ABSTRACT
This essay reflects on critical intercultural communication pedagogy associated with Deaf instructors teaching American Sign Language (ASL) to hearing students. Focusing on the presence and absence of sound while learning ASL—a language that lives visually–spatially—the essay offers preliminary observations of how the present absence of sound demonstrates the distinctive way an ASL classroom performs difference.
You’re a college sophomore in your first American Sign Language (ASL) class.Footnote1 You thought it sounded like a cool thing to do, and you have a little more flexibility in your schedule this semester. You remember learning to sign the letters of the alphabet in third grade. You can still fingerspell your name. Right now, the class is a free elective, but your friend takes it at another university where it counts toward the language requirement. You don’t know anyone who is deaf, or Deaf. In fact, you just learned from your professor that “deaf” means someone doesn’t hear, but “Deaf” refers to a person whose primary language is ASL and who identifies as part of a culture defined primarily by language, not by disability or physiological condition. You learn the ASL sign DEAFFootnote2 means “Deaf.” You learn the ASL sign ORAL refers to someone who is “deaf,” meaning the person doesn’t hear and was raised to speak rather than sign and may not identify with Deaf culture. There’s a whole other sign for someone who is hearing.
You didn’t know you were hearing until you started taking this class. Sort of like you didn’t know you were white (if you’re white) until you were exposed to the experiences of people of color. Sort of like you didn’t name yourself as straight or cisgender (if you’re straight or cis) until you were exposed to LGBTQ+ experiences. Now, in this classroom, you realize you’re hearing, because you’re learning ASL, and your professor is Deaf and doesn’t speak English (well, she can, but she chooses not to, like your high school French teacher who taught only in French—it’s a better way to learn). Sometimes your professor writes on the board in English if she needs to explain something beyond the students’ ASL comprehension, or to make a comparison between ASL and English. But now you see yourself as hearing because your difference from her strikes you in every class session. Your eyes hurt sometimes after class because this is a seeing and visual language. You’ve never been in a class where you didn’t have to pay attention by listening.
You’re asked to “turn off your voice” (the sign looks like turning a dial “off” in the space right in front of your Adam’s apple), meaning in class no one speaks. Without the sound of voices, the classroom is unusually quiet. And yet the silence feels loud. You can turn off your voice, but you can’t turn off your ears. The silence feels loud with its absence of voices. It feels loud with increased awareness of keyboard clicks, pens scratching on paper, paper rustling, stomachs rumbling, congested breathing. Mostly you forget the silence because your eyes are doing so much work. Communication is happening all the time visually, just not in a spoken, sound-based way.
Your teacher has a good sense of humor. Sometimes she pokes fun at you and other students for not having good enough facial expressions. She imitates you by signing something like EXCITED or DISAPPOINTED with a totally blank face and then shows the same signs with an animated face. She demonstrates how Deaf people show hearing people talking: she silently moves her lips around very quickly with no facial expression and an empty stare. It’s an exaggeration, of course, but you all laugh at yourselves with her, because her hyperbolic “mirror” helps you see yourselves the way she does. You thought ASL was about using your hands and fingers in space, but it’s also your face. You never thought about how when you speak, your voice communicates tone and emotion that people hear and it helps them understand what you mean; now your face needs to communicate tone and emotion so the person you’re signing with understands more fully what you mean. And it’s not only emotion—you also just learned your eyebrows function like grammar and punctuation; a question like YOUR NAME—WHAT?Footnote3 needs to be signed with your eyebrows knitted together, while a yes/no question like CHILDREN—YOU HAVE?Footnote4 is signed with your eyebrows raised. You don’t quite have the language to explain this yet, but you’re starting to comprehend an equivalence between auditory and text-based cues in spoken–written English and visual–spatial cues in ASL. You don’t quite have the language to express this yet, but you have an inkling that taking this class is becoming more than merely a fun thing to do…
