Category Archives: teaching

Presentando The Mind Hears [La Mente Oye] a académicos de habla hispana

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-translated by Ana

Our goal for The Mind Hears is to have it serve as a global resource for deaf and HoH (hard of hearing) academics. Though countries differ markedly in the degree of resources provided to deaf/HoH individuals, our hope is that this blog can be a refuge and forum for all, regardless of where you are. To date, however, most of our blog contributors and followers have been in the US and Europe. Taking advantage of the fact that Ana is Colombian, we have reproduced our Mission Statement here in Spanish in the hopes of reaching our Spanish-speaking friends and colleagues worldwide. We welcome help with translating our mission statement to other languages.

Brightly colored word cloud in Spanish of the most common words appearing in the post below. Nube de palabras en varios colores de las palabras más comunes en la entrada de blog.

En el año 2018, Michele Cooke y yo, ambas profesoras en la Universidad de Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, decidimos empezar un blog que reflejara nuestras experiencias como personas con sordera en un ambiente académico. Así nació “The Mind Hears [La Mente Oye]”. Dada nuestra localización geográfica, las entradas del blog han sido – hasta ahora – publicadas en inglés. Con la esperanza de que este blog llegue a ser un recurso global para personas sordas trabajando en universidades, traducimos aquí la misión del blog al español. Esperamos que esto lleve a nuestros colegas de habla hispana a contribuir entradas al blog en el futuro.

Misión

Este blog está escrito por y para académicos en cualquier etapa de su carrera con algún grado de sordera. Aquí usamos el término “sordo” para representar a todas las personas con discapacidad auditiva, independientemente del grado de sordera y del modo de comunicación preferido (ya sea oral o por lengua de señas). Los objetivos de este blog son:

  • Proporcionar un foro para la colaboración abierta entre académicos sordos  
  • Compartir estrategias para prosperar con sordera en el mundo académico 
  • Fomentar una red de académicos sordos que promuevan estrategias de comunicación inclusivas en las instituciones académicas.

¿Por qué un blog?

Como académicos sordos, continuamente hemos enfrentado obstáculos en el camino al éxito profesional en entornos diseñados para y por personas sin discapacidades auditivas. Nuestras experiencias no han sido todas iguales. Dependiendo de  nuestros antecedentes/proveniencia y de las instituciones en las que nos encontramos, es probable que tengamos diferencias en acceso a recursos y en la capacidad de abogar por si mismos. Debido a que la sordera puede ser una discapacidad invisible, hemos a menudo perdido oportunidades para reconocernos y aprender estrategias efectivas los unos de los otros. A través de este blog, esperamos alcanzar a académicos sordos y con problemas de audición en todo el mundo, tanto para reducir el aislamiento, como para armar una “caja de herramientas” comunitaria de recursos e ideas. La sordera es variable y puede afectarnos de muchas y diferentes maneras, pero a través de la experiencia compartida del blog, esperamos brindar algo de valor a todos aquellos que visitan y contribuyen a nuestras discusiones.

¿Por qué académicos?

Como académicos, estamos involucrados en muchas actividades que requieren comunicación continua, a menudo con colegas y estudiantes oyentes. Dictamos clases, presentamos seminarios, participamos en comités y páneles de asesoría, moderamos sesiones de discusión y dirigimos reuniones de grupo, participamos en actividades de divulgación pública y nos comunicamos con la prensa. Muchos de los impedimentos a la comunicación que se presentan en estas actividades son exclusivos al entorno académico — y el éxito de todos los académicos, oyentes o sordos, depende de la comunicación productiva en estas situaciones. Sin embargo, los académicos sordos a menudo no encontramos soluciones adecuadas para los obstáculos a la comunicación: nuestros audiólogos no tienen suficientes clientes académicos, y las oficinas de servicios para discapacitados en las universidades están diseñadas para servir principalmente a los estudiantes de pregrado (no profesores, estudiantes de posgrado u otros académicos). Al centrarnos en la comunidad académica sorda, particularmente a niveles después del pregrado, tenemos la intención de crear un recurso personalizado que ayude a todos los académicos que se identifican como sordos a alcanzar nuestro potencial profesional.

¿Por qué “The Mind Hears [La Mente Oye]”?

El título de nuestro blog proviene de una carta escrita por el autor Víctor Hugo al educador sordo, Ferdinand Berthier. Hugo escribió:

“¿Qué importa la sordera del oído, cuando la mente oye? La única sordera, la sordera verdadera, la sordera incurable, es la de la mente.”

Estas líneas encapsulan la poderosa idea que nuestro potencial para contribuir al ámbito académico, al conocimiento y a la sociedad no está limitado por nuestra capacidad o incapacidad de escuchar sonidos. Las dificultades que surgen al trabajar en entornos académicos dominados por la audición se pueden enfrentar con creatividad y resiliencia, las cuales son características de la mente. Las herramientas que las personas sordas usan para facilitar la comunicación, incluyendo la lengua de señas, la lectura labios, el uso de audífonos, los subtítulos y los implantes cocleares, por nombrar solo algunos, ilustran el potencial ilimitado del ingenio humano. La declaración de Hugo también refleja nuestra convicción de que la colaboración con la mente abierta a nuevas ideas, a la inclusión y a aquellos que abordan las cosas de manera diferente a la nuestra, puede beneficiarnos a todos. Ya sea que nos hayamos criado usando lengua de señas en la comunidad Sorda, o que recientemente hayamos perdido la audición, todos los que trabajamos en el mundo académico hemos desarrollado formas de ser exitosos. A veces podemos ver beneficios en nuestra sordera (por ejemplo, Deaf Gain), y otras veces nuestra sordera puede ser una carga no deseada (por ejemplo, Conquering faculty meetings (or not…)). Este blog es un hogar para todas estas perspectivas y experiencias. Esperamos que hallen en este blog un lugar de encuentro gratificante de mentes verdaderamente empoderadas, ingeniosas y abiertas.

