Tell Me How It Reads: Tutoring Deaf and Hearing Students in the Writing Center

1. Introduction

1 C H A P T E R 1  Introduction SHORTLY AFTER I began directing the writing center at the University of Texas at Brownsville, two deaf students began coming in for tutoring.This event not only disrupted our routine but also sparked an ongoing interest in the complicated and multifaceted topic of tutoring deaf students at mainstream hearing postsecondary institutions . Common tutoring practices used with hearing students do not necessarily work for deaf people, and some of the tutors in this case actually shied away from and tried to avoid tutoring the deaf women. This exposure to deaf student writers clearly made the tutors uncomfortable . In Good Intentions, Nancy Grimm (1999) writes of a tutor whose discomfort with a student’s unconventional literacy practices inspired her dissertation research. Unease or embarrassment in a classroom or tutoring session may also serve as a prompt to work toward a better understanding of different ways to help student writers (Kirsch 1992). This unease and desire to know more resulted in a naturalistic study of writing tutorials with deaf college students in both writing and learning centers. I observed tutorials and conducted interviews with d/Deaf and hearing students, their tutors, their interpreters, and the directors of 2 Chapter 1 the writing and learning centers where they were tutored.1 I conducted research at two different colleges: a four-year private college in a major Midwestern city that offers undergraduate and graduate majors in the visual, performing, media, and communications arts, which I call Davis College, and a suburban community college near this same Midwestern city, which I call Stanhope College. As I relate in more detail later, the choice of colleges was based on convenience factors such as proximity to my house, friendliness and helpfulness of staff and contact people, availability of deaf students being tutored, and willingness to participate. This book is based on the resulting study of tutoring in writing in the college context with both deaf and hearing students and their tutors, describing in detail tutoring sessions between deaf students, hearing tutors, and the interpreters that help them communicate.Although a description of other methods of communication, such as written notes on paper (Schmitz 2008, 138) would be valuable, the deaf tutees I observed all chose to conduct their tutoring sessions through an interpreter. In addition, all of the tutees in this study chose to use a variety of English or contact signing rather than American Sign Language (ASL) in the tutorials.2 The ultimate goal of describing these tutorials is to illustrate the key differences between deafhearing and hearing-hearing tutorials and to suggest ways to modify tutoring and tutor-training practices accordingly. Although this study describes the tutoring of deaf students,the focus on students who learn differently can inform the tutoring of students with learning disabilities,English as a second language (ESL) students,and other nonmainstream students or students with different learning styles. In addition, through the results of grounded theory analysis,this book offers a complete paradigm for all tutoring of writing. Deaf students are attending mainstream postsecondary institutions in increasing numbers.Seventy-three percent of all US institutions of higher education reported enrolling students who were deaf or hard of hearing .These students account for 4 percent of all students with disabilities 1.Throughout the book I use “Deaf” with a capital “D” to indicate cultural deafness, “deaf” with a lowercase “d” to indicate auditory deafness, and “d/Deaf ” to consciously include both groups. I use “deaf” generally throughout the document as a neutral term and use “d/Deaf” or “Deaf” where the distinction is relevant. 2. I thank Ceil Lucas of Gallaudet University for confirming the participants’ language choices in the tutorial. Introduction 3 at these institutions (Raue and Lewis 2011). According to Watson et al. (2007) there are 414,300 college students in the United States with some form of hearing loss,but not all these students disclose their condition,nor do they all ask for accommodation. However, current literature says little about tutoring this mainstream deaf population, and even less has been written about conducting tutoring sessions using sign language interpreters . Writing tutorials conducted through communication modes based on English, such as lipreading and speaking, as well as writing—both on paper and computer screens—have been documented, but these were mostly first-person narrative accounts of tutoring a single deaf student. Other than my work (Babcock 2008, 2011...