context

measurement

I do not wish to appear to single out one university for criticism. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the layered flows of power that characterize a large, complex institution. I believe that every individual I encountered in the classroom and in administration throughout this study thought that they were reforming its ability to provide for deaf students. It is the nature of a complex institution to contradict itself, and this has the effect of not seeing problems from the perspective of students or faculty or reformers in administration who seek to re-form (in the sense of literally re-building the institution from inside). As important as the Deaf/Audist gulf is for deaf students, this communicative gap is but one example of the kind of differend that keeps an institution from meeting the needs of its constituents. Here I think specifically of the battles over basic writing instruction. Or, of greater significance of readers of Kairos, of teaching writing with technology. Tracing the ENFI-to-Daedalus development of writing intensive, student-centered, text-sharing pedagogy reveals that computers and writing owes a debt to crossing the deaf/hearing divide.

back | map | next

john in context | jenny & sue
deaf:audist | hearing pedagogy | enfi | techno-teaching
city on the hill | "othered" outside
end | cited