Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs
[The interpretation provided for this presentation
is live and unrehearsed.
Interpreter(s) assigned may or may not
have had materials in advance for preparation.
Inaccuracies related to the content of the material
may be due to imperfections in the interpreting process.
This interpretation has not been reviewed by the presenter.]
Hello all.
I'd like to open with a little bit about myself.
I was born in Colorado,
raised there,
and had what you might call a regular childhood.
Went outdoors to play.
Friends, family and a good life, all told.
And then, all of the sudden, out of the blue,
something changed my life and had a profound impact on me.
At age 21, I became hearing.
You may wonder what this means.
But it doesn't refer to the fact that I grew up hearing.
I could hear my entire life,
and from birth I heard everything in my environment,
from my mother's voice to the telephone ringing.
Everything in my environment was accessible through hearing.
But that's not what I mean.
I had no clue at that point in my life that I was "hearing" as an identity
until I came into the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, CSDB.
When I was first hired as a dormitory supervisor,
I was a little puzzled that I'd gotten the job,
not knowing sign language at the time.
But at the moment I came in and crossed the threshold of that campus in Colorado,
I began to realize how different I was.
I had identities as a white person, as an able-bodied, middle-class person,
as a heterosexual,
but never before had I felt different in this way.
From the moment I came into the campus grounds, I was the minority.
The majority status I'd always felt was turned on its head.
And in fact, throughout my entire life,
as a majority group member, I had felt "normal."
I had no idea, no clue, how normal I felt in that environment
until coming into this new environment and that normalcy was taken away.
It was profoundly shocking to me
that I, as a hearing person, was no longer normal.
[NORMAL] -> [NORMAL (with red slash)]
This attribution of identity is really a foundation
to the way I perceive and think about normalcy today.
I am hearing.
And this brings to mind many, many other questions
about what it means to be hearing.
[What does it mean to be 'hearing'?]
Now, I had just graduated from college
and studied for my bachelor's in literature.
So as a graduate from four years,
spent over $100,000, all told, on my education,
not once did I ever learn anything about the literature of signed language.
And there were schools for the deaf nearby,
just some two miles from the college I attended.
And yet, I had spent all this time and all this energy
studying literature.
That absence ...
[What does it mean to be 'hearing'?
How has hearingness shaped literature?]
That realization of that absence from the body of literature
in my education was striking to me.
And so to be hearing really means to have an absence of this whole genre,
of this whole experience.
And so in all my studies, I'd never encountered that.
And that brought to mind questions of what else it means to be hearing,
what other influences there are.
[How has 'hearingness' shaped education?]
There's education
[How has being hearing shaped our built environment?]
and environmental aspects to this.
[How has hearingness shaped the history of thought?]
And there's a whole history of thought
that has been passed down through thousands of years
in this corpus of hearingness
and how it has shaped our thinking and literature.
So there needed to be -
I really think there needs to be a new field of study,
like "Hearing Studies."
There are Black Studies, there are studies for other groups,
but white people are there in the mass of the body of literature and study.
So there is a studied focus
on all of these other kinds of identities and perspectives.
So in the Hearing Studies field, one concept for study
would be that of looking at the importance of sign
and not looking at the act of hearing, the function of hearing or hearing loss.
[Hearing Loss
(noun) refers to the limitations that hearing individuals experience
by not being aware of Deaf ways of being in the world.]
If we look first at this notion of hearing loss,
we should then turn that on its head and see what do we as hearing people lose
by not expanding our understanding of the world?
Hearing loss and looking at sign as two different concepts
really turns the notion of hearing loss on its head.
And what's quite interesting for me as a person who's grown up hearing
and as someone that I might call a "late-hearing" adult -
you know the term CODA refers to child of deaf adults,
and then we have late-deafened;
I'm, in fact, "late-hearinged."
So having had this identity now,
it has taught me a number of lessons that I'd like to now share with you.
[#1 Lessons in Limitations: danger of the single point perspective]
The first of that is the danger of a single-point perspective.
Many of us habitually arrive at conclusions
about the world around us from a limited single perspective.
[We humans often get it wrong....]
