Good morning. Good morning. I'm happy to see all of you here.
It's really a thrill to be presenting at this Ed Talk for you all.
This has really been a very nice opportunity
just to share with you some of the thoughts
that have come to me over the years. It's really taken me some time
to figure out who I am, and as well as who our students are
and what it is that we're doing here. So I thought it would be a good time
to share with you the process. So thank you very much,
Dr. Pustejovsky for inviting me here, and thank you for coming,
to everybody as well.
So, you could see the title of my presentation.
It's a bit of an odd one, I understand that.
When you think about becoming a statistic, what does that mean?
What does it mean to be a statistic? Does it have a positive connotation?
A negative connotation? Typically, it's a negative connotation
when we say someone or a particular group
has become a statistic. It's typically looked at as a negative.
It has a negative feeling, it has consequences that
we need to realize is part of the experience
for a lot of students to feel like they are one
that has become or is trying to avoid becoming a statistic.
So keep that in mind as we go through this presentation.
The first is, what does it mean between the personal and the professional
in terms of being an academic? How is it that we do that?
What does that even mean? I'm going to talk to you
about building a foundation through research, obviously.
Here being at the University of Texas, we are research people,
so we how do we do that? What does that mean?
And then, I'll talk about the bit about the shift to engagement.
From that foundation of research, the next steps. Now what?
Ten years later, are we still just doing research?
That can't be the case. So we'll talk a little bit about
the shift we have to engagement and how we'll be doing that.
But before I do that, a clarification.
When I use the term "deaf," the term deaf can mean
a number of different things. All of the things you see
on this screen and more.
So when I say "deaf," I use that term inclusively.
There are a number of characteristics that describe that group.
It's not just one thing. There's a number of different people
in that group. And with that understanding...
You have to understand that the deaf identity is fluid.
It develops, it grows, it changes. A number of different people
have said to me, "Well, Stephanie, you can't be deaf.
"You're hard of hearing." Well, who says when that is true
and when it isn't? And it varies.
For me, it depends on the situation. It really is context dependent.
So in being an inclusive definition, it helps clarify that
the identity can be fluid. It's not just one set identity
across a group. For one individual, that identity can be fluid and complex.
So knowing that first, I can now tell you
what we have in mind for the end game: equality.
That's the goal here. No more, no less.
And equal opportunity. And what do we mean
when we say opportunity? What does that look like?
It's not just in school, and we understand that
school is important, but it's not the only indicator
of a successful life and what that means after school.
I know as a graduate student, you may not believe me
when I say you are going to finish someday,
after that, what does that look like for you?
What does that look like in terms of a quality of life?
There are a number of contributors to understanding quality of life
and how important it is. So it's not just degree,
it's not just being employed. It's what you then do with that
that contributes to quality of life. So, equality is the goal.
Now statistics. Obviously, being at UT, we love statistics, right?
And we know if the statistics are there, it's true, right?
We can't argue with the statistics. So here are just
a few statistics for you to keep in mind.
So this particular statistic is about post-secondary education.
The black bar is the general population.
The gray is the general disabled population.
And that beige-orangeish color is deaf individuals.
So you notice a few things right off the bat.
At community colleges, deaf individuals
are near double the enrollment of the general population.
When we look at technical programs, we see the same trend.
But when you get to the four-year institutions ...
that number can indeed be high, but you have to remember
when we talked about enrollment, that doesn't look at completion.
Those aren't the same. So the starting point
is an interesting thing to see here. But understand that when
people are talking about post-secondary education,
it's not the same percentages for deaf individuals in terms
of institutions they're attending.
Now this statistic is about employment.
Now there are a number of complicated factors
that are going to impact employment. It's never going to be something simple.
But we know there's an employment gap. And it's important to address that gap.
Okay. So keeping in mind those two simple statistics ...
what's happening in the real world? What about real life?
What is it like for individuals?
So just to tell you a few stories about my upbringing.
This is not a picture of me. It could've very well been.
I grew up with hearing aids.