Dear Students: Listen Up. Like, for Real. 

teaching, , , , ,
Feminine hands top on a laptop. The typer wears an off-white sweater. Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash.

A love letter from your HoH Professor

Hi folks. I can’t wait to learn with you this semester. But first, an admission before we can get started. And I call this an admission because it feels like I’ve done something wrong, that I’ve made a mistake to which I must confess. Apologize? Confess? Perhaps it is both.

I am deaf. 

But I have done nothing wrong. (I must remind myself of this.) 

Well, almost deaf. I use the word “deaf” to placate the hearing; when I use the phrase “hard of hearing” with hearing folks it is too often misinterpreted as an invitation to a needling Q&A session. The word “deaf” is just a more concrete, absolute word for the uninitiated to accept. So “deaf” it is. But I’m not deaf—I can hear, barely. 

Surprised? I thought so. I am, too. 

When I was your age, I sat in the back row of the classroom, mostly silent, in denial and driven by fear. 

Look at me now: loud, confident, witty, encouraging in our classroom each day. Standing at ease, fielding questions, strolling the classroom as you ponder, think, write. Crushing your stereotypes and assumptions about what it means and looks like to be disabled—beautiful, smart, funny. And yes, I know I’m the one person in your life besides your grandpa that wears hearing aids. 

Your curiosity about my deafness is endearing but exposes the limitations of your experience. The first and (usually only) question: How did it happen? Why are you deaf? 

Wouldn’t I love to know. Like there was a playground mishap and now a little scar on my eardrum that blocks some sound from going in and out. No, children. No, there is no exotic origin; no riveting nor heartwarming story. Deaf for me just is. Has been. Will always be.

Back to the classroom. I’ll let you in on the best-kept secret of my trade because we need to talk about this if our time together is going to matter. 

Great teaching starts with trusting students. Think back: I bet the best teachers that you’ve had, at times, let go of their control in the classroom. They understood that classrooms are a space for collaborative invention. They didn’t talk at you, they learned with you, even abandoning a mediocre lesson if it meant the reward—your engagement and investment—was worth the risk of class failing extravagantly as it unfolded. Great teachers trust their students to contribute to the classroom as knowledgeable, interested peers. And again and again, I’ve seen students rise to this challenge they’re given and thrive.  

But I think that trusting students looks a little different for teachers with disabilities, like me. 

No matter how student-centered or democratic a classroom dynamic is, professors always have power over students. But what if it’s the other way around? What if a disability puts the professor at the mercy of her class?  What if I’m at your mercy?

Is there anything as vulnerable as a deaf person standing in front of an expectant audience? One that is looking to be led, to be given something (knowledge—something so abstract, fragile, personal)? Sometimes my colleagues tell me about their teaching nightmares: showing up naked to class; going to the wrong classroom; being forced to teach a class on which they know nothing about; showing up to take a test for which they haven’t studied. This is anxiety working itself out. The anxiety of a HoH professor is palpably different from this. We can prepare and utilize the latest microphones and other accommodations, but it always happens. Being exposed, I mean.  

It happens often. A student raises their hand and offers a question. I’m excited: questions mean students are listening and engaging. It also means I’ve created a classroom in which they feel comfortable and vulnerable. They trust me. But instead of a question, I hear muffled patches about analysis and … argument, … I think. 

Crap. Time to sweat. There’s a host of solutions and I need to flip through them all to 1) keep the cadence going and 2) assure the student doesn’t feel awkward. Do I:

  • Ask the student to repeat themselves? Power imbalance makes that tricky.
  • Ask a student closer to me to “translate”–basically re-stating what the first student said? There’s no guarantee I’ll understand the translator; there’s additional burden on folks in the front rows that they didn’t ask for. 
  • Play pretend: “That’s a great question. How about I offer it to the class first to see what your classmates have to say?” Or defer and delay: “That’s a great question. How about we chat after class about that?” But what if they asked a simple yes/no question? Awkward.
  • And, recently, ask the student to briefly pull down their mask so I can read their lips while they talk? (Side note: the painful, masked-up hell of this pandemic is worthy of another letter.)

Over the years, attentive friends and family members have learned to know and even expect “the look;” the exact facial expression I make when I have no clue what someone is saying. I merely had to turn to them, and they’d repeat (this is also the second option, above). This degree of trust took years to build. 

As the room sits silently waiting for my answer, I’ve got “the look” on my face, but not a single student understands. Our classroom was spirited, brisk, and it’s now still and all eyes on me. 

Which option is safe? On whom do I call? Who can I trust? The nightmare plays out yet again.

You registered for my class, but you didn’t sign up to accommodate and well, here I am, broken and all. So here I sit, writing this letter, warning you about the role you’re about to take on whether you like it or not: my teacher. 

Yours, 

Professor Heaser

white woman with dark shoulder length hair

Sara Heaser is a Lecturer of English at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, where she specializes in basic/co-requisite and first-year writing curriculum, pedagogy, and program development. Her writing about teaching has been featured on the Bedford Bits blog, the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and Composition Studies. Her favorite aspects of her job are mentoring undergraduate education students and new teachers, tutoring adult learners, and teaching first-year, first-semester writing students. She is an alum of the Dartmouth Summer Seminar for Studies in Composition Research and Winona State University.

New Year’s Resolution 2022: Making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf/HoH colleagues

advocacy, conferences, daily grind, grad school, job searches, meetings, networking, teaching, ,
Man colored square post-it notes on a dark surface. Each post-it note bears a New Year's resolution, including one that says "make workplace accessible".

The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In what is becoming a The Mind Hears New Year tradition (see posts from 2019, 2020, and 2021), we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible. You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Below we provide an outline of the best approaches for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.

Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard of hearing colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone (see post on the impact of the Mind Hears). This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see post on Where are the deaf/HoH academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.

Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very useful employment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work and not expecting us to bear all of the burden of creating accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations and making sure that technology/accommodations function is never-ending and exhausting work that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service (see post on making an impact at high stakes conferences, post on conquering faculty meetings, and post on teaching very large classes). Your understanding and your help changing our workplaces can make a huge difference to us.  For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question, ask them to repeat, even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of ensuring speakers repeat questions (see post on listening fatigue and post on the mental gymnastics of hearing device use)? Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH hereand here).

One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (see post on working with sign interpreters and post on networking with deaf colleagues who use interpreters), oral interpreters, CART (see post on Captions and Craptions), or FM systems (see post on Using FM systems at conferences). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. What works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if the situations seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion.

Want to be a better ally and make your workplace accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues? Follow this link to read our list of recommendations. We welcome your comments and suggestions either to this post or directly within the document at this link.

Lessons from the pandemic: work innovations that we are keeping

daily grind, meetings, teaching, ,
An open laptop shows gallery view of a zoom meeting, with faces of about 20 people -- each in their own zoom box" -- slightly out of focus. A blue-green ceramic mug is next to the computer. Both are on top of a slightly distressed looking wooden table.
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

The last year required a myriad of adjustments in our professional lives. For those of us in academia, much of it entailed moving our teaching and service to remote format. The pandemic isn’t over, but many universities around the world have taken steps to return to face-to-face operations. When the current semester started, we, Ana and Michele, shared notes on what aspects of remote teaching and remote working went well for us, and which we hoped to keep no matter what mode our future work takes (e..g  in-person, hybrid mode, or remote; masked or unmasked). Because we experienced many of the same struggles and benefits, we haven’t attributed our experiences and discoveries to a particular person.

Teaching

Switching to remote work mode in 2020 and 2021 forced us to shake up our teaching, making us re-examine our class content and many of our class practices (see our post on accommodating a pandemic). This push towards innovation left us with several practices that we wanted to bring back with us from the pandemic — some because they are helpful with our deafness, but others simply because they seem to improve the pedagogy of our courses.

  • Zoom office hours can be more accessible and more inclusive than in-person office hours. Though in-person conversation always provides greater connection, students appreciate being able to drop in with a question from wherever they are, instead of making the trek across campus to our offices. This ease of access meant they are more liable to come even if all they have is a small question. Also, if we are zooming from private spaces we don’t have to wear masks, which allows speech reading (see our post on navigating masked world) – with this and auto-captions enabled we are able to follow conversations often better than we could in person. 
  • Going online forced us to explore and use the tools available in our class management software, which we had resisted exploring fully before, primarily due to inertia. We found that we could offer better feedback and grade more equitably assignments submitted online. For example, messy handwriting is less of an issue with online assignments. We could also come up with more creative ways for students to engage with the class content and work together (e.g. challenges that involved students taking pictures of themselves with class-related content; collaborative jamboard tasks). Previously, we had over-relied on the standard think-pair-share and we found that jamboards opened new ways of having students work together. We could even set up a break-out room for folks who prefer to work on their own, rather than having them feel obligated to work with their chatty neighbor. For seminar style courses, one of us started using Perusall for reading assignments where students post questions and can comment on the questions of others. Having those discussions beforehand meant that students came to the seminar ready to engage with the material more deeply. We have continued to make use of several of the class management tools we discovered while in-person this semester. 
  • Inertia had also prevented us from previously trying a flipped classroom approach. But in order to provide both synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities for students while fully remote, we were essentially “forced” to flip our classroom for the first time. We discovered that we really liked it! Students seemed much more engaged/aware when they came to class having previously watched one of our videos on the topic being covered that day. We had assigned readings in the past, but it seemed like most students never read the assignments. The combination of pre-recorded videos with a required follow-up quiz led to much better questions in class and also less of a rush to try to fit a given topic within a class period, and we have continued using a flipped approach for our in-person classes this semester.
  • Because engaging remote students to participate was more challenging than being in-person, we started using anonymous polling. Anonymous polling tools, such as the Zoom poll, Mentimeter and Poll Everywhere, provide a powerful way to engage students. During remote teaching, we found that these anonymous polls allowed students who might have otherwise been uncomfortable to raise their hand to express their opinions. We have now tried to use some of these tools for all courses, whether in-person, hybrid or remote.
  • Several platforms allow written questions during live lectures. You provide a URL to the audience and they can then access a Q&A forum from their smartphones or laptops. For deaf/HoH instructors, this provides a way to understand student questions in large courses. Even before indoor mask requirements, we would struggle to understand questions or comments from folks beyond the first row (see our post about teaching large classes). One of us has experimented with receiving questions this way using Google Audience Tools in her large (~230 students) in-person lecture class this semester; in fact, this has been the strategy that has made it possible for her to interact with masked students at all . Allowing anonymous questions to be submitted has yielded more student questions, while reducing communication barriers for us as deaf/HoH instructors. It would be great to see more live presentations take advantage of this functionality and discover ways to incorporate audience/student responses to each other too.

Meetings

All of the benefits and drawbacks of remote teaching also apply for remote meetings. It can be difficult for deaf/HoH folks to follow in-person meeting discussions, and when we are leading meetings we often miss what folks contribute, which can erode the flow of meeting discussions, as it does the classroom discussions.

Faculty meetings 

Faculty meetings are notoriously deaf/HoH unfriendly (see our post about faculty meetings) and during the period of remote work, we were able to participate more fully. The ability to see colleagues’ faces while talking and combination of auto-captions and generated transcript (once our institution actually purchased the zoom auto-captions option) did make it easier to follow the entirety of zoom meetings. We have fortunately continued to have remote faculty meetings this semester. One of us has had one masked in-person faculty event; at this in-person event she felt herself drift into the background, as in pre-pandemic times when speaking would reveal we had missed part of the conversation.

