Online webinar platforms like Zoom provide a digital space for people to talk to one another and collaborate in real time.
In group meetings on these platforms, the person speaking is typically the one whose video is prominently featured. But this can become an issue when the person is communicating in American Sign Language.
This happened to Associate Professor Jessica Scott and Professor Sue Kasun in a webinar they hosted for an audience with deaf and hard of hearing individuals and hearing individuals. The presenter was giving his presentation in American Sign Language (ASL), but the platform automatically displayed the screen of the person who was voice interpreting.
Scott and Kasun quickly resolved the issue and made the presenter’s screen the most prominent one, but this experience prompted a larger conversation about interpreting services, how they’re viewed in hearing communities and how universities structure their interpreting services.
They co-authored a positional essay in Harvard Educational Review with Illinois State University’s Stephanie Gardiner-Walsh that discusses how interpreting is typically viewed as a one-way form of communication from a hearing person to a person who’s deaf.
The authors explain how university-level disability and accessibility offices typically only provide interpreters when a student is deaf or hard of hearing and makes a formal request for one.
However, interpreting and accessibility services could help facilitate more two-way communication in coursework, research and other activities – for example, when a faculty member who is deaf is communicating with a class of hearing students.
“If hearing society does not consider interpreters as being present for the hearing person’s as well as the deaf person’s benefit, then we perpetuate the ignorance and dominance of a world centered on the experiences and preferences of hearing people,” the authors wrote. “We believe it is necessary for able-bodied people to recognize their shared humanity with disabled people, and part of this process naturally includes learning from disabled people.”
Scott, Kasun and Gardiner-Walsh recommend that universities restructure how interpreting services work to be more inclusive of requests that encourage two-way communication among deaf and hearing individuals.
“Recognizing that the abled learn from the disabled can lead to much more robust sharing and learning,” they wrote. “We find resources for what we prioritize, and we should prioritize the access to knowledge sharing and meaningful communication for all.”
About the Researchers
Jessica Scott
Department of Learning Sciences
Jessica Scott is an associate professor in deaf education in the Department of Learning Sciences. She earned her undergraduate degree in deaf education from Flagler College, and both her Ed.M. in language and literacy with reading specialist licensure and Ed.D. in human development and education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research is focused on further exploring the role that American Sign Language plays in the reading of deaf and hard of hearing students and literacy instruction for deaf students.
Sue Kasun
Department of Middle and Secondary Education
Sue Kasun is a professor of language and culture education in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education. She is a faculty affiliate in the college’s Snap Inc. Center for Computing in Teacher Education, where she has woven her interest and work in Native science/Indigenous knowledge into digital curriculum piloted in U.S. dual immersion education with partnerships based among the Totonaco and Nahua peoples in Mexico. Her co-edited book, “Applying Anzalduan Frameworks to Understand Transnational Youth Identities: Bridging Culture, Language and Schooling at the U.S.-Mexican Border,” won the American Educational Studies Association’s 2023 Critics Choice Award.
Citation
Scott, J. A., Kasun, G. S., and Gardiner-Walsh, S. J. “Flipping the Interpreter Script: Perspectives on Accessibility.” Harvard Educational Review, 93 (4): 516–532. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.516.