"othered" outside

responsive

The University must better enable itself to listen to the varieties of critical discourse making demands of it. In becoming more politically activist, the agents working within and outside the University have a responsibility to confront the deafened moment and the significant challenge it poses to the institution's structures. Some changes, such as better communication among levels of administration and teaching, as well as better responsiveness to law and cultural demands, will make the University more responsive as a whole. However, the Deaf students I write about in this essay present problems the institution has not faced in diversifying its ethnic, racial, and gender makeup. Nor are the issues the same as incorporating physically disabled and blind students into campus life. Instead, the cultural inability to recognize deafness and Deaf culture as not debilitating but simply different points to new problems requiring new solutions. The deafened moment can not be worked through by any administration's "handling." Instead, the institution and its deaf constituents must be in constant dialogue in order to build solutions that address the problems as they occur. The problems encountered in the deafened moment are unlike anything the University has faced and, as such, require new solutions in constant negotiation with the Deaf, with both deaf cultural populations to determine what is demanded of education and deaf student populations to determine what they believe they need.

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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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