We have mixed feelings about advocating to never have in-person faculty meetings again. The chit-chat before and after meetings improves department cohesion. The shared laughter or groans in response to lighter moments or bad news helps camaraderie. At the same time, we recall so many times when we heard folks laugh and wondered what joke we had missed. We feel that we participate more equitably in zoom meetings than for in-person faculty meetings. Going forward, in-person meetings could be alternated with remote meetings in order to harness the benefits of both meeting modes.

Committee meetings 

Pre-pandemic, committee meetings often involved scrambling to get across campus in time for the start of the meeting. Being able to participate from our offices or homes remotely, meant not only that the meeting was easier to follow (see comments above), but we also avoided missing the first few minutes in the hustle across campus. We’ve also been participating in a greater number of professional committees with folks at other universities and even from other countries. In the before-times, such committees might have met in person during one or more of the disciplinary conferences. Now that we can meet more regularly over zoom, we find this committee work to be more effective and rewarding. Maybe this is also because we can participate more fully in the remote mode than we could in person, where we were already exhausted from listening at the disciplinary conference. We have even found that the auto-captions can help us to some degree in understanding people with unfamiliar accents (see our post about unfamiliar accents).

Research collaboration meetings 

Being able to share screen and annotate on the screen allows for some research discussions to follow more smoothly than in-person. Sometimes, when a group is huddled around one computer, they can’t see the screen and they end up pointing vaguely to try and describe something. The annotate tool makes it clear what folks are pointing to and still allows everyone to add to the conversation. However, one drawback of remote research meetings is that drawing with a computer mouse is horrible clunky compared to a pen on paper or whiteboard. Another benefit of remote research meetings is that our research collaborations with folks at other institutions has strengthened, as we have regular remote meetings to discuss on-going and potential projects. With captions available for remote meetings and video for speech reading, we are able to participate fully in ways that teleconference research calls did not allow pre-pandemic. The same is also true for journal club type seminars that discuss a research paper.

Invited Speaker Seminars

With the return to face to face instruction some of our seminar presentations from visiting scholars have been in-person and some hybrid or remote format. We have found that remote seminars continue to be of overall benefit, allowing us to invite distant speakers, leading to greater geographic representation. In-person seminars with and without masks have always been challenging for deaf/HoH folks. Allowing for hybrid seminars with auto-captions increases accessibility for deaf/HoH academics, but seminar hosts and/or speakers have to be cognizant about repeating audience questions to make these available to those online. What about when we have been invited to give seminars elsewhere? Given the current reality of masking indoors and the challenges this poses for our ability to speech-read our hosts and audiences, to date we have only accepted remote speaking invitations.

Academics, by nature, tend to resist changing the way we work. Our research and scholarship builds on the previous work within our disciplines. We don’t reinvent our disciplines with each new study. Experiments only change one parameter at a time in order to learn how systems work. Unless there are external factors, our tendency is to work the way that we have in the past. Data can point to better practices that slowly shift how we work over time and with slow incremental changes. While our survivorship bias leads us to make only small changes to what has worked in the past, what worked in the past for meetings and teaching was not inclusive to everyone. The covid-19 pandemic forced an overhaul of how we work. Within weeks, we adopted new approaches that otherwise might have taken us years to try. The pandemic crisis also provides a phenomenal opportunity to assess the way that we work and make wholesale changes that improve inclusion and access. 

Rather than returning to the old normal, we advocate for moving forward to the new normal. This new inclusive normal uses effective practises from in person and remote teaching and meetings. We would love to hear from others on “best practices” that they have brought back with them from their pandemic experiences.

Making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf/HoH colleagues

advocacy, conferences, daily grind, meetings, networking, teaching, Uncategorized, , , , ,

The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In what is becoming a The Mind Hears New Year tradition (see posts from 2019 and 2020), we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible. The listing now includes best practices for remote meetings, a format that dominated our professional interactions in 2020 and will play a role in ‘normal’ operations going forward. While many presume that remote work increases accessibility for deaf/HoH, this is not always the case (see post on suddenly remote teaching and post on accommodating a pandemic). You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Here we outline the best approach for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.

Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard of hearing colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone (see post on the impact of the Mind Hears). This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see post on Where are the deaf/HoH academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.

Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very useful employment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work and not expecting us to bear all of the burden of creating accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations and making sure that technology/accommodations function is never-ending and exhausting work that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service (see post on making an impact at high stakes conferences, post on conquering faculty meetings, and post on teaching very large classes). Your understanding and your help changing our workplaces can make a huge difference to us.  For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question, ask them to repeat, even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of ensuring speakers repeat questions (see post on listening fatigue and post on the mental gymnastics of hearing device use)? Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH here and here).

One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (see post on working with sign interpreters and post on networking with deaf colleagues who use interpreters), oral interpreters, CART (see post on Captions and Craptions), or FM systems (see post on Using FM systems at conferences). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. What works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if the situations seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion. Reaching the goal of achieving an academic workplace accessible to deaf/HoH academics is a journey.

Want to be a better ally and make your workplace accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues? Follow this link to read our list of recommendations. We welcome your comments and suggestions either to this post or directly within the document at this link.

The Best Laid Plans: A remote teaching journey

teaching

This is a repost of The best laid plans from Dr. Rachel Obbard’s blog Pandemic Pedagogy. The post is the first in a series that chronicle her adjustment to remote teaching after the coronavirus pandemic shut down face-to-face learning. Rachel still has a few more weeks of remote teaching this term, so stay tuned to her blog for more posts.