***
An estimated 197 U.S. colleges and universities give credit for ASL courses, either as free electives or as fulfilling language requirements, suggesting thousands of hearing college students learn ASL as a second language.Footnote5 In fact, ASL is the third most frequently taught language in U.S. secondary and postsecondary schools.Footnote6 This is a fairly staggering statistic, given that signing was banned in most education of American deaf children from the late-19th to latter-20th centuries,Footnote7 as well as that ASL’s linguistic legitimacy began to be recognized only with the publication of hearing English professor William C. Stokoe’s groundbreaking linguistic research in 1960.Footnote8 The dominant hearing world has historically made decisions for the Deaf world, discouraging or forbidding the teaching of ASL to d/Deaf children and enforcing English as the only language of instruction and use. How ironic, then, to witness the tremendous increase in ASL coursework and world language equivalency for hearing college (and some high school) students, celebrating inclusive access to a language denied across history to its rightful users and assigning academic credibility in the hearing world where it had little-to-none in the Deaf world.Footnote9
Numerous factors likely have contributed to this shift in ASL’s visibility and popularity in the hearing world, particularly as an option to study a second language. Following Stokoe’s initial linguistic research on ASL in 1960, the next few decades saw expansions on ASL linguistic structure (as well as other signed languages), and then in the 1980s–1990s scholarship extended into ASL literature (poetry and narrative).Footnote10 This work laid the foundation for establishing Deaf Studies programs and formal ASL language programs not only at Gallaudet University but also at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (part of Rochester Institute of Technology), Boston University, California State University at Northridge, the University of Arizona, and more. A movement to offer world language credit for ASL began slowly but, as noted, has exploded over the last 15–20 years; as Octavia Robinson and Jonathan Henner note, “American Sign Language (ASL) has gone vogue.”Footnote11 At roughly the same time, with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, mainstream education opportunities for d/Deaf students increased, with a corresponding decrease in the number of d/Deaf residential and day schools,Footnote12 resulting in more contact between d/Deaf and hearing children than ever before. Generally, however, rather than achieving an outcome of equity and inclusion, mainstreaming d/Deaf children with hearing children and very few, if any, other d/Deaf children, has often led to the d/Deaf children’s isolation and marginalization.
The ADA and ensuing mainstreamed education policies have publicly placed deafness within the category of disability rather than culture, characterizing sign language instruction and interpreting more as a disability-based accommodation than as a linguistic, cultural, and community-based necessity—despite the growth of Deaf Studies programs and ongoing attempts by the Deaf community to be viewed as a linguistic minority in the U.S.A. With mainstreamed d/Deaf children left to communicate primarily with hearing sign language interpreters and without Deaf peers, teachers, or counselors, their Deaf identities and ASL fluency are inherently diminished. At the same time, hearing students in K–12 grades and postsecondary education have benefited from mainstreaming with new exposure to d/Deafness and sign language in their classrooms. The competing narratives begun in the 1990s—ADA and mainstreaming on one hand, Deaf Studies programs and ASL scholarship on the other—brings us to the present moment, with more hearing Americans than ever concurrently aware of ASL and Deaf culture and motivated to learn ASL as a second language. Equal opportunity for d/Deaf American children and adults in education, language/communication, and employment, however, continues to lag,Footnote13 and yet demand for qualified Deaf teachers of ASL to hearing students continues to rise.Footnote14
