"othered" outside

inclusive

There must be a ways to establish protocols for the University to work with unaccustomed demands and to recognize when it is not attuned to student needs. This is a tricky demand: to ask the institution to begin working to accommodate students it has just begun to encounter but does not yet comprehend. Such a solution would provide for the deaf and hearing impaired such that they do not receive substandard college education but are embraced as necessary members of the college and, later, the citizenry. This is no different than racial and ethnic groups who have been traditionally excluded from higher education, or at least it is a difference of a kind of discrimination and not different in the nature of discrimination itself. Developing methods for incorporating deaf and hearing students into classes together should and can be a pedagogical imperative for the institution to take on rather than a point of resistance for the university to resist change and maintain the status quo. But institutions like universities appear to be, historically, better at maintaining the status quo than developing socially progressive solutions. As this CoverWeb demonstrates, we are beginning to build solutions to accommodate differently abled bodies, but we do not yet know who the institution will be asked to accommodate next.

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