Drawing of a horse at the left it is realistic (semester begins) the middle is more cartoonish (told to plan for remote teaching) the right is stick figured (actual teaching)

The drawing above came across my Facebook feed. The artist’s comment was “We’re stick footing it now, people!” Indeed.

Last week I took my carefully crafted syllabus for Spring 2020 and tore it up. Then I sat down with a pad of paper and a pencil and worked out what my class this Spring will look like, taught remotely. I would like to think that Technology and Sport this spring will look more like the middle of the horse than the stick foot, but stay tuned. Both the students and I need to adjust to this new way of teaching, learning, and engaging.

How I Hope to Adjust – Fortunately I have been using the learning management platform Canvas for four years. It is fairly easy to upload reading assignments, either by downloading a PDF from our library or scanning a few pages from a book. I can also collect and grade student work through Canvas. Faculty who teach in the spring are still allowed into the office to use the scanner, and we even have one at home. I much prefer to mark up physical copies, and can do a better job that way, but it is possible electronically.

The hard part, I think, will be replicating or replacing the classroom discussions and in-person individual conferences with students. With video conferencing apps such as Zoom it is technically possible, but as with many things, the devil is in the details. One of the problems I’ve always had with Zoom meetings is that the dynamics of speaking in turn are pretty kludgy. It takes time to get everyone’s attention (and unmute yourself) when you have something to add, and this means missed opportunities, awkward pauses, and people accidentally talking over each other. Moreover, the latter is harder to sort out when all those voices are coming from the same direction.

Perhaps this is a good time to add that I’m hearing impaired. I have a congenital hearing loss in both ears, and grew up supplementing my hearing with lip-reading. As a result, I really need to read lips to hear people. This makes the challenges above even more difficult for me. Another problem arises when the audio and video aren’t synchronous. I note lags of even fractions of a second. As the lag gets larger, my difficulty with understanding increases. I hope that all my students have good internet bandwidth, and that the internet and Zoom don’t get bogged down by all the demand!

On the plus side, Zoom seems better than some other video conferencing applications I’ve used because in gallery view it puts a green frame around the person speaking, and in another mode it makes the speaker’s face larger. Also a tremendous help is that I have an ADA accommodation for remote captioning for our Zoom classes. Speech-to-text applications still don’t work great (as was the case when I worked at a firm in the 1980s who made one). Remote captioning means having a real human being listening to what is being said (using either a telephone or Zoom itself). They type what they hear and this text appears on my screen. It’s amazing!

What About the Students – Notwithstanding all of the challenges above, I know that many students this term will have an even more difficult time. Not everyone can return to a stable environment conducive to scholarly pursuits. I couldn’t have in my first year of college. Some of our students don’t have internet access at home or a quiet place to work. Some return to family responsibilities or will need to get jobs (having lost the ones they had at school). All will have to work harder to access the services and resources they had on campus. That’s on top of having to adjust to living at home again, and at the same time meeting our expectations of them. Here are some comments from my past students:

“The first thing that comes to mind is the mixed challenge and blessing of being at home with family. While school has its own (quite extensive at times) set of distractions, it is fundamentally a place of learning where most of your peers probably spend at least a few hours every day studying, there are many different places to go to study, and you can study whenever you’d like and really make your own schedule. In high school, I must have mastered the art of getting my work done in spite of my family, but it was a bit jarring to come back to it.”

This student and others talk about how even with supportive, understanding parents, it can be difficult as an adult to resume the ‘child’ role and live by someone else’s rules. Aside from general friction, it forces students to alter their work routines and creates new demands on their time – family dinners, babysitting, chores, and as one student puts it, to “generally be an active and contributing citizen of the family.”

For many students it can mean difficulty working at the times they find best and finding a quiet place to do work. Getting it right, if even completely possible, can take weeks.

Another past student writes, “I’ve had an idea of how disruptive this pandemic is, but as spring term gets closer, I’m realizing more and more how this really complicates and changes things for the worse.… I’m certainly anxious to see how this will all work out. I do have internet access at home, but my house has never been a great place to study (noise, commotion, etc.). I’m hoping I can find my way to the library or coffee shop, but I live pretty far away from both.”

And so … – We are encouraged to teach as much as possible asynchronously, which means in ways that don’t require the students to turn up at the same time via high-speed internet. I have decided to hold a short (~1 hour) Zoom meeting twice a week, attendance optional but encouraged, and to hold most ‘discussions’ on Canvas (i.e. students type their responses to a prompt into a text box, which other students can read and respond to). It is going to be super hard to have really complex discussions and build community this way, but we shall try (again, stay tuned).

I will have to replace one of their major projects, a group one. The project requires in- and out-of-class group work and culminates with a presentation to the whole class. If that isn’t bad enough (for asynchronous teaching in times of social distancing), the project requires that I work with one group at a time to help them understand a peer-reviewed engineering paper. Sooooo…… NO. I am replacing that with an independent assignment, and, hopefully, some great discussions as a class and in breakout groups. I think more than anything this term, I want to see if I can build the kind of community we do in on-campus classes. I don’t mind if my horse has a stick foot, as long as he has friends.

white woman with ombre green hair wearing maroon sweater in front of treesRachel Obbard: I am an Adjunct Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), and a Senior Scientist at the SETI Institute (Mountain View, CA). I teach writing in science and first-year college writing courses. The latter revolve around the intersection of technology, sport, and ethics. My SETI research involves exploration of planetary ice (Earth and Mars) and I am currently leading a project to develop instrumentation for a future mission to Mars’ north polar cap. I am congenitally hard of hearing (HoH) and lip reading accounts for at least 50% of my access to speech. While I wear hearing aids, I need to see a face and mouth, or captioning, to have full access and understanding. 

