Culture Across the Curriculum

Kim Brecklein
(Abridged Version for Proceedings)

One of the strengths of our nation has always been its cultural diversity, but parallel to that diversity has run a thread of common culture. Unfortunately, Deaf students have been doubly deprived, first of their own unique culture, and second of access to the culture common to all Americans by right of birth. The twin goals of Culture Across the Curriculum (CAC) are to support Deaf culture and to equip students to gain access to the common culture. To approach these goals CAC employs three specific instructional components: 1) reciprocal expertise; 2) careful curriculum development; and 3) Realtime Writer.

Since I am not a Deaf instructor and cannot directly transmit the culture, I attempt to reach the goal of supporting Deaf culture through reciprocal expertise. In the context of CAC, reciprocal expertise means regarding Deaf students as experts in their own language and culture. It involves demonstrating respect toward ASL and Deaf culture and being open about personal areas of weakness, especially in areas in which students are strong. This admission of weakness may require a partial transfer of classroom control from the teacher to the student. For example, many of my writing and other assignments are structured to provide a framework for discussion of Deaf culture. When students turn to me for guidance in these discussions, I remind them that in this area I am not the expert and reflect questions back to the class, suggest students take up the matter with one of our Deaf staff members, or ask them what they were taught in the Deaf Culture classes offered by Tulsa Junior college and usually taught by Deaf adjuncts. At first I felt a bit uncomfortable introducing topics over which my students have more mastery than I, but I have discovered, much to my delight, that acknowledging students’ expertise raises their confidence and encourages them to become open to new areas of knowledge.

The second component of CAC is careful curriculum development. Researchers (Athey, 1979†; Ewoldt, 1974†) have discovered that cultural familiarity is essential to reading comprehension. For this reason, if for no other, our students must become familiar with the common culture even as they discover Deaf culture. In my reading and vocabulary classes I provide for exposure to a wide range of cultural contexts in order to build cultural familiarity and comprehension skills. In my writing classes I stress writing as a thinking process whereby both cultures may be explored. Finally, I offer a class specifically on cultural literacy. In this course I attempt to transmit as much as possible of “the crucial background knowledge possessed by literate people [which] is… telegraphic, vague, and limited in extent” (Hirsch, 1987). This is my most popular course and the one about which more than one student has said, “I could learn this stuff all day!”

The third component of CAC is more a luxury than an essential, but like indoor plumbing, it is a luxury which quickly seems to become a necessity. Realtime Writer (RTW) is a networked conferencing system developed at Gallaudet that allows students to communicate in writing in much the same way CB radio operators communicate in sound. RTW is an important tool for CAC because it creates an environment in which CAC may occur naturally. First, the RTW classroom immediately becomes student centered rather than teacher centered, providing a perfect setting for reciprocal expertise. Moreover, RTW encourages students to regard their writing, sometimes for the first time, as communication rather than drill and stimulates them to stretch their skills to make themselves understood in a community of peers. Finally, RTW provides a framework for serendipitous and often very exciting exploration of both cultures.

For the most part, CAC represents not something new, but a conscious, deliberate emphasis on much of the best of what we have been doing all along: finding legitimate and powerful ways to build both self-esteem and appreciation for Deaf culture; fine-tuning the curriculum to meet skill enhancement and informational needs; and finally, using technology to its fullest applicable extent. We are aware that without full access to both cultures our students cannot reach their potential; CAC is yet another tool to help us to help them enter fully into all that ought to be and must become theirs.

About the Presenter

In January 1987, Kim Brecklein walked into a mainstream classroom at Tulsa Junior College, where she had been teaching as an adjunct for several years, and found that half of the students in her class were deaf. Since that “baptism by fire,” she has continued to work with deaf and hard of hearing students, first as an instructor in TJC’s mainstream program, then as a tutor and materials writer for the Resource Center for the Hearing Impaired (RCHI) at TJC, and for the past three years as the full-time English Specialist for RCHI. Ms. Brecklein earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Arkansas State University in 1976 and 1977.