Agent of change

"A leader is a change agent (one who creates change) working in an active, collaborative process with others" (Cress 43).

UNPACKING PRIVILEGE/BEING OTHERED

being othered

identity

During one of their breaks, the students played with the stuffed toy in the room, Toothless. Toothless has hearing aids. I heard one girl remark “let’s take the hearing aids off of toothless, he is tired of being hearing.”

I included this story here because I think it fit with the "being othered" theme. These mainstreamed students are surrounded by all hearing people except the 9-11 other students in their grade who are also D/deaf and who may not use the same communication modality. I think this story is important, to me, in realizing how we did not grow up the same. This awareness is essential to developing empathy to people's situations and becoming a good ally.

What are your thoughts on the intersections of hearing privilege in the context of race and/or ethnicity?

There is one student who is Deaf and autistic, and some of the students sometimes make fun of her for this and the teacher must step in. When learning about intersectionality my freshman year, we learned it was different forms of “disadvantage” people have, and I see how this affects students at the school. For the girl who is Deaf +, she is looked at differently because she is Deaf, and the other Deaf students look at her differently because she’s autistic. She’s a minority inside of another minority, and she’s treated even more differently because of that.

For me, I’m hearing, white and able-bodied. I have privilege in all these aspects. For people who are Deaf and a different ethnicity/race/etc, they are fighting multiple systematic issues, and usually underrepresented in each respective group. All these things overlap to make basic activities harder from a systematic perspective.

ALLY/Advocate concepts

Being an Advocate

Personal Autonomy: the capacity to decide for oneself and pursue a course of action in ones life

This idea of personal autonomy is essential to being an advocate. I'm going to reference back to a story I told in the "Accountability" section of this ePortfolio. The story was about how my teacher told me she allows the students to choose whether they want to use closed captions or the interpreter. I think this ability to choose is the difference between the "helping/fixing" terms we learned about at the start of class and the term "serving." D/deaf people do not want to be spoken for and want the ability to make their own decisions.

allyship

Allyship is not an identity, nor is it self defined. Allyship is a process and our work and efforts must be recognized by the people we seek to ally ourselves with. That being said... here are ways to improve your allyship:

Educate yourself about the Deaf community.
Own your Hearing Privilege (along with other privileges) and put it to good use.
Accept feedback! The best way to learn and grow is from feedback of people in the Deaf community.
If you can make something more visual, take that opportunity.
Be aware of the difference between the term "serve" and the terms "helping" and "fixing"
Unlearn and re-evaluate your previous thoughts/beliefs/attitudes.

the 7 cs

Individual

Conciousness of Self

Definition: being aware of our own beliefs, values, attitudes and emotions

Personal Example: Being aware of my own privileges, and how my culture/the way I grew up is very different from the students in the classroom.

Congruence

Definition: Thinking, feeling and behaving with consistency, authenticity and honesty towards others.

Personal Example: By the end of the semester, I was not afraid to tell the students I was signing with when I did not understand them.

Commitment

Definition: Energy that motivates the individual to serve and that drives the collective effort

Personal Example: As an ASL student who also loves kids, I was committed to helping my service site in whatever way I could and learning and growing as much as I can in the process.

Group

Collaboration

Definition: Working with others in a common effort.

Personal Example: The common effort this semester was learning and growing while helping the Deaf community. I collaborated with Marla and Kristin, continuously asking them for advice and perspectives and taking their constructive feedback by learning from it. I collaborated with my teacher to figure out how I can best support her classroom. Lastly, I collaborated with Kendall and my other classmates to ask how their placements were going and what they were doing there.

Common Purpose

Definition: Performing collaborative work with shared aims and values

Personal Example: every person in this class choose to take it to get more involved in the Deaf community. We each wanted to learn, grow, and get more involved compared to the classroom setting.

Controversy with Civility

Definition: Reorganizes two fundamental realities of any creative effort: differences in viewpoints is inevitable, differences must be aired openly but with civility for the group to accomplish its task effectively.

Personal Example: My group did not agree on how to pursue with our group presentation. We talked about this at length and eventually came to an agreement.

Citizenship

Definition: Process where the individual and the collaborative group become responsibly connected to the community through the service activity.

Personal Example: By getting involed with CHIP and growing relationships with the students, I feel more connected to the community than I did before.

Agents of change

Educating the People Around Me

I think the biggest way I am becoming an agent of change is educating the people around me about the systematic issues D/deaf individuals face. I am currently in the process of setting up a presentation of Audism and Hearing Privilege with our DEI chair in my sorority. Using your platform and network to inform people of systematic issues going on that they may not be aware of is the first step in becoming an agent of change.

Learning More About Accessible Communication

In our assignment #9 in the course, I wrote about how I was being an agent of change by always speaking and signing everything I was saying to make sure everyone had access to what I was communicating. When I recieved the feedback on this comment, Marla told me to dig deeper and watch what's really happening with the students when they use SimCom.

SimCom is not a completely accessible way to communicate because it is not a real language. I knew this at the beginning of the semester, but it's easy to lose site of something when you're in a specific environment pretty often.

When Sim Com is used, there are words ASL words missed due to hearing people's English brains working faster than our hands can. English also lacks the expressitivity that ASL has. Students who utilize ASL do not get the same access to communication in the contained classroom because of these facts.

After this, I tried my best to communicate as accessibly as possible. I would sign to the students who utilize ASL, speak to the oral students, and try to communicate what other students were saying in the students prefered communication modality. Was this the perfect solution? Probably not, but I am learning and growing everyday and always open to hear what the best course of action may be.

How I Feel Restricted/unable to Be an Agent of Change

I don’t really understand what I can do to combat the systematic issues that are going on in the schools. I feel like looking at things from the top down makes you feel very small. It’s hard to figure out what exactly you can do when the system is so large and there is so many layers to it. Feeling like a small and underqualified fish in a big pond can be overwhelming at times.

Cress, Christine M. Learning Through Serving. A Student Guidebook for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Across Academic Disciplines and Cultural Communities. Stylus Pub., 2013.

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