This essay approaches the postsecondary ASL classroom as a site for critical intercultural communication pedagogyFootnote15 and as an opportunity to “crip” higher education.Footnote16 Similarly to “queering,” “cripping” “can serve. . . to unpack and deconstruct dominant discursive constructions of the body and their embodied translation,”Footnote17 particularly in relation to questions of ability, identity, and embodied experience. The ASL classroom affords critical cross-cultural and intercultural contact, particularly in the form of “bridgework,” conceptualized by Nilanjana Bardhan as a kind of “intercultural praxis” that “focuses on the in-between spaces of identities in interaction in order to deconstruct cultural authority” and that creates “possibilities for transformation and intercultural alliances.”Footnote18 With cultural authority denied to Deaf Americans on and off for centuries, ASL’s popularity as a second language for hearing students instates cultural authority with the Deaf instructor. For both Deaf instructors and hearing students, this pedagogical space highlights difference in terms of language, ability, and the body and, in so doing, disrupts normative power structures.Footnote19 The ASL classroom itself performs difference, as the inherent need to be in one’s body when signing “focuses on how our bodies are sites of power production”Footnote20 and of oppression. Thus, in performing difference, the ASL classroom has potential “to accomplish intercultural bridgework that may not have been conceivable before.”Footnote21
Being able to hear creates no advantage to ASL students. In a standard ASL classroom, the Deaf instructor and hearing students share the ability to see, and hearing students must adapt to learning visually, without the kind of linguistic sound cues they have grown to expect as “normal.” ASL’s mode of expression is sign, not speech, and ASL has no written form. Thus, the primary adjustment for a hearing person concerns shifting from an auditory orientation to a visual–spatial orientation to language and communication. Awareness of sound and its present absence may productively disrupt ableist assumptions about Deafness and foster bridgework in the ASL classroom.
At first glance, drawing connections with sound studies—an area this themed issue invokes—might seem to run counter to the experience of an ASL classroom, particularly as “sound scholars aim to disrupt narratives of the so-called hegemony of the visual and the privileging of the eye.”Footnote22 Jonathan Sterne points out sound studies’ aim to counter visual culture, yet ASL and Deafness highlight the visual; in fact, one could certainly describe the core study of ASL and Deafness as recognizing and challenging a hegemony of the auditory. That said, sound studies provides a provocative place to begin an ASL classroom exploration. Sterne introduces sound as “part of a field of vibration,”Footnote23 as well as rhythm, drawing attention to ways some studies of d/Deafness relate to the study of sound. In their study of d/Deaf lived experience, Michelle Kriedner and Stefan Helmreich draw parallels between speech and sign, and between the auditory and visual senses, with a focus on “articulation,” or how “language and sociality are entangled with one another in fashioning phenomenological and cultural worlds.”Footnote24 It is this distinctive difference in articulation that hearing students experience in the ASL classroom. Embodied rhythms—staccato, legato (terms deriving from music, but visual as well)—may provide a sensory translation of sound (e.g., the signing of a song by hearing interpreters to translate melody visually/rhythmically). Melody and harmony may live in the realm of sound/music, but rhythm lives in both the body and voice. The ASL classroom offers hearing students an opportunity to experience the rhythm of their bodies in language and to confront—often for the first time—what it means to be hearing in a hearing world, as well as a beginning sense of what it means to be d/Deaf in a hearing world; as Sterne writes, “[h]earing requires positionality.”Footnote25 This “hearing positionality” may contribute to the connection between d/Deafness and sound studies in its focus on the hearing student’s experience learning ASL rather than the lived experience of d/Deafness. Further, this hearing positionality offers another context in which to address John T. Warren and Satoshi Toyosaki’s concerns about the study of intercultural communication and theorizing difference, as we see power upended through “the actual production in/at/through our bodies.”Footnote26
***
The quiet is at first intimidating. You’re nervous about drawing attention to yourself. Every movement seems bigger, more exaggerated, cutting through the air, the space. But your professor moves around so freely. You feel your body clunky, loud in its awkwardness. Better to stay small. You feel really uncoordinated at first.
Your professor moves around the room, coming up close to everyone, lots of eye contact, wanting everyone to look at each other. So much seeing, looking, staring. If you look down or away, you’ll miss something. You’ve never paid this much attention to everyone in your class.
