.

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Returning to my roots as an intellectual

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Posted by maxporter on December 21, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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Earlier this year, I was pretty depressed. There were a lot of reasons, but one of them was that I wasn’t sure what role intellect has in activist struggles. I saw so many people around me struggling to simply make ends meet – they worked multiple jobs, but they still had to go to bed hungry. With so many people focused upon basic survival, I asked myself what the use of intellect was. Books may enrich your character, but they won’t put food in your mouth.

Over time, I’ve changed my mind about that issue and I’m happier now.

I realized that one of the problems facing our country is the fact that people are not given equal access to education. Intellect and education are not, in and of themselves, bad. They only become negative when certain people are given access to those things while other people are not.

When you look at who gets access to education, there is a huge race gap and a huge class gap. A recent study showed that African-American second-graders are actually more motivated than White second-graders – all children are excited about learning at first because they have not yet failed. But, by fourth grade, African-American students’ motivation falls way behind White students’.

And think of another dynamic that often happens in many cities – with so many options, parents get to pick and choose schools. The well-funded ones are able to retain more highly skilled teachers and offer tons of extracurriculars, so the quality of the school goes up as a result. It creates a significant rift in social classes.

All of that creates a world where the people who had the chance to go to “nice” schools just so happen to be the ones who end up being in charge. So, if you look around and see the people from the fancy schools doing shit like ruining the economy, it can be easy to blame education altogether. But, really, education isn’t the problem – unequal access to education is the problem.

When all is said and done, intellect and professional thinkers are important for a wide variety of reasons.

For one thing, thinkers create innovations that change the world. Whether it’s a revolutionary new building design, a skillfully written political speech, a strategically written news story, or a sick piece on the wall, ideas have impact upon the everyday lives of people.

Thinkers are also leaders. What I mean by that is – think of how important the religious figure of a community is. Priest, pastor, Rabbi, whatever. If you look at the life of a priest closely, it’s actually not that different than a counselor or psychotherapist. They deal with abstract concerns, rather than actual physical reality. That takes a certain kind of intellect.

My thinking is – society benefits from a wide variety of different people, right? People who are good with their hands can build things of value; people who are artistic can create a more pleasing world for us to live in; people who are thinkers can advance the condition of the human race. The thing is, all of this works out so much better if people are actually passionate about what they are doing – there are so many thinkers in working professions and vice-versa. It would be a lot more efficient to ensure equal access to a variety of options for everyone. For this reason, equal access to education is vital.

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Deaf for a day

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Posted by maxporter on August 3, 2011 – 2:01 PM
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In high school, I was required to take a language. For various reasons, I enrolled in ASL. One day, we had to do an assignment that struck me as extremely strange: pretend to be deaf for a day. The point was to understand first-hand how much privilege hearing people have in this society as compared to deaf people.

Since then, I’ve heard reports from people who went to school in other cities, even other states, that they also had to pretend to be deaf for a day. And it’s not just high school- I’ve had friends in college who have to do this.

Honestly, it makes me uncomfortable for several reasons.

Number one, it assumes that everyone in the class is a hearing person who is completely ignorant of deaf culture. This is a gross oversimplification and I think it’s fairly common in ASL classes.
I’m deaf, but I was taking ASL because I didn’t speak it that well and I wanted to improve my skills.1 I imagine that other deaf people would take ASL classes for similar reasons; being deaf does not mean that we came out of the womb automatically knowing ASL. The exercise oversimplifies the diversity of the d/Deaf community.

Also, what about hearing kids who have Deaf parents, siblings, or other people close to them? I imagine that they learned at a very young age that people would treat them very differently in public when they signed versus when they spoke. Even though it’s impossible to know first-hand what it’s like to be deaf, I’d imagine that CODAs/SODAs understand society’s reaction to deafness a lot better than ASL teachers give them credit for.

Which leads into my next point: it is impossible to know what it is like to be d/Deaf unless you actually are d/Deaf. The experience of ordering french fries at McDonald’s by writing on a slip of paper and then carrying a conversation in sign with your ASL classmate does not even come close to approximating all the complexities of being deaf. Frankly, I find it almost insulting that a teacher would be so presumptuous as to think that signing in public is even remotely close to approximating the d/Deaf experience.

One reason that I think that this kind of exercise does more harm than good is because most of these people will eventually work with deaf people. If an interpreter is allowed to assume that she knows everything about my experience simply because she took ASL classes, I can’t see how the working relationship would be very good.

So that’s why I dislike the “deaf for a day” types of activities. What do you guys think? Can people benefit from these exercises in any way?

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  1. It didn’t work out so well, by the way. [↩]
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