For millennia we thought the world was flat.
Humans thought the world was flat.
This is comparable to my own perspective being so limited.
The notion of the world being round is very difficult
when what we perceive is a horizon that's somewhat flat.
So with an increasing body of knowledge,
we eventually arrived at a different, more accurate conclusion,
that the world is not, in fact, flat, but round.
[Geocentrism]
Another notion here was that humanity
thought that the Earth was the center of the universe.
The thought came from the perfectly reasonable notion
that we observed the Sun passing through the sky,
but don't feel ourselves passing through space
at [500] miles per hour.
So we were given the sense that everything else was moving
and we, the Earth, stood still.
So this expansion of our knowledge
leads to arriving at a different conclusion.
This geocentricism, which was present across the world,
changed once we expanded our body of knowledge.
[Phonocentrism Language = Speech]
[Language = Speech (with red slash)]
Let me turn our attention now to the concept of phonocentricism.
This is the notion that our hearing perspective,
our language, and our act of speech are all interchangeable.
This has been the dominant mode of thinking
for thousands of years
and is just as stubbornly held onto as geocentrism
or the flat earth notion in its era.
So we must now expand our thinking, expand our understanding.
["Language" is not what it used to be]
Now, based on research findings,
we have found that the human brain is fundamentally ready,
whether language comes through input auditorially
or visually, it doesn't matter.
The brain will produce language.
This brings an entirely new definition of human potential to the fore for us.
Research findings from a number of people
have found that the brain processes language
whether it be signed or spoken,
biologically equivalently.
[Because we got it wrong, we must now take a second look at...]
Very interestingly, I have to admit that as a hearing perspective taker,
I had it wrong all this time.
And I say this because these fundamental concepts of human nature
that we have held are on based on the notion of language
that we had all this time,
which we had to take a second look at more recently.
[definitions]
So these definitions of
[Literacy]
literacy,
of what it means to read and write, have to be re-examined.
[Literature]
The notion of literature has to be re-examined
because of the presence of signed literature.
[Origins of language theory]
Our notions of how language emerges and evolves
requires a second look now.
[the human brain]
We have an entirely new map of the human brain
that looks quite different than our old conceptions.
[Textual studies]
The meaning of text is called into question.
[benefits of visual, gestural, spatial learning]
And in fact, the notion of how humans learn
through visual, gestural and spatial modes
has increased our access to knowledge.
[Human nature]
[Human being]
In fact, what it means to be a human being has changed.
This act of re-examining all of these notions
is what I propose by examining Hearing Studies.
[We now know to sign is human]
Our conclusions about language have changed
because of what we know about sign.
Hearing identity is really based on a lack of an entire body of knowledge.
[#2 Lessons in Limitations: Eye Contact]
Another lesson learned from this for me is that of eye contact.
[Lesson #2 Toward a psychology of Deaf Gain and Hearing Loss
What can hearing people learn from Deaf eye gaze behavior -
in social and cognitive domains?]
Eye contact really deserves our examination.
[Deaf people use eye contact
to the maximal human potential for eye use,
including cognitive processing and social engagement throughout their lives,
whereas for hearing people it's a different story.]
If we look, on the metro, for example,
the hearing perspective of serial conversation
and the lack of eye gaze,
where we don't have to meet each other's gaze for conversation.
But it's actually far healthier
to engage in conversation with eye gaze shared,
it's a healthier perspective,
which is brought to us by understanding how deaf people use it.
And so we can then learn, as hearing people,
how to increase human connection and human interaction,
human social and cognitive domains by examining how deaf people do this.
So we have to contrast this notion of hearing loss
with what is gained by being deaf, deaf gain.
So there are a number of lessons I've learned as a hearing person
and that we all could benefit from, eye gaze being one of those.
[#3 Lessons in Limitations: Hearing Classroom Ecology]
The third lesson learned
has to do with education in the classroom environment.
If we look at what eye gaze requires,
that begs us to re-examine the ecology of the classroom.
I grew up in the normal, everyday conception
that you have of a classroom in a hearing environment -
the seating in the row and column configuration of the classroom.
