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Concept Cue
Concept Cue
My involvement in the Deaf community was very limited before I began my education at SLCC. Although I am just starting in this course of study, I have already seen a shift in the amount that I am interacting with the Deaf community. More importantly, I have seen a fundamental shift in my understanding of the Deaf community. The coursework I have been doing as part of the Interpreter Training Program (ITP) pre-requisites, main program classes, and Civically Engaged Learning coursework has opened my eyes and been a big contributor to these shifts.
In recent years, before I began studying at SLCC I had taken some community education ASL classes and had one Deaf friend who occasionally invited me to get togethers with other Deaf people. However, I was unsure how to interact and jump into Deaf culture and mainly kept to myself. I can remember attending my friend’s baby shower and I think I made a couple of quick comments to maybe two or three other people (of 40!) - telling my name or how I knew my friend. I didn’t know what to expect at a social gathering of Deaf people, how to jump into conversation, I was not confident in my ASL skills, and so on. It was very awkward and uncomfortable and I’m sure many people wondered what the deal was with the weird hearing girl who came to the party!
My coursework at SLCC has taught me much about the Deaf Community. My Intercultural Communications class opened my eyes to different cultural considerations and conventions, concepts like privilege and ethnorelativism, and taught me about how to live and interact in a multicultural world. These concepts are very relevant to the Deaf community. Deaf people deal with “hearing privilege” everyday as they move about in the world. Any hearing person who wants to enter the Deaf World needs to maintain an ethnorelative view and must be aware of their hearing privilege and how to appropriately deal with power dynamics and learn to be an ally to the Deaf community. It’s also important to learn about Deaf culture and how the Deaf community works, so you know how to be a conscientious participant in that culture/community. The ASL classes I have taken at SLCC have all been taught by Deaf teachers and have been instrumental in helping me learn more about Deaf culture from members of the community. They have helped me to build my knowledge of ASL which has increased my confidence in getting more involved in the Deaf community.
The ITP courses (Connections to Community, Ethics in Interpreting, etc.) have further opened my eyes to issues first raised in my Intercultural Communications class and the readings in my ASL classes about Deaf History and Deaf issues. These classes have forced me to think deeply about my own beliefs, attitudes, and how I would respond in tricky ethical dilemmas. The Connections to Community class has been an opportunity to learn about Civic Engagement and Community Engaged Learning, where you take the principles you’ve been learning about in class and put them into practice in the real world. The coursework for this class has given me the final push to really try to dive into the Deaf community. It has helped me to increase my social activity, service to, learning about, and learning from the Deaf community. This has happened through attending Deaf social and religious events in the community, one on one mentoring to work on ASL and interpreting skills with a Deaf person, attending workshops related to ASL and interpreting, providing volunteer hours to add Closed Captioning to online videos, so they are accessible, service hours in the Deaf community (like donating needed items to food drives and helping set up for events), and so on.
Community Engaged Learning courses have helped me to make connections between my classroom learning and the real world. I have seen the principles I’ve been learning about come to life and how they apply in daily life. Through my coursework at SLCC, I have seen my ASL skills improve, my knowledge of Deaf culture grow, and my engagement with the Deaf community increase dramatically. This will only grow as I continue with my Community Engaged classes and I know it will help me be a more skilled, sensitive, and aware interpreter.
Community Organization Report
The Community Partner I researched is the Utah Schools for the Deaf (USDB). I researched USDB through in person visits and their website. I am also a substitute teacher on one of the campuses (EDS) and this allowed me to learn even more deeply about this location. I love being involved with this organization in a small way. It is a wonderful experience to work with the awesome students and teachers at USDB and see Deaf education in action. I have found my time there to be surprisingly fulfilling and I plan to continue being involved with this organization. USDB’s website is https://www.usdb.org/ and the website for the Elizabeth Delong School (EDS) is https://www.usdb.org/programs/deaf-and-hard-of-hearing/eds/. (USDB serves both Deaf and Blind students, but I will focus on features/services for Deaf students for this report.)
My in-person visits allowed me to see the campuses of JMS and EDS IN Salt Lake City and Springville, respectively. It really is an enlightening experience to see the schools in person. There are so many little details that make sense when you learn about the Deaf community - glass/window walls throughout for maximum accessibility and to allow for ease of visual communication, alarms that both make a sound and flash lights and have scrolling text boards, round tables in the lunch room to enable visual communication, and so on. From the websites, I was able to learn more about the Deaf individuals who the schools are named after, Elizabeth Delong and Jean Massieu. Something I didn’t know (even though I work there!) is that USDB serves students up to age 22! USDB provides education in different tracks - ASL classrooms and Listening and Spoken Language tracks giving parents options and providing choices to suit each family.
USDB’s mission is to “educate students who are deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind, blind, or low vision so they can achieve their full academic, social, and career potential”. They have been serving this community for over 100 years. Currently, they serve over 4,000 students throughout the state of Utah. USDB provides a model of education for Deaf and Blind students that leads the nation and is striving to be a caring, responsible, and innovative approach to serve this population.
Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind provide resources for Deaf students and their families in many ways, both in and out of school, from infancy through the beginning of adulthood. First, they provide support and education to parents and Deaf infants through their Parent and Infant Program (PIP). Their mission is to “empower parents as an unbiased guide to help the child reach their potential in language, social, emotional, and academic development”. This is a huge benefit to help families as they start down a road that may be unfamiliar to them, during a critical time of language acquisition. Additionally, they match families with a Deaf mentor which is a huge benefit to Deaf children who may be the first/only Deaf person in their family. USDB provides a Deaf centered pre-K-12th grade school option for students. They also provide audiological services, Deaf school extracurricular activities, summer camps, and statewide outreach programs.
The Civic Engagement concept of Community Engaged Learning and Research is explored by this organization as they directly address Deaf community identified concerns with academic researched backed solutions. The Deaf community has unfortunately suffered through long and ongoing misunderstanding and oppression in many ways, but specifically in Deaf education. USDB aims to address this concern by providing an alternative to public school education in predominantly hearing classrooms. USDB aims to be Deaf centered and provide a bilingual approach. Students learn both ASL and English in a supportive, accessible environment where they are surrounded by other Deaf students and many more Deaf staff members than at a typical public school. (Although, there is room for improvement here and more Deaf teachers and staff are needed.) Research has shown much better outcomes when Deaf students have the option to be educated in these types of settings. While no organization is perfect, USDB is a remarkable organization that provides much needed services for the Deaf community in Utah.
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