Associate Professor of English, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
Field of expertise: Writing Studies
- Website
- Twitter: @slkersch (although I rarely use it)
Describe your hearing: I wear two behind-the-ear hearing aids and speechread well in one-on-one and small-group settings. Due to years of childhood speech therapy, I use my voice to communicate for myself when conversing with hearing people and sign when around other signing deaf people.
Here’s me—in this professional head shot my short brown hair, red rectangular glasses, white skin, and many-toothed smile are readily visible, but my two behind-the-ear hearing aids are not. I have been deaf since birth. When I was about one, my parents learned I was deaf and my mom immediately enrolled us in parent-child sign language classes. I learned to sign before I could talk, but once I began talking, my mother reports that I largely stopped signing.
I never completely let go of that early language learning, however—while I do not have deaf family members (other than those who have late-in-life hearing loss), I did attend a school with a significant population of deaf students from 5th through 8th grade, and began using sign language interpreters and CART when I went to college at The Ohio State University. I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to start graduate school in literary studies, but after taking an “Intro to Comp Studies” course as an MA student, ended up getting my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition.
I’m currently an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, where I think a lot about different forms of writing and composing with and around disability as well as the ways that disability matters to all kinds of everyday experiences. I didn’t start focusing on disability studies until I was well into my first tenure-track job, though—it took me a long time to make explicit connections between my lived experiences of negotiating communication, interactional access, and building an academic career with the kind of theorizing I was doing around how people name and articulate differences—of all kinds—during everyday interactions.
One of the biggest challenges that I face—and that is common to many disabled faculty members—involves building inclusive environments in which I can authentically and fully participate. By this, I mean situations where I can contribute in a timely fashion to an ongoing conversation or meeting in a way that enables others to attend to what I am sharing and incorporate it into the discussion. Too often, disabled faculty members experience environments where their participation is marginalized or mediated through interfaces, material arrangements, and patterns of behavior that frustrate rather than enable inclusion.
In a room of 10 people I’m not likely to be able to completely follow a back and forth conversation without an interpreter. And even when an interpreter is in the room, I almost always still need to ask for some shifts in the interaction. Right now almost all of the responsibility for making those changes falls on me. So the hardest part is getting others in the room to participate in the work that is involved in making the kinds of changes needed.
An accommodation I’d love to have is actually an improvement on one that I already have and enjoy using. I love working with sign language interpreters. But there’s so much that goes on around making that work proceed well that I’d really like to have automatically be part of the experience: getting access copies of scripted remarks without having to go through complicated negotiations each time; well-structured processes for securing interpreting in which highly qualified interpreters well-trained in academic transliteration are readily available; having presenters, meeting organizers, and committee chairs consider interpreters’ needs when setting up rooms, sending out meeting materials, and more.
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