On one of the first days of class, your professor points to things in the classroom: does the fire alarm only make a sound, or will it also flash on and off? What if these chairs didn’t move and we were all in straight rows—how would we see each other’s signing? She gets our attention by flicking the lights on and off. She writes on the board in English when she has to explain something we can’t understand in ASL. It takes a lot of time to write, and you sometimes find yourself getting a little bored or impatient. Sometimes you totally get that 3 ASL signs conveys the same meaning as a 10-word sentence in English. You wish you could learn ASL faster.
***
When a person signs, the “sounding,” the articulation, is in the body; all cues are visual and spatial. Learning necessitates being embodied and active. The different demands on hearing students’ familiar ways of paying attention reveal a different kind of presence in the classroom, a presence that highlights the kind of “cripping” noted earlier. Here Deaf instructors are free to, and in fact must, “harness the cultural power of their double seeing selves” in ways that subvert the “unequal power relations”Footnote27 that pervade the world outside the ASL classroom. Here the hearing students observe directly what it means to have a hybrid identity as a Deaf person, to see how Deaf people have been adapting to the hearing world for centuries. In this disruption of power dynamics, the Deaf instructor may accommodate hearing students by writing on the board in English when necessary, but overall, in the ASL classroom, hearing students must adapt to their Deaf instructor and shift away from their phonocentric ways of being in the world. They must be present to the instructor—and each other—with their eyes and bodies.
***
Your instructor uses a new word, “audism.”Footnote28 You can’t believe there’s another “ism” you hadn’t heard of. Your instructor demonstrates clearly the discrimination d/Deaf people face just for being d/Deaf, such as in the past hearing teachers slapping deaf children’s hands or making them sit on their hands so they wouldn’t sign, or now how some colleges don’t hire Deaf ASL instructors because it costs too much to provide accommodations or because it’s too hard to find Deaf instructors.Footnote29 You get it. You can see audism now. Why should an opportunity be taken away from a Deaf person who’s in the culture and who has never had the same opportunities as hearing people?
***
As I have observed ASL instructors in classes on numerous occasions, I have also watched the students and heard a voice inside my mind. At times critical, this voice comments on what I see as small missed pedagogical opportunities—I wish they had given an example here, the students needed more time to practice there, the video went on too long, they spent a bit too much time writing—but at the same time, that voice inside my mind notes the instructors’ comfort in the spaces, the twinkle in their eye when joking with students, and how these students pay such close attention. They seem to trust the instructors’ knowledge and authority, and they are adapting to Deaf cultural norms in the signing classroom. This is critical intercultural communication pedagogy in action. As I have observed various ASL instructors in class, I am struck by what each single ASL classroom can accomplish to confront audism, to heighten students’ senses of both vision and sound, to heighten their overall bodily engagement, and to heighten their capacity to be present to language and one another.Footnote30 Best practices in language learning argue for immersion in the new language and for a focus on experiencing both language and culture,Footnote31 expanding the learners’ ways of being in the world. Learning ASL also expands the communicative versatility of hearing people, and the ASL classroom immerses them in a world of the Other, helping them experience directly how and why difference matters.
Reflecting on how the present absence of sound underscores power dynamics in the ASL classroom, I would like to suggest that the overwhelming popularity of ASL instruction in higher education exceeds an experience of novelty. Yes, hearing students may be drawn to the language initially for its distinctive mode, but they stay and continue because learning ASL gives them a new way of being in their bodies and reveals the partiality of normative modes of language and communication. How recognition of this partiality develops should be studied further. In addition to furthering best practices for ASL teaching,Footnote32 research should continue ethnographic exploration of hearing students’ experience learning ASL. ASL’s evolution from stigmatized language to protected marker of cultural belonging, and now to world language option, suggests the need for more research into changing perceptions and interactions between d/Deaf and hearing worlds, changing opportunities for d/Deaf people, and changes in ASL itself. When viewed through the lens of critical intercultural communication pedagogy, ASL fits remarkably well in a communication studies department and as a subject for communication scholarship; the lived experience of learning ASL and interaction between Deaf instructors and hearing students create a site for what Gust A. Yep calls “transformative communication pedagogy” designed to “demystify identity, difference, and power.”Footnote33 ASL classrooms engage in critical intercultural pedagogy “by creating and maintaining spaces for ‘Other’ forms of communication to be legible in the discipline”Footnote34 within a framework of difference comprising language, bodies, expression, and ability.