I didn't speak until after the age of four.
So my parents weren't really sure what was happening.
My parents were clueless. Both of them were academics.
They're both faculty members. They still are clueless.
Being an academic doesn't prevent you from being clueless.
So academics often start with the question.
Where should we send her to school?
Where it is they got their degree from was important, right?
That gives them a reputation. So an academic wants to know
where you got your degree from.
So when I represent my academic history, people are always unsure.
I would think, number one:
where did they send deaf children way back in the day?
When I was growing up, that was the first
recommendation of where they sent me because I wasn't speaking.
And if you don't speak, that's a problem that needs to be fixed by society.
I can remember the hours and hours upon days upon days
of speech therapy, replacing my social life
for years on end. Doing the same thing
in a number of different ways. In elementary school
sitting in the front of the classroom trying to read the teacher's lips
as they're teaching. Not having a social life
because all the students were behind me.
So academics are important. Yes, obviously,
I learned a number of things. But if you understand
the life of a deaf individual, you need to understand that
the social aspect is very important as well.
So we think about what it is we say when we talk to people.
How we then internalize what people say to us.
Now, I was giving a presentation on a similar topic,
and people had asked me to say the quotes
that I'm going to share with you, and I say no.
Because they've impacted me enough growing up,
I don't need to give them any more power.
So Bobby, our interpreter, is going to voice them for me.
I'm not going to sign them or speak them.
And these are things that were said to either myself or my parents
while I was growing up or later in life
about my deafness, about my field of study,
about a number of things.
Why do you think I was talking to the other students in class?
Especially as an undergraduate. You're talking about a huge room
full of 300 students. I can't hear.
I couldn't hear what the teacher was saying.
I was constantly checking in to see if I was understanding accurately.
And that's why I wasn't a serious student.
"She's done all this in spite of her hearing loss."
Now this was meant to be a compliment. This was meant to be praise.
It definitely didn't feel that way. "You should change
"your research interests. There's not much funding
"in that area." It's really funny now,
but it was not funny when they said this to me.
All of those words, even though they were just words,
were weights that I brought with me every day.
And I'm not the only individual like that.
There are a number of individuals out there that had to take those
on for themselves. They had to
carry that weight of other people's expectations with them.
And it always felt like I wasn't doing the same amount
as other people. I was always doing more.
And it felt like I had to do that because I had to show them
that I wasn't what they thought. People always looked at me and said
"Stephanie, you're an overachiever." And I said
"No, I'm fighting an uphill battle every day."
So the personal is professional, and the professional is personal.
You can't separate the two.
I remember the first day I figured this out.
I was an undergrad, and I was in England.
I was at school in England, and someone said to me
"What do you think about language development
"especially as a perspective of a hard of hearing person?"
And I thought, "Oh, that means that there's a difference."
That was the first time that it was important for me
to realize that there was a difference. I grew up realizing that
things weren't the same for me. And that then impacted
every area of my life, not just education.
So that's what really kicked off my field of study.
That question I got when I was a 20 year old undergraduate.
And I understand about building a foundation.
Now the picture you see on the screen is an ideal world, right?
When you tell graduate students "You want to plan your research.
"You want to plan the structure of your research.
"You want to build the foundation one block at a time."
And this is what they picture. It's easy, it's clear, it's linear,
and it builds up from the ground. But that wasn't how mine went.
This is what my plan looked like.
So no plan. I had an interest, but I didn't have a plan.
So when people see my CV, they say
"That's a variety of things here." I say,
"Yes, but remember, I'm doing double, triple the work.
"I'm trying to prove to everyone that I can."
So any opportunity that came, I took it.
And I don't feel like that was a mistake on my part.
But that's not what I tell my students. We tell them, you gotta have a plan.
So one thing at a time. School accountability
was an area of interest and thinking about school systems
and what they do for students with disabilities
and students that are deaf in general and how they look at language development.
The system of assessment, the tests themselves.
It's still a hot button issue in the field.
