Meet your students: Taylor

What are her frustrations so far?

“In one of my classes, all the content is online in writing, and I am often confronted with walls of text and nothing to break them down. This makes it hard for me to do the reading since ASL is so different from English.”

“Sometimes it feels like my program doesn’t care about less traditional students. Lots of the networking opportunities happen outside of class time when I need to care for my family and I cannot always find a babysitter, especially on short notice.”

“One of my professors often speaks with their hand covering their mouth and it affects how well Zoom captions what he is saying. It’s really annoying when this happens and I don’t have an ASL interpreter with me.”

“When we work in groups, students in my group often talk to my ASL interpreter when they want to talk to me, instead of addressing me directly.”

What has helped Taylor feel included in the UMaine community?

“Events where I don’t have to make a special request to have closed captions because I know they will be available to me.”

“In one of my classes, we can send questions to guest speakers in advance of their talk. It makes it easy for me to participate.”

“In another one of my classes, the professor asked that everyone who records a video response in the discussion board also corrects the captions of their video before they post it to the course, and everybody is doing it!”