For five years (from August 2009 to May 2014), I taught d/Deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) students biology at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), one of the nine colleges at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and I tutored D/HH students taking biology courses at the College of Science (COS) and, to a lesser extent, the College of Health and Science Technology (CHST), two other colleges at RIT. COS and CHST are where students with typical hearing generally attend.
The two courses in which I most often tutored D/HH students at COS or CHST were Cell Biology and Molecular Biology. The most help my tutees had gotten from me dealt with their laboratory sessions. Of course, for every exam they had, I would give my tutees review sessions, and they would do generally well in their classes.
Professors that traditionally taught the courses were generally appreciative of the tutoring I had given their D/HH students because they would spend more time with me than with their hearing instructors. However, there were quite a few professors that believed (I don’t know if they still continue to believe) in the “flipped classroom method”. This is where students have to teach themselves on important areas of the subject they are learning in the class and the professor is only there to reinforce what his or her students have learned on their own. One important way for the students to learn on their own is to communicate with each other.
The problem is that not every student taking either Cell Biology or Molecular Biology had typical hearing. It was easy for me to foresee that the D/HH students were more likely to fall way behind and I was there to help them to stay up-to-date with what they had been learning in class.
An associate professor of biology at COS, Kate, a strong believer in the flipped classroom method, had taught Cell Biology or Molecular Biology in alternate years. At first, she was enthralled that there was a d/Deaf tutor for her course. However, as she learned more about my tutoring approach towards D/HH students, she seemed to feel thrown off by such an approach. I suspect she was concerned that my way of tutoring was in conflict with her method of teaching.
You want to know why Kate might feel thrown off by me? Well, she wanted her students, regardless of their hearing level, to learn on their own, yet she failed to realize that this wouldn’t work well with D/HH students. They still needed someone to teach and help them associate concepts with objects so that they could obtain an understanding as to how things work in general. I’m bringing this up because D/HH students are mainly visual learners, unlike those with typical hearing. The latter students find it easy to associate concepts with objects via both hearing and seeing, and are therefore much more likely to stay ahead with their knowledge than those with hearing loss.
Kate failed to recognize this major advantage the students with typical hearing have over those with hearing loss. Additionally, she failed to realize that was how D/HH students often fell behind their hearing peers in the same course. This failure had prevented her from providing her D/HH students with reasonable accommodations such as American Sign Language interpreters, real-time captioning and notetakers. In short, her flipped classroom method was, for the most part of the course, inaccessible to her D/HH students.
In a veiled but significant way, Kate vented her frustrations on me one day. It occurred when she felt I helped one group of D/HH students too much during a laboratory session. She took me out of the session for a brief lecture, saying in a very clear way that she wanted all of her students, regardless of their hearing status, to learn her way. Of course, one of the students in the D/HH group expressed her displeasure with Kate afterwards, but there was nothing I could do about it because that was her class, not mine, to teach.
I believe my conflict with Kate started the domino effect for my departure from NTID. But that’s another story.