Transcripts of Anonymous deaf graduate student

  OK let's start then I'm gonna start by saying that today is November 16th 2007. Here in Columbus, Ohio at The Ohio State University. Go bucks (chuckles) (more chuckling) And we're gonna start by asking you to give us a little bit of background, just about yourself about your family, do you have other family members? Where you grew up at? Uh, school, where you went to school? Elementary School, High School, just some general background about where you came from before you were here. Ok. Well I was born in Arizona, in a hearing family. All of my hearing is family. I do have some deaf family members. (clears throat) Well and I lived in, when I lived in Arizona, I went to the Phoenix Day School for the Deaf and my first teacher was a woman who was Deaf, who graduated from Gallaudet. And later my family moved to Maryland and I went to Maryland school, in Frederick, Maryland. After that my family then moved to California, and my parents didn't want to send me to a boarding school that was far away. So I ended up staying in San Diego, and went to a local public school. And I went in a self-contained classroom for secondary classroom, and then later on went into a segregated classroom and then went onto a mainstream classroom. After several different schools my family realized that I wasn't happy in that mainstream environment, and allowed me to go back to residential school for the Deaf, at Riverside, and I graduated from Riverside and then went to Gallaudet University, graduated with a BA and an MA there and worked in their archives for a couple of years. And I was tired of that kind of work, and I wanted to get back to studies, and I came here to Ohio State University and I studied in a PHD program in History. So do you have memories of reading, like with your mother, or other family members when you were young? Yes, we all read together. It was always something that we did, was reading together. Ok so what about writing? What are some early memories that you have of writing? You know it tends to happen after reading a little bit, but what do you remember about writing when you were young? I do remember that my mother, my mother and grandmother would write journals, they would write journals and I would see them writing, and I would ask them, "show me what you have written." And of course I didn't understand their writing, but that was really interesting, to see how important writing was to them. So when I went to school I do remember often bugging the teacher, asking them, "I want to do the same thing." "I want to read and write." How would you describe what your relationship is now with reading and writing, and what ways that connects with some of your earliest memories, or the way that it was treated in your family or growing up? In other words I guess I'm interested in if there are ways that you see what happened to you when you were young, reading and writing has impacted you now, as a person? Well now, I love to read. I find it very important that I'm involved in a number of, involved in my, in daily routine reading that's not related to what's required for my classes or my coursework but things for my own enjoyment, my own pleasure. I find that very important to read on a daily basis. And also writing, I write, I'm much more comfortable with ASL than English of course. I'm not very crazy about writing but I do tend to avoid writing whenever I can. Like for example on e-mails, I don't tend to respond if it requires me to write back, I don't like to write back just to it's too much work to think about writing the correct answer, to give a good response. If I could give a response in ASL that would be much easier and I would tend to, I tend to prefer to do that. Is there any connection that you make now when you write, for example, do you map out ideas? For example in ASL, first? And then turn to writing? I guess I'm very interested in this because I actually know that you've published an article in a book I've edited. And you wrote very well. Well, I must say, that being here at Ohio State University has really shaped my writing skills. Before I came here I used to, when I would write, I'd write in American Sign Language and my colleagues would call it ASL discourse in writing. A dialect, the writing in ASL word order, and I would use my own, oh I don't know, brand of ASL signing in English. I would do that first, then I'd go back and clean things up and go more toward English word order. So do you still do that? Do you kind of just try to write it first? In your own dialect, ASL, and then go back and turn it more into standard English? Yes I still do that. To this day, yeah. Let's add technology in here now. What are some of your first memories of do you remember the first time you used a computer, for example? But we're interested obviously in technologies of communication, how technology works with reading and writing, and also let's say your ASL use. Start as early as you can and remember using technology Well I grew up in the Eighties, and the first computer I had was an Apple IIe computer and I would play with that for communication and technology. I remember my family couldn't afford captioning for the television so my mom would sit by the TV and interpret what was being said. We would go to a deaf friends house and they would have captioning, and I kept saying that I wanted that and I wanted that. My mother finally was able to get one for my birthday one year and installed it and I became hooked on television because I could finally read and finally understand what's going on. And that brought me into the "World of English Language" the idioms, the slang, the everyday uses of the language that's not formal written language, it's the everyday dialogue of English, through Television. So that was interesting to me because when we started, you started by talking about computers but the technology really you wanted to talk about, that had an impact on you was the technology of captioning, on TV screen. I want you to dwell a little bit more there, because by the time this interview is out I think already a number of people, audiences won't even understand what the earliest days of captioning were like. So when you say for example you couldn't afford it what that means, well can you describe what early captioning was like? As a technology? Certainly, in the Nineteen... Bush