Notes
1 This piece of creative nonfiction represents years of experience in ASL classes as a student and participant–observer, as well as informal conversations with Deaf teachers of ASL. It creates a single student voice compiled from my own and others’ experience. In the classes I’ve participated in or observed, the curriculum used is Vista’s Signing Naturally or TWA (True+Way ASL).
2 Using all caps refers to the ASL gloss, or the sign rendered in English.
3 This word order, and all further examples of glossed ASL sentences, reflects ASL syntax. Here the English translation is “What’s your name?”
4 The English translation is “Do you have children?”
5 “Universities that Accept ASL in Fulfillment of Foreign Language Requirements,” maintained by Sherman Wilcox, updated September 9, 2019, https://www.unm.edu/~wilcox/UNM/univlist.html.
6 Dennis Looney and Natalia Lusin, Enrollments in Languages Other than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Summer 2016 and Fall 2016: Preliminary Report (New York: Modern Language Association, 2018), https://www.mla.org/content/download/83540/2197676/2016-Enrollments-Short-Report.pdf.
7 Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jami N. Fisher, Meredith Tamminga, and Julie A. Hochgesang, “The Historical and Social Context of the Philadelphia ASL Community,” Sign Language Studies 18, no. 3 (2018): 429–60.
8 William C. Stokoe, Sign Language Structure (Silver Spring, MD: Linstok, 1960).
9 For example, 1999 was the first time since its founding in 1820 that the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (PSD) included ASL as a separate, standalone language of instruction. Further, the Philadelphia region currently, and for at least 15 years, supports ASL programs of study for hearing students at numerous area colleges and universities. See Fisher, Tamminga, and Hochgesang, “The Historical and Social Context of the Philadelphia ASL Community,” 450.
10 Andrew Byrne, “Sign Language Literature,” in The Sage Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, ed. Genie Gertz and Patrick Boudreault (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2016), 833–36; H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose, eds., Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See CMS 14.136.
11 Octavia Robinson and Jonathan Henner, “Authentic Voices, Authentic Encounters: Cripping the University through American Sign Language,” Disability Studies Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2018): https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6111/5128.
12 Seventy-five percent of deaf/hard-of-hearing children are mainstreamed. See Shirin Antia, “Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in the Mainstream,” Raising and Educating Deaf Children, October 23, 2013, https://www.raisingandeducatingdeafchildren.org/2014/01/01/deaf-and-hard-of-hearing-students-in-the-mainstream/.
13 As a group, persons who are d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing tend to be less educated than their hearing peers. A 2019 report reveals that 53.3% of deaf people (ages 25–64) were employed in 2017, while 75.8% of hearing people in the same age bracket were employed. See National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes, “Employment Report Shows Strong Labor Market Passing by Deaf Americans,” August 22, 2019, https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/news/employment-report-shows-strong-labor-market-passing-deaf-americans. Data on education shows improvement at the high school level: 83% of d/Deaf individuals finish high school (compared with 89% of hearing individuals); 51% complete some college (compared with 63% of hearing), yet only 18% of d/Deaf individuals complete a bachelor’s degree (compared with 33% of hearing). See Carrie Lou Garberoglio, Stephanie Cawthon, and Adam Sales, Deaf People and Educational Attainment in the United States: 2017 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes, 2017), https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/sites/default/files/DeafPeopleandEducational_Attainment_white_paper.pdf.