Talk about equity and funding to look at who's getting promotions
and who's not through those.
And then all things related to access and the learning environment.
So if you think that testing is important,
well I hope that stems from the education that the student got.
And then I expanded to not just looking at students,
but also looking at parent and teacher perspectives.
So it really grew from that individual perspective,
because I felt like I needed to emphasize it's not just the individual
that was important to study, but you had to understand
the system and the context that they were in
to understand the impact on them.
And then the last one is really a team effort.
Predictors of post-secondary outcomes. And it's not always the same thing
for deaf individuals. We assume that, but it's not.
Some things have more of an impact and some things a lesser impact.
But one thing that's recently become very important for us to understand
is when we think about research, we typically look at the outcomes.
We measure outcomes. We look at those at being
the important part. What's happening with the students?
What are they learning? Are they graduating?
Are they getting a job after graduation?
And those distract us from the causes, sometimes.
So right now, we're really shifting our understanding of important
actions to not just the outcomes but the causes
and how we can address those.
And it's the same idea of this picture. You have a flower, you have a plant,
and underneath that plant is its roots.
Now, from the science perspective, why do you do a root cause analysis?
There's rarely funding in it, and funding is decreasing every day.
So you need to be wise about how you use it.
And it seems like these are things that are common sense,
but they're not. You see a lot of emphasis in the outcomes,
but not on the root causes.
So our team really made an emphasis to do a systematic review of the literature
With our understanding of what happens in the field for deaf individuals
and identity development. It's not just finding random readings,
it's really educated reading. It's understanding why
things are important and why we understand
what we're looking for.
I always say people need to keep in mind I am a developmental psychologist.
And that is always going to impact my approach to everything.
Training, perspective, theory, all of it is really,
in terms of developmental psychology. Someone else from a more
social psychology perspective, maybe a social worker,
they're going to look at this differently. And that's fine,
and I accept that. But for me, the developmental perspective
was really a good fit for what we're seeing.
Systems are important. We can study individuals
and that's fantastic, and we know that, but if we only study individuals,
we're missing part of the picture. So we really have to have an understanding
that the system needs to be part of the review.
So we identified four possible root causes.
We're not saying that these are the only four root causes,
but these are four of the possible root causes
that came from the review of literature.
Now, language and communication access.
I think it's important that it's not just language and communication
but it's also access to direct communication.
I think everybody thinks that communication
can always happen through an interpreter,
and it can, but direct communication is very important to remember.
A lot of times, deaf children grow up at home, at school,
and in their environment without direct access
to communication and language. And this is important.
It's important to remember.
And deaf individuals are spread out all over the country.
It's not just that they're at schools for the deaf.
They have an opportunity to be at whatever school they can be
in their neighborhood. We are seeing all the time,
new universities and small colleges asking us,
"We have a deaf student for the first time.
"What are we doing? What do we do with this student?"
So this is a common experience out there for universities and colleges all over.
So with that, the opportunities of access are really important to remember.
A lot of these teachers are meeting and teaching a deaf individual
for the first time. And oftentimes, they're doing this
without direct communication.
Now within the research in our field, we often see outcomes
related to mental health that stem from social isolation.
Social isolation impacts employment and education success.
We know this.
A number of deaf students don't have access to those social opportunities
that they desperately need for just even networking opportunities.
When you think about how it is you got your job,
it typically happens with getting in with people you know.
So how do you develop those networks if the language
and access to communication isn't there?
So we need to build structures that allow for those opportunities to happen.
A number of people out there hold the belief
that deaf people are incapable. We see this all the time.
Whether it's said or unsaid, the attitude and biases are there,
and we see them often.
And oftentimes, that bias is very subtle.
It's not explicit, but it makes the same type of impact.
Now we know high expectations are critical for success
in post-secondary environments. And to have a teacher that says
"Deaf individuals aren't going to be able to do this on par as
"their hearing colleagues," or to have a parent who doesn't know
a role model or doesn't know how to be a model for success
for their children, how is it that they know
that their child can grow up to be successful,
if they don't see successful deaf individuals?