But there's a lack of human connection there
because my human connection is never to those behind me,
only to those who I see in front of me,
and in fact, I only see the back of their heads.
So it creates isolation of each individual within the classroom.
This is the norm for the hearing classroom ecology.
But if we look at the deaf classroom ecology, it looks quite different.
The deaf classroom will almost always be in either a semi-circle
or full-circle arrangement.
So when a teacher comes in,
they immediately establish eye contact and recognition
with each participant in the classroom,
so they're all unified before beginning their discourse.
Everyone can see everything in the classroom.
This is entirely different,
and I would propose that is a loss for hearing people,
to not have this conception of what is gained by deafness
and the experience of deafness.
These can provide benchmarks that we can all learn from.
[#4 Lessons in Limitations: Hearing Loss and Health]
The other lesson that I'd like to turn our attention to is that of health.
For a very long time, deafness was looked at
as a biological deafness that needed fixing.
But as a hearing person, I have to admit
that I have a number of health issues that are related to my hearing.
For example, last night at around 11:00, I was just getting ready to go to sleep,
I heard my house alarm be triggered.
And so I had to go and fix it immediately because it was such an annoying sound.
Repeatedly, I tried to turn it off and to no avail - I couldn't do it.
My whole body became stressed from this experience,
from this auditory intrusion,
and this was because of being hearing.
(Loud beeping noise starts)
And there are a number of other health problems associated with hearing.
You know, problems being able to sleep because of noise in the environment,
distractions in the workplace reducing work performance,
academic success
with all of the auditory distractions in the environment.
(Airplane noise starts)
All of these things can bother a listener, and increasingly so over time.
So these stresses we know also result in other health problems,
like cardiovascular health issues.
(Ringing noise)
So we have seen that increased stress on mothers
actually affects the health of the newborn in utero.
(Baby crying starts)
There are many, many other examples of these stressors
that come from -
People acting out of their best interests in reaction to these stressors
still results in health problems overall.
(Baby crying continues)
So we have to look to how we deal with that -
the suffering that we experience
because of having hearing and all of these distractors
that cannot be turned off.
[Being Hearing or Deaf...
is one necessarily, in all cases, better than the other?]
So if we contrast hearing and deaf people,
if we look at it, what happens, happens out of necessity.
It is simply a different experience.
Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone should become deaf.
I am happy with who I am, and I am who I am.
But there is something that has to be examined.
If we look at the need to "fix" deaf people,
that there is something begging to be fixed,
that has to be called into question.
Because throughout my whole life, I had a limited perspective,
which now having been expanded, I have to wonder
why would we ask that we not have access to that.
[#5 Lessons in Respect: Taking a Second Look]
So we have to look at the word "respect."
[Re-spectare = to look again]
Let's examine what this means.
In its roots, we see its prefix "re" means "to once again,"
"take a second look."
So this asks us to, once again, re-examine our world with a new respect.
And to think about the fact that everything you have conceived of
could easily be turned on its head.
And that what we see externally calls us to question
our own internal experiences and conceptions.
So what I have seen and deaf people calls me to re-examine who I am.
[taking a second look at one's privileges]
So who am I, then, based on my understanding of the world?
This has increased.
I have a great number of privileges that lay unexamined for many, many years.
[taking a second look at one's assumptions]
So this questions my assumptions of normalcy.
Things that we take for granted have to be called into question
and be re-examined.
[taking a second look at one's education]
I have to examine where my knowledge comes from.
My sense of reality comes from
the education system's inculcation of my experience.
[taking a second look at what is "normal"]
That experience of becoming hearing
called into question everything I assumed normalcy referred to.
[taking a second look at human diversity]
If we look at the value of human diversity,
we see that Alexander Graham Bell
actually wrote that the deaf variety of human being is something to be feared.
I would challenge that and say
that the deaf variety of human experience and deaf being
is worthwhile and positive.
[taking a second look at the contributions of Deaf Studies]
There are benefits to be gained in the field of Deaf Studies.
We've examined that.
[taking a second look at lessons of hearing loss]
And finally, the lessons that we learn
from the experience of being hearing and that loss.
I thank you very much.