Sudden Remote Teaching – Deaf/HoH

daily grind, meetings, teaching,

-Ryan

Here we are navigating our 5th week of remote / online classes here in NYC (and beyond of course) and adapting to our “new lives”. I can’t think of anything else to call it as of right now, so I’m going with this. I say this from the perspective of integration as I’m very much still in the: “I’m really perplexed about how we are even in the position that we are in” phase along with having adjusted to this new life and fulfilled so many new, mandated compliances to keep my courses going simultaneously. (That was a long sentence, too!) I originally started writing this post about 3 weeks ago. A lot has changed, which makes it seem harder to update, since I’ve made more progress than I thought I would. Or could.

Along with following all of the administrative protocols, attending endless Zoom meetings, making course updates, reformatting everything, and dealing with the staggering amount of e-mail and overall communication—and that’s just work stuff—not including connecting with family and friends. Whew!—I’m finally starting to reflect on things. Or… wait, is my ego reflecting on what it thinks it is reflecting on? Reflection invites in ALL of the emotions. And the feelings—both positive and negative. And there’s been quite a bit of the negative! Why am I reminded of past failures at a time like this? We humans like routines, they help us stay focused and structured. Uncertainty isn’t something we’re really good at, right? Wrong, we certainly adapt, and adapt quickly. I can see that as I edit this post!

cog-fatigue

Here is a visual interpretation of me after the first 2 days of my 3-in-a-row-straight zoom meetings..

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the conversion to remote and online teaching in general. As I see it now, especially as a deaf/HoH professor who depends on “visual everything,” I have much more to organize than I thought. I teach simultaneously between 4 colleges here in NYC. I’m teaching 7 courses between all of these schools to 99.9% hearing people. As we know, the reality of “just switching to video chat classes” is NOT easy, even for a hearing person teaching hearing people. Especially if you’ve never done this before. Video chat platforms can actually work well for me if it’s a one-on-one situation, but add 5-15-24 people and access really changes.

Simply put, I need to see a face and mouth at all times to have access to a spoken conversation. Yes, I wear hearing aids but they are NOT magical devices that mean I can “hear” what normal hearing people hear. I don’t, not even close… Because I’m deaf. My hearing loss is degenerative and has been decaying over time since birth. So these days, I only catch about 30% with hearing aids. The other 70% of the conversation is absorbed from lip reading, speech patterns, emotional rapport, facial expressions, and body language. When it comes to only seeing someone’s face, head, and shoulders on a flat monitor or screen, that 70% contextual part is naturally limited, and understanding speech becomes harder.

IMB_LPIpfu

When switching to “synchronous style” remote teaching formats using Zoom, Skype, Google Meet or Google Hangouts or another video-chat platform (I recently tested Microsoft Teams that DOES have a live, real-time captioning feature. I much prefer this over the others and will be switching to this. You do need to download the desktop application and have access to the business or education licensing, though), things can get really challenging, especially with a sea of small icon-like faces as the number of people increase in the chat session. Three of my classes have 20-plus students in them. As I mentioned, one-on-one video chat works well for me, but add several others to the chat, and, well, the faces get smaller, and visual access decreases. I need to adapt to this by using a text-chat feature to support the visuals. This can be done and I have been making several adaptations as time has passed. However, typing out the conversation slows down the process, and others in the virtual classroom may become a little impatient. “Please be compassionate, please be patient, please put yourself in the shoes of others and try to understand.” Hmm, this is tough, especially if I’m your first Deaf professor. Believe me, I know I am. We are learning together in this experience, in real-crazy-time. Things will be tweaked as we go along. We can’t be selfish and expect communication to function as it would in the normal classroom. It’s just not the same thing

Aside from what I said above, accessibility has a context that expands and extends far beyond myself; it is collective and contextual. I can share my own experiences here but my experiences obviously relate to my life experiences as a whole—and that includes all of my students. I care about them deeply and protect them fiercely. They come first, always have, and I am fully responsible for making the choice to teach and work where I do. What does accessibility look like on my students’ end? My students have their own issues, struggles and problems. Some have no access to the internet, no access to a computer, laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet. Which means no access to certain software applications. Some do not have a physical space to sit and be present in a video chat class as their living space is shared with parents, siblings, and other relatives who are also home, and in some cases working from home. Many have lost their jobs altogether. Some are living with multiple family members who are sick, whether with Covid-19 or other pre-existing conditions. This all happens simultaneously. But what we don’t really talk about, when we discuss how wonderful all of these new adaptations are, are the emotional and psychological aspects of this entire situation. Do we have enough contrast yet to fully understand the current and continuing impact of the last 5 weeks? No way.

I have adopted the mantra of Compassion, Patience, Understanding, Accessibility, Adaptability, Inclusion, Helpfulness, and Humility. We can do this together both inside and outside academia. Fellow students, faculty, and colleagues, both those with accessibility needs and those who need help working with folks with accessibility needs, let’s pull together and contribute our resources and knowledge to help each other. Blogs like this one and other social media have a huge reach and can be used to share useful perspectives and resources.

It is also crucial that we communicate honestly with our colleagues, students and administration. I AM Guilty of this in the past myself! I have and continue to reach out to my people. All of my students already know that that I am deaf/HoH. I was upfront with them from Day One of our semester. I explained my communication needs and stated that I always need to see a face, lips, and body language to follow verbal conversations. If not, then we need to type, write, text, or make written communication happen. The application of a speech-to-text application like Cardzilla (that I love! iOs — Android) or another form of text/type/visual communication also helps! Of course, content management system (CMS) platforms like WordPress websites are also super effective, and I have built a website for every class that I teach! No, not Blackboard or Canvas. I build my own websites for my courses so that I have full autonomy of the admin aspects of communication and access and so much more.

