Teacher Must Sign Good?
This is a follow up on a presentation Jon Henner and I gave at the ASL Roundtable a couple of years ago. Immediately after that roundtable, some folks posted vlogs that vehemently disagreed with us. What was odd is that we actually were on the same page and had shared politics about the value of linguistically rich education for deaf children.
So apparently, what happened is that folks didn’t understand our, or rather, Jon’s humor. Our title, “Teacher Must Sign Good?” was Jon’s way of critiquing the prevalent attitude in K-12 deaf education that mediocre, dysfluent sign language skills among teachers of the deaf and educational interpreters fresh out of interpreter training programs are acceptable.
They aren’t. Deaf people deserve the best possible access. And children, especially, deserve the best possible language models because they often arrive at school without a signing community. The majority of families don’t sign. Neighborhoods and extended communities such as the church, often do not have signing models. There are few opportunities for deaf children to interact with other deaf people. We discuss this at length in our Crip Linguistics Goes to School article.
Our position was and remains this: deaf children deserve the best possible language models, which means teachers of deaf children and educational interpreters should be top-notch language models.
What we challenged, though, is the nature of language assessments themselves that assess those teachers’ language skills. [Really, Jon as he was the assessment expert.] Many ASL language assessments are limited. They often contain implicit racist and ableist biases. They capture a small snapshot of a person’s signing skills but does…
not authentically reflect their ability to language with young children,
not measure how effectively they calibrate to whatever language the children brings with them to school or work within their schemas,
not demonstrate their mastery of a wide range of signed vocabulary suitable for a variety of subject areas,
not show their ability to nurture languaging,
not measure their ability for creative language problem solving skills.
We ask do existing assessments measure any of those things?
Our point is that many assessments that verify a teacher’s language skills, allowing them in the deaf ed classroom, are flawed and limited.
We want the best language models and teachers for deaf children. This means we need to develop better assessment tools that aren’t racist or ableist but can fully capture a person’s holistic language skill set that can accommodate different ages and contexts.
That was our point. Assessments are generally lousy and deaf children deserve better. How can we pursue that goal?
