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Winter 2007

Accessing Alliances:
Disability Studies Across the Curriculum

February 22-23, 2007
George Washington University
Keynote Speaker: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

This two-day symposium will make the critical work of Disability Studies accessible to a wide audience across the university, building bridges between faculty in Disability Studies, professionals in Disability Support Services, and students.  Beginning with an evening of international disability short films presented and moderated by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell and continuing with multiple sessions on a range of topics, this symposium will generate ongoing conversations about how to build Disability Studies alliances across the university.

Focus Group Results Are In!

In Spring 2006, DSS enlisted the help of the SASS Research Consortium to organize a series of focus groups and individual interviews with GW students with disabilities. The results are in, and overwhelmingly students told us what a crucial role they see faculty playing in their overall experience at GW. [Read the full story]

Recent DSS Career Initiatives
This year’s Disability Awareness Week marked one of several initiatives DSS has undertaken with respect to an issue of continuing interest for the disability population: career opportunities. [Read the full story]

DSS Speaker Bureau reactivated
Former GW and DSS student Jim Duncan describes how the newly reactivated DSS Speaker Bureau promotes self-advocacy and undertsanding. [Read the full story]

Case Study: Alternative Test Formats
The latest in our ongoing series of case studies from the FAME (Faculty and Administrator Modules in Higher Education) online training modules; find out how some minor alterations in test formats can have a major impact on student achievement! [Read the full story]

Recommended Reading 

“The recent demonstrations at Gallaudet University did more to launch deafness and deaf culture onto the national scene than any event since the release of the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God.” So writes Lennard J. Davis in “Deafness and the Riddle of Identity,” a feature article in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The popular explanation for the difficulties that Jane K. Feranandes encountered in her presidential nomination – one that may have been exaggerated by her supporters even though it was widely disputed by Gallaudet students – is that she was “not deaf enough.” 

Davis, who grew up with deaf parents and is a professor of English, disability and human development, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, acknowledges how this explanation of being “not deaf enough” can be met with confusion and even outrage in the hearing world. Nevertheless, Davis uses this opportunity to explain deaf identity and the changes in what it means to be deaf that have taken place over the past 30 years. 

Since the civil rights, gay and women’s movements of the sixties, along with linguistic research that established American Sign Language (ASL) as a genuine language, deaf people have increasingly come to view themselves less as possessing a physical impairment and more as belonging to a linguistic and even ethnic minority within the dominant hearing culture. Davis’ analysis of the pros and cons to this fascinating and provocative thesis can be found on page 6 of the January 12, 2007 issue of the Chronicle or online (subscription required) at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i19/19b00601.htm.