So those messages that I showed you that I heard throughout my life,
I'm not the only deaf individual to hear these.
I'm sure every deaf person has had this experience,
if not more. And it's hard to overcome that.
It's hard to say "Those words aren't mean."
These are people who are my teachers, my doctors, my advisers,
my department chairs. These were all the people
that were saying these to me, and they are important to me.
So I hold their opinions as important to me.
And so deaf individuals often internalize those biases.
And when that happens, when you face those negative messages every day,
it becomes who you are. It becomes harder and harder
to break through those stresses.
So there are a number of professionals involved in serving
deaf individuals in education. Whether they be audiologists
or teachers or speech therapists. Whether they be in general education
or special education. Whether they're interpreters
or captioning providers, they all need to have skills
in order to access, to mean something for that deaf individual.
And that's hard to do because being deaf
doesn't mean one thing. It's varying.
It's dependent on the context. It's dependent on the person.
So the individual working with the student needs to understand that.
Needs to understand that for implications for assessment,
for testing, for a number of things. So training and exposure
to this type of thing is not necessarily the responsibility of the professional,
but understanding where the gaps are in the system can help address it.
So understanding those four root causes will help you understand,
through and through, the purpose of our center.
The foundation is here. We have a foundation of research at UT.
We know that for at least for the last 10 or 15 years.
It has been taking time. You can't avoid that.
You need that growth. It wasn't something 10 years ago
I decided, "Hey, I'm going to have a center at the university."
It was just focusing on my work and making sure it was
of a high quality.
Finding effective models of research to practice,
thinking about the stakeholder groups that need to be worked with.
Parents need something that's different from professionals,
they need something that's different from students,
so how do you fit every stakeholder group that's not a one-size-fits-all
type of thing? To really think about
evidence-based solutions and how to work with those.
And then there's just the right people at the right time.
You can never plan that. We have a number of amazing people
here at UT.
We got very, very lucky.
So, step three: it's time to engage.
We built the foundation of research, and that's not finished,
but we have enough to start. So how do we start?
Now you see links from some of the previous slides
focusing on post-secondary successes by using evidence-based strategies,
research. We can't just pull these out of thin air.
You need to understand the research to do it.
Really focusing our effort on addressing root causes
as well as systemic barriers. It's not an individual thing,
it is the system. And that is obviously
much, much harder than people realize. But without addressing that,
every solution is just a bandaid.
So we start to talk about shifting the culture.
It's not just about behaviors and attitudes and activities,
it's about shifting the culture. We have a culture here.
How do we make that culture accessible to deaf individuals
and make that an equal opportunity culture?
There's the virtual help desk. If somebody has a question,
we have people who can answer, and they're available to address
individual needs. The annual reports are extremely important for the field
to understand that there's a foundation of what's happening.
Where a deaf individual is going to school,
what are their outcomes? So to build an annual report
for the field's need, to make sure that they have something
to focus on that is reliable. Knowing that it's not just one study
but a synthesis of a number of studies that they can build their model on.
Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is crucial
to engage with the people that are on those platforms.
As researchers, we tend to be isolated, we tend to work alone
in our office on the laptop, but we need to get our information out there.
So we change the language. We change the length.
We don't send out academic documents that are 50 pages long.
Who wants to read that? So we translate those as well.
We translate the format, the language.
We have videos that we've translated our research into ASL,
so that way it's accessible for deaf individuals as well.
It's not only important for hearing professionals to understand,
it's also important for deaf individuals to understand as well.
Online professional developing. We know the key is professionals.
Without those professions, we cannot hope to shift the culture.
So we help them continue their learning and their professional development
through online platforms. And right now,
this part might be my favorite part. Engage for change:
local, state, and national. Each of these three
engage for changes is different, but the goal is the same:
to start a dialog. It's about starting a dialog,
it's about building identifications to problem and solutions.
It's getting people together at each level.
We understand that we can't hope to do this work alone.
It's not possible.
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