passed a law in the early Nineties, that talked about Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, and in fact it really came to being in Ninety-Two. This required all televisions, thirteen inch or larger to have a chip inside to decode captioning. Prior to that there was nothing to that, you had to buy a separate machine a device that would hook to your TV that would decode the message, and I assumed it was pretty expensive back then I don't know how much it was, but that's why I didn't have one until later on. I'll just say, I kept mine, I have one in the basement that I've kept because I remember it really was, I don't remember exactly how much but it was really expensive at the time, and it was such a privilege to have it. So once they went out of style, I thought I would just save it for grandkids or whatever, (chuckles) the big black box. We still have ours as well. And a TTY too (chuckles). So other technologies, like the TTY hearing aid, did you wear a hearing aid? My family gave me a TTY later on when I became 13 they allowed me to be able to, it allowed me to contact friends through the TTY and it didn't last too long because right after that I went to the Residential School for the Deaf, and I had access to a computer with instant message and e-mail. And many of my peers preferred to communicate through instant message rather than through the TTY. The TTY was so slow and cumbersome while the instant message was much faster and you could chat with more than one person at one time. And so the IM really became the means, to still today, but today IM technology, if you're using an Apple computer that has an AV chat rather than IM, so oftentimes I use that to sign through the computer, using similar to IM. So IM, instant messaging was a kind of important communication technology for you, for social interactions. Yes, right for social purposes to chat with everyone. Would you say, did it have any kind of impact on your other literacy skills? In Sign Language or in reading and writing? Well yes it made me more "lazy" I would suppose, with English then, because my I had to be more careful with English because I was writing for school without IM, prior to IM, because for the social purpose of it, it was less, I had to be less careful how I wrote my English sentence. Of course my friends themselves used that ASL dialect and I slid into that dialect as well, just in chatting, and non-formal uses. And that worked out fine. So I became a bit more lazy with my English, and that gave me a degree of comfort with how to write my own formal work, because then I found that ASL dialect was much easier than regular writing. So I started using that as my daily school work, I would type in an ASL dialect and then change it over to English, and it gave me that basis, so yeah. So in the way that captioning made you familiar like you said with English, with idioms and phrasings, new words, new vocabulary and stuff. And you're saying the IM might have made you a little lazier with your English use but it also made you in some ways more fluent, using the language a lot everyday. Right, yes, that would be right. I wanted to ask a quick follow-up, you mentioned using AV chat, real time chat with Sign Language. Does recorded video play a part in either personal interaction or your academic work? That is, the recording a video of signing and then sending it to someone. Well not really because we don't record our dialogues, it does, it has been helpful, sometimes, when I consider in a reading in my schoolwork, if I need to digest a particular material without a lot people hearing there's not a lot of people here in Columbus who have the same level of education, so I do have a number of other friends, who are PHD level students who are in other cities, I do call and chat with them. But I tend to understand my material better through that instant chatting method, in my program here. It's more a kind of "real-time" technology use, rather than recording and saving it. Well what about, let's... I want to stay with computers. Yeah real time technology is what I use. Stay with the computer a little bit, because you've talked now about the computer and using IM through the computer, other ways or uses of the computer as a technology, that have changed or shaped or added to your literacy skills. Other than the obvious use of a computer for, (hesitates) for other word processing. I certainly use the computer for word processing and I get a lot of my daily news through the computer. I participate in a number of forums, discussion forums, debates, I see a lot of ASL "vlogs" the vlogs are available on the computer, the internet, really is a wonderful tool to use. Good, that's what I was going to ask about, I didn't think about the computer as an information technology, you know whether it's a library or Google, in what ways you use that. And then I was also going to ask you to expand, if you access blogs, and can you tell us a little bit about blogs? How you use the blogs? Is it just for... Do you blog yourself? Do you just read other people's information? Do you chat with other people about things that you see, on the blogs? Yeah I do look at a number of "vlogs" on a regular basis to see what's going at Gallaudet University and the Deaf community. Oftentimes it's very interesting information that's there and later on that I incorporate that in my regular discussion with people. Do you find the blogs, in terms of, are there things that they do, for you, in terms of literacy skills? Do you use them for information, or is it social? Or is it some of both? And I guess I'm interested because I know I've looked at some of the blogs are much more English oriented, and then some of the blogs are pretty primarily ASL, do you look at both kinds? Do you have a preference for one kind? Well I don't have a preference really, the blogs are really a variety of different areas of focus, and I tend to read political blogs, "vlogs", I do appreciate that. I don't see a difference there. But sometimes I would prefer to read blogs over vlogs, because vlogs take much longer whereas blogs are much more quicker to look at, it takes less time, it's less time consuming. Blogs that are probably outside the Deaf world, blogs. Outside of the ones like on deafread.com but also wider range of blogs. You also access deaf blogs right? That's correct, both deaf and non-deaf blogs, yeah.