The combination of Zoom and the CMS platforms have allowed for a relatively smooth integration for me. As I mentioned above I will integrate MS Teams this week over Zoom. Zoom allows for simultaneous Video, Audio, and Text Chat, so for me and my students, this is crucial! I can see a face to speech read and then ask for additional text follow up via text in the chat box. Plus, if turn the audio on my computer speaker up, in my case to Very High, I can place my iPhone next to it and have the Cardzilla app transcribe the audio to text. It is a hack, but it works, and I am grateful for that. My students have been super patient and seriously awesome at this point! Accessibility is EVERYTHING! Especially in this very NEW situation we find ourselves in.

Aside from teaching and hacking accessibility and expanding my awareness of how amazing our collective human potentials are, how are you all coping with the isolation, and order to stay home? I’m focusing on self-care. Making healthy meals and setting a cozy and loving environment in my space. I’m also making a lot of new art, I mean A LOT!

breakfast

IMG_3076

Ink-Jet-SeriesWIP-Paintings

Communication is EVERYTHING so please be mindful and specific about what you NEED.

Much Love to all!

How much listening is too much?

daily grind, meetings, teaching, , , ,

– Michele

Listening is hard work. At the end of a long day of meetings I’m exhausted. When I share this with my hearing colleagues they’ll say “Oh, I know—me too!” But is it the same? Really? 

Studies have shown that users of hearing aids like me, who rely on speech reading along with amplification, experience listening fatigue as much higher rates than hearing people (e.g., Bess and Hornsby, 2014). We are working much harder than everyone around us to piece things together and make sense from what we are able to hear. Most listening fatigue studies are on school-aged children and the few studies of adults show that “Adults with hearing loss require more time to recover from fatigue after work, and have more work absences.” (Hornsby et al., 2016). As academics, our jobs require us to listen to others all the time—in our classes, in faculty meetings, in seminars, and when meeting with students. How do we recognize cognitive fatigue due to too much listening and mitigate this fatigue so that we can manage our work responsibilities? This is a tremendous challenge for deaf/HoH academics and The Mind Hears will explore this topic in several blog posts. 

In this post I share how I figured out my daily listening limit, which turns out to be 3 hours with good amplification and clear speech reading. For many years, I pushed through my day not paying attention to how much time I was spending in meetings and classes. Some days I felt okay while other days I ended up utterly exhausted. The kind of exhausted where I can’t track conversation and even have trouble putting my own sentences together. When this happens, I can’t converse with my family and exercise class is out of the question because I can’t follow the instructor. I just take my hearing aids out and lie on the floor with the dog— I don’ need to speech read him and he gets me. Yay dogs!  

When I explain to my listening fatigue to non-native English speakers, they get it right away. They recognize that this listening fatigue is just like when they first moved to a country with a new language; while they had good command of the new language, following it all day exhausted them. Exactly! Except I’m not going to get any better at my native language.

After a while—actually a really long while because for many years I tried to work as if I was a hearing person due to internalized ableism, which really is a whole different blog topic—and now this sentence has really gotten off track so I’m going to start over. After a while, I started to realize that for my own health I needed to avoid becoming so exhausted that several times a week, I could only commune with the dog.

undefinedIt turns out that my fancy new Garmin watch that tells me to “MOVE” every hour also detects my stress level. This image at left is from a day at a conference. All I did that day was sit in one room listening to talks with occasional breaks for coffee and meals. My heart rate stayed elevated all day due to the work of following the conversation and the anxiety of constantly deciding whether I should ask for clarification on something I may have missed or just let it go. When even my watch is telling me ‘enough is enough’ or more specifically “You’ve had very few restful moments on this day. Remember to slow down and relax to keep yourself going”, it might be time to figure out how much listening is too much

So last February I tracked both my hours each day spent listening and my evening exhaustion level in my bullet journal. 

Actually, I didn’t track this much detail—I just made marks in my bullet journal for each hour and then noted whether this was manageable. Below are two example pages. For the day on the left, the 3 Xs represent 3 hours of listening and this was an OK day. The image on the right is from another day that month. The horizontal line below the Xs means that I was on the floor with the dog that evening after 5 hours of listening. 

Yes, I know that my handwriting is messy and I tend to kick a lot of tasks to the next day. But this blog post is not about my untidiness and unreliability. What I learned from this exercise was that any day including more than 3 hours of listening would be a tough an unmanageable day. Armed with this knowledge, I could start to try to rearrange my schedule to avoid having days with more than 3 hours of listening. 

Interestingly, this goes against the advice that many academics give each other. Early career researchers are encouraged to push all meetings to one day so that you have a day free for research. This is great advice… for a hearing person. For many deaf/HoH, we may do better with two free mornings a week rather than 1 full day so that no one day is overloaded with listening.

So how successful have I been? Moderately. While I have control over some aspects of my schedule, I don’t over others. I schedule my one-on-one meetings with my research assistants on days that I don’t have a lot of other meetings. If I’m teaching a 3-hour lab, sometimes it’s just impossible for me to have no other teaching or meetings that day. But I am considering restructuring my lab activities so that I don’t need to be ‘on’ the whole time. I’ve also started talking with my department head about my effort to limit my daily meetings; this involves educating him on why listening fatigue is different for me than for hearing faculty. Had I been more savvy, I might have negotiated a listening limit when I was hired. Take note of this, future academics! 

I’m still sorting out how to manage my day and eager to learn more from others on how they successfully manage listening fatigue. As I mentioned at the start of this post, The Mind Hears wants to have a series of posts about listening fatigue. Tell us how has this fatigue affected your work day and your health. What solutions have you found?

References cited

  • Bess, F.H., & Hornsby, B.W. (2014). Commentary: Listening can be exhausting—Fatigue in children and adults with hearing loss. Ear and hearing, 35(6), 592.
  • Hornsby, B.W., Naylor, G., & and Bess, F.H. (2016). A taxonomy of fatigue concepts and their relation to hearing loss. Ear and hearing, 37(Suppl 1), 136S.

