An Enabling Pedagogy: Meditations on Writing and Disability

Abstract

Each and every time I stand in front of a new class, I feel the undue and often paradoxical burden of representation.1 Somewhere in the briefing over course policies, the obligatory run through the syllabus, the remarks on key texts and assignments, and the stumbling over a roster of names that I might struggle to pronounce and will struggle even more to hear correctly?somewhere in there I need to tell them that I am deaf. But I won't use that word. I'll opt for hard-of-hearing.2 And then I'll wince over how I'm sure they're thinking: Gee, I guess she's a lot older than she looks. So I'll quickly add that it's a genetic condition that I've had from birth, and I'll begin rambling fast and nervously about how I have no hearing whatsoever in the higher frequencies that are used in audio logical exams; that I possess only about moderate hearing in the lower frequencies; that I am therefore very hard to fit for hearing aids (which I do sometimes now wear thanks to the wonders of digital technologies that can enhance some of the higher frequencies without also over-amplifying the lower ones); how I have never heard a bird or a bell or the last three keys on the piano; how I can't hear whispers or even soft-spoken folks; why I tune to lower-pitched male voices easier than to female ones; how I worried so much over whether I would be able to hear my own children once they were born; why I struggle most with consonants; how I patch together the sense of what they are saying in class by reading body language and other contextual clues around what they say and by lipreading (explaining, too, that this is a skill that most deaf people aren't, in fact, very adept at so please don't take me as a representa tive); that I have a tendency to move in on their space?to move toward them?when they are talking so that I can maximize those clues all the more (which I illustrate even as I am explaining this jac 21.4 (2001)

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