14 Robinson and Henner, “Authentic Voices, Authentic Encounters.”
15 In communication scholarship, a small body of research on d/Deafness and/or ASL occurs in the at times separate, at times intersecting, areas of disability studies, performance studies, rhetoric, intercultural communication, and communication disorders. My own research has focused on ASL poetics, performance, and Deaf culture from a performance studies perspective. Acknowledging intersections of performance and disability [e.g., Kurt Lindemann, “Performing (Dis)Ability in the Classroom: Pedagogy and (Con)Tensions,” Text and Performance Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2011): 285–302; Margaret M. Quinlan and Lynn M. Harter, “Meaning in Motion: The Embodied Poetics and Politics of Dancing Wheels,” Text and Performance Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2010): 374–95] and some exploration of d/Deafness via intercultural communication [e.g., Shane T. Moreman and Stephanie R. Briones, “Deaf Queer World-Making: A Thick Intersectional Analysis of the Mediated Cultural Body,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 11, no. 3 (2018): 216–32], in this essay I draw primarily from critical intercultural communication pedagogy.
16 Robinson and Henner, “Authentic Voices, Authentic Encounters.”
17 Gust A. Yep, “Queering/Quaring/Kauering/Crippin’/Transing ‘Other Bodies’ in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International & Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 120.
18 Nilanjana Bardhan, “Postcolonial Migrant Identities and the Case for Strategic Hybridity: Toward ‘Inter’cultural Bridgework,” in Identity Research and Communication: Intercultural Reflections and Future Directions, ed. Nilanjana Bardhan and Mark P. Orbe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 150, 151; Bardhan focuses here on people with postcolonial migrant identities but argues for the heuristic value of a postcolonial approach and application to other iterations of colonizer/colonized. The experience of Deaf Americans certainly fits this conceptualization.
19 For a look at the reverse classroom dynamic, see Patricia A. Foley’s discussion of hearing novice signers teaching fluent ASL students in “A Case ‘for’ and ‘of’ Critical Pedagogy: Meeting the Challenge of Liberatory Education at Gallaudet University,” American Communication Journal 9, no. 4 (2007): 1–21.
20 John T. Warren and Satoshi Toyosaki “Performative Pedagogy as a Pedagogy of Interruption: Difference and Hope,” in Identity Research and Communication: Intercultural Reflections and Future Directions, ed. Nilanjana Bardhan and Mark P. Orbe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 31.
21 Bardhan, “Postcolonial Migrant Identities and the Case for Strategic Hybridity,” 150.
22 Jonathan Sterne, ed., “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 7.
23 Ibid.
24 Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich, “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” The Senses and Society 7, no. 1 (2012): 80.
25 Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 4.
26 Warren and Toyosaki, “Performative Pedagogy as a Pedagogy of Interruption,” 28. See also John T. Warren, “Performing Difference: Repetition in Context,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 1, no. 4 (2008): 290–308.
27 Bardhan, “Postcolonial Migrant Identities and the Case for Strategic Hybridity,” 154.
28 See Robinson and Henner, “Authentic Voices, Authentic Encounters.” See also Janine Butler, “Integral Captions and Subtitles: Designing a Space for Embodied Rhetorics and Visual Access,” Rhetoric Review 37, no. 3 (2018): 286–99.
29 Robinson and Henner, “Authentic Voices, Authentic Encounters.”
30 During spring semester 2020, COVID-19 required campuses to close and instruction to occur remotely. The ASL students’ comments in the course and teacher evaluations revealed additional new understandings; many commented not only that it was more difficult to learn ASL on a screen, but that they also missed being in ASL together, in their bodies, with each other and the instructor.
31 MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” Profession (2007): 234–45.
32 Michelle G. Swaney and David Harry Smith, “Perceived Gaps and Supplemental Materials in Postsecondary American Sign Language Curricula,” Sign Language Studies 17, no. 3 (2017): 293–321.
33 Gust A. Yep, “Demystifying Normativities in Communication Education,” Communication Education 65, no. 2 (2016): 238.
34 Ibid., 239.