Mandated equal opportunity hiring may not ensure equal considerations by hiring committees: A hypothetical scenario

daily grind, job searches, networking, teaching,

-Ryan

Imagine that you are a deaf/hard-of-hearing (HoH) person applying for a full-time academic position in a U.S. public institution of higher learning. The position is listed nationally across multiple job boards. At the offering institution, deaf/HoH faculty, students, administrators, and staff members represent 1% of the population. You are highly qualified and display an extensive résumé with many accomplishments in your field and a strong history of service. Information about you is highly transparent on the internet at large.

You investigate and discover that the offering department does not currently have a deaf or hard-of-hearing person among their full-time and adjunct faculty.

Applying for the position:

When applying, you check the general “YES, I have a disability” box on the institution’s application and contact the human resources (HR) department directly to let them know that you are applying specifically as a deaf/HoH person. If you are offered an interview for the position, you request, as is your right, to meet with the search committee in person, rather than have the interview over a conference call. You cross your fingers, hoping that the HR department communicates with the department offering the position to ensure that they are presenting an equal opportunity for employment for those with disabilities. Does the HR department actually communicate your request for accommodation to the academic department? You may never know but let’s say that it does in this case…

Considerations of the hiring committee:

When the academic department’s search committee learns that you are deaf/HoH how will they respond? Are they experienced in the process of interviewing a deaf or hard-of-hearing person? How many interviews have they given to deaf/HoH applicants in the past? How many of those previous applicants were given an interview, made it to the second or third round of the process, and hired full-time? Where are the statistics to prove that equal opportunities are being given?

When the search committee learns of your request to meet in person for an interview because you are deaf/HoH, how aware and educated are the search committee members of Deaf culture and what it means to be deaf or hard of hearing? How aware are they of what it means to be a deaf/HoH faculty member teaching in a mainly all-hearing environment? Do they know the benefits of having a deaf or hard-of-hearing person as a part of their full-time or part-time faculty? What evidence is there within the department’s current publications, seminars, exhibitions, faculty development, and outreach efforts of awareness of the advantages brought about by workplace diversity that is inclusive of disability?

Is the typical academic faculty search committee equipped, skilled, and supportive enough to interview a deaf/HoH candidate if none of their members are deaf or hard of hearing? If they don’t have deaf/HoH members, are they sufficiently trained in deaf/HoH experiences to judge your application fairly against the numerous other applicants who do not have any disabilities? Are search committees trained enough to distinguish between medical and cultural models of disability, and to understand how these models impact their perceptions of your strengths? Are they savvy enough to move away from focusing on what the you can’t do, and focus instead on what your diverse perspective brings to the hiring unit?

Answers to many of the questions I ask above should be part of the public record. My experience in the job search circuit thus far has left me disillusioned and believing that departmental search committees and HR departments are likely ill-equipped to handle deaf/HoH applicants. Studies have shown that search committees have many implicit biases. One of these biases is that since deafness may impede academic success, it is safer to hire a hearing applicant.

It’s time to fix this.

Have you ever been a on a faculty search committee where a deaf or hard-of-hearing person applied? If so, did that person receive the position? If not, would you like to share your experience?

How to work with ASL-English interpreters and Deaf academics in academic settings

daily grind, meetings, networking, teaching, ,

Just like their non-Deaf colleagues, Deaf academics teach students, discuss and present their research, attend various professional meetings, and give media interviews. Communicating and sharing knowledge with others is a critical part of academia. However, not everyone has had experience communicating with somebody using sign language, and many non-signers are unfamiliar with the protocols of working with ASL-English interpreters. Ashley Campbell, the staff ASL-English interpreter at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Linda Campbell, a Senior Research Fellow of Environmental Science at Saint Mary’s, have put together a rich set of resources: a series of tip sheets on how best to work with interpreters in various academic scenarios. By sharing these resources with The Mind Hears, Ashley and Linda provide quick reference tools that will simultaneously educate and lessen any stress around facilitating communication through interpreters. Though originally written to facilitate ASL-English communications, these tip sheets can be applied to any settings that incorporate signed language-spoken language communications.

The tip sheets can be found at:

https://www.smu.ca/faculty-of-science/environmental-science-work-with-interpreter.html

Do you have ideas on further tip sheets to add to this resource? Are there other recommendations that you would add to the existing tip sheets? Please let us know what strategies you have found useful in educating non-signers, and help Ashley and Linda expand the reach and utility of the resources they have created. Write to Ashley at Ashley.N.Campbell@smu.ca or share your thoughts in the comments below.

Ashley Campbell

Since 2015 I have been the staff ASL-English interpreter within the Faculty of Science at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. My first exposure to sign language was in Belleville, Ontario where I lived for a short period early in life. Many years later I took ASL night classes for enjoyment and through learning the language and culture I became interested in studying it more formally. I graduated from an interpreting training program in 2010 and along with interpreting have volunteered for both provincial and national interpreting association boards. I have a passion for sharing knowledge with the mentality of “each one, teach one”. When I’m not working I am a mom to a very active toddler, cooking feasts for my family, and enjoying the odd Netflix program.

Linda Campbell

Dr. Campbell is a Professor and a Senior Research Fellow at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.  She moved to Halifax from a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) faculty position at Queen’s University in Kingston. Her research and teaching at Saint Mary’s University focus on contaminants in the environment and on sustainability / resilience issues, with emphasis on aquatic ecosystems and water resources. Currently, Dr. Campbell’s research group is examining environmental contaminants across the Maritimes and around the world, with projects looking at impacts of legacy gold mine tailings from the 1800’s and contaminant transfer in aquatic food webs, birds, bats and humans.