We also explore ways that universities use ASL classes to further marginalize deaf academics. In this article, we examine how universities have profited from ASL while denying opportunities to deaf students and academics. Most importantly, our framework fosters intellectual engagement with disability. It supports deaf people's needs as both students and faculty and enables an environment that is mindful of the varied needs and desires of deaf communities.
While McKinney's framework was about how professors can make their classrooms more accessible for disability and disability-identified peoples, our framework considers how universities can use ASL and Deaf Studies classrooms to increase the presence of deaf and disabled people on campus.
Cripping higher education allows students, administrators, and scholars to critically engage with questions of language, social control, and power surrounding disability. It involves embracing disability scholarship and the study of disability across the curriculum. To crip higher education is to intentionally create welcoming spaces for disabled students and faculty. In our analysis, we extend Claire McKinney's (2016) concept of cripping the classroom to cripping the college and university, and more specifically, cripping the ASL classroom. What this article does is examine institutional practices for offering ASL classes and considers how ASL can bring the benefits of disability to the higher education classroom. Who should be able to teach ASL and disability related courses? How has the surge of interest in ASL affected signed language teachers, deaf and disabled academics, and deaf and disabled communities? This is not the first article to examine the appropriateness of nondeaf people teaching ASL. ASL also offers opportunities for educational interventions that work toward the ends of a liberal education.Īnd yet, several questions must be considered when analyzing the place of ASL education in higher education. ASL courses, unlike other foreign languages, give abled students the opportunity to transcend not only cultural boundaries but also the boundaries between abled and disabled in challenging what we take for granted in our understandings of normalcy (Annamma, et al, 2013). In this article, we argue that American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf Studies serves as an avenue for abled students, colleges, and universities to engage with disability in critical ways.
Cripping requires that higher education institutions consider authentic voices, faculty, and encounters when offering disability-related content.Įxplicit representation of disability among students, faculty, and academic discourse benefits everyone. We also suggest solutions via the concept of cripping the academy.
However, we use the term disabled when referring to experiences that affect broader disabled communities, including deaf communities. As appropriate, we refer to deaf people as a distinct population within the disabled community when speaking to experiences that mainly affect deaf people. Inclusion and access to academia must be made not only for deaf and disabled students, but also deaf and disabled scholars and faculty, despite the cost.Īlthough deaf people in the western world have historically considered themselves as sociolinguistic minority groups separate from other disabled communities, we recognize the underlying structural forces and historical, social, and cultural processes that shape deaf people's relations to society and the academy are tied to dis/ability and ableism. Even though American Sign Language (ASL) has gone vogue, deaf people continue to remain with other disabled people on the margins of U.S. As deaf people experience the sting of audism, ableism, and inequity, they pull back and situate this discourse within the larger notions of disability justice and social justice. It is common for deaf people to grumble about nondeaf people teaching American Sign Language and deaf culture in higher education institutions.
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