Stories Teachers Tell: A Narrative Exploration of American Sign Language Teachers’ Professional Lives

Abstract

American Sign Language (ASL) is one of the most popular languages for foreign language study among hearing adult learners. ASL teaching has deep connections to the long-standing oppression of deaf people and sign languages, and so ASL teachers might be linguistic and cultural guides as well as deaf advocates, allies, and spokespeople. Yet, little research has addressed who ASL teachers are and how they have come to and navigated the profession. In Canada, there is no clear educational pathway to learning to teach ASL. Although formal and informal teacher learning opportunities exist, they are not widely adopted or enforced.In response, this narrative dissertation explored the professional life histories, or pathways, of seven ASL teachers in Canada through multi-part interviews. I was informed by theories of narrative as a social practice and teacher learning as embodied, and prior literature about the sociohistorical context of ASL and ASL teaching in North America. To further contextualize teachers' stories, I also conducted interviews with representatives from deaf cultural organizations and ASL program administrators and incorporated publicly available data about ASL in Canada.The findings of this study were an extensive collection of stories drawn from the seven teachers' accounts, organized into three chronological clusters: early ASL and teaching experiences (pathways to teaching), ongoing teaching experiences (pathways through teaching), and reflections on experience (pathways forward). Stories about teachers' early experiences underscored the diversity of people that comprised this workforce-native iii and non-native signers, deaf, hearing, and hard-of-hearing, formally and informally trained, and so on. Their accounts of ongoing practice illustrated how they variously strove to be teachers and the different successes and challenges they met along the way in meeting their goals. Teachers' closing reflections demonstrated that their teaching work was tightly intertwined with other goals, including the broader social justice aim of improving the status of sign languages and deaf people in Canada.This study aimed to make a space for ASL teachers in academic conversations where they are rarely featured. I hoped that ASL teachers, especially the study's participants, found meaningfulness in reflecting and sharing professional experiences documented in this dissertation.xvi GlossaryThis glossary includes definitions for the key terms, concepts, and theories used in this dissertation. Many of these are subject to debate and discussion in and across disciplines, but within this dissertation I defined these terms, concepts, and theories according to the definitions provided below.Alexander Graham Bell: Known in the deaf vernacular for his discrimination against deaf people, e.g., eugenicist policies against the intermarriage of the deaf and support for oralist deaf education. Ameslan:The name for ASL prior to the 1960s. Audism:The ongoing discrimination of deaf people by hearing people who consider deaf people in...

Assessing the Impact of Gesture Instruction on Hearing Adult University Students Learning American Sign Language as a Foreign Language

“…This dependence on intuition and experience rather than empirical study has been openly stated by ASL/FL material developers, such as those involved in the creation of the popular Signing Naturally textbook series (Smith, 1988). The lack of research into ASL/FL teaching and learning has been noted by several researchers (see for example Doré, 2020;Hilger, Loucks, Quinto-Pozos, & Dye, 2015;McKee, Rosen, & McKee, 2014;Quinto-Pozos, 2011;Willoughby, Linder, Ellis, & Fisher, 2015).…”