Help Teach

Help Teach: Episode 3 - Being Heard

Mihai Covaser: [00:00:00] Welcome, learners and learned alike, to Help Teach.

Mihai Covaser: Hello and welcome to our community audio project. I am your host, editor, producer, and project co-lead: Mihai Covaser. I am also a youth living with a physical disability. My most formative experiences living with a disability have come in the Canadian public education system. Many students like me, with physical, emotional, or mental challenges, go through their years of schooling lacking the supports and accommodations they need to partake of the same opportunities offered to their peers. The vision of this project is to provide educators in Canadian classrooms, students with disabilities, and members of the general public, with the tools and knowledge they need to make our institutions more accessible and inclusive for all. Join me and a diverse cast of guests as we explore perspectives on disabilities and education in this podcast series. [00:01:00] One last message for you teachers tuning in: Listen in each episode for our key takeaway that you can implement in your classroom today to help us further this vision.

Mihai Covaser: Today, I am joined by another one of my project co-leads–and a good friend of mine–Elise Doucet. Elise, welcome to the show.

Elise Doucet: Happy to be here.

Mihai Covaser: So I’d love to just get started by asking you a little bit about you. So whatever you wanna tell our audience…where are you from, what are you up to right now, any projects or initiatives you wanna tell us about, why don’t you get us started with a bit about you?

Elise Doucet: Yeah. I’m from the interior of B.C., I’m a student, and I’m Deaf. And that is me. I’m Deaf, I like writing, I like animals, [00:02:00] and learning. And obviously, activism work, and that’s why I’m here today. My main thing that I like to push is captioning on everything, because that’s the most common barrier that I come across in school, but that can extend to other issues as well.

Mihai Covaser: Mhm, mhm. So I’m sure our audience would love a bit of clarification here, how is a Deaf person here with me on a podcast series? How does that work? Why don’t you clarify a bit of the misconceptions, maybe, around someone that is hard of hearing and their ability to participate in, you know, projects and events like these?

Elise Doucet: Yeah, well, right now, I am listening to you right now, but I’m also reading the live transcript. It is automatic, so it’s not picking up everything perfectly, [00:03:00] so if you said something really weird or, you know, brand names or something, it wouldn’t necessarily pick that up, but with context, I can kinda figure it out. So that’s kind of how I’m doing, you know, the online aspect of that. I’m also wearing a hearing aid. I’m only wearing one today, because my current other one sitting on my desk right now is out of commission, for the moment. So I’m only hearing out of one ear, but it is here. It’s working for now. I did have to borrow a part for it to work, but it’s working, and other than that, I mean, I can see–I know what we’re planning on talking about today, and I’ve talked to you, Mihai, before, so I know what your voice sounds like, I know how you talk, I know the cadence of your voice, I know kind of all those things [00:04:00] and that kinda helps me put together, you know, with the other, additional context of your facial expressions, what you’re saying.

Mihai Covaser: That’s a really great explanation. I really appreciate that. That’s something very interesting, you know, that is maybe not very well-known, about living with a disability, is that it often makes you aware or attuned to things that other people don’t usually consider, right? Like for example, as you said, knowing my style of speech, my manner of speech, being able to identify with that to help you out, that’s something that I think a lot of people don’t do, or at least don’t do consciously or aren’t aware of, so that’s super interesting. So as this podcast is about the perspective of youth with disabilities in education, I’d love to ask you a little bit about that. [00:05:00] So is there a moment, maybe, that you remember from your educational experience or something right now, or something in general that’s followed you for a number of years, with regard to an obstacle in education for someone like you?

Elise Doucet: I’d say, as I kinda mentioned earlier, captions on videos has kinda been a main thing, particularly as I’ve been online homeschooled for kind of most of my high school career, which is in part because of COVID, but I was already online pre-COVID, so there wasn’t really an adjustment because of COVID to online, it was already all set up. And captions is the main thing for that, and then in public school education, the main issue was teachers just not believing me, for a lot of things, [00:06:00] and being unwilling to make kind of a number of small accommodations like letting me sit in the front of the class. That’s one thing I’ve had teachers refuse to let me do. And yeah, that’s kind of the main thing, and then…yeah. Yeah, I can’t think of anything else.

Mihai Covaser: So we’ll cycle back to that in a minute, you said something very interesting, but I’d like to start with that idea of online. You know, I think all students across the country and across the world have had a variety of experiences transitioning online from in-person schooling. How has that been for you? Has it been easier or harder? What unique challenges or benefits, even, would that pose for you?

Elise Doucet: What I like about online is that it’s self-paced. It’s largely self-paced, so I can do it whenever I want, wherever I want. You know, if there’s [00:07:00] a concert I wanna go to–you know, obviously during COVID, this wasn’t possible–but if there was a concert I wanted to go to and it was in the middle of the week, or there was an event or something, or just really anything that I wanted to do, I could do it and I didn’t need to reschedule school or miss any school in order to do it. And if I was to use my funding to do extracurricular activities like riding or gymnastics or whatever kind of lessons, it was a lot easier to find times, because I wasn’t trying to find the after-school times of everyone else, and that’s another thing that’s kind of, you know–That was pre-COVID, and then everything was switched to online anyways for everyone else. I felt like there wasn’t a big transition for me to go online, because [00:08:00] of COVID, everything was already online, but in terms of transitioning from doing kind of regular, in-person school to online? It wasn’t huge for me because there was sort of an intermediary transition from in-person school to homeschooling, but the kind of homeschooling where you get a big box of stuff in the mail every month with all the work that you need to do every month, so it was more of a transition of going from doing, like, physical stuff to on a computer stuff, so it wasn’t–There was definitely stages to that transition, so it wasn’t like a big, “Ah! Everything has changed.”

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, what I think was really interesting that you mentioned there and I want to circle back to, is something–a very curious kind of phenomenon in the education system between educators and their students, which I personally haven’t experienced, because I have [00:09:00] what is called a “visible disability”, so for audience members who may not be familiar, we often distinguish between a visible and an invisible disability, being something obviously that can be seen by the general public as it’s affecting someone’s life: being in a wheelchair, or in my case, just having an irregular walking pattern, missing limbs, or anything like that. And then there are invisible disabilities, which would be something like being hard of hearing, which isn’t immediately obvious to someone who is just meeting you for the first time or looking at you. So something that I’ve never experienced, but I found very interesting hearing your story, is this disbelief from educators that you even have anything going on, so I’ll turn it to you: what is that like? What has that experience been for you?

Elise Doucet: It’s very frustrating, is what it is. Because people–teachers, especially–they won’t believe me [00:10:00] and I think it stems from a certain unwillingness–They don’t want to believe that I’m actually Deaf, because then it means that they’ll have to accommodate me, and they don’t want to do that, so it’s easier to think that I’m faking. Which… I have medical records from two and a half years old, showing that I’m not lying, and it’s not really the teacher’s place to comment on my medical situation, which I think is good for people to remember, because I think you get a lot of questions about your medical history, which wouldn’t be appropriate to ask an able-bodied person, so I think it’s worth pointing out there that it’s not really appropriate and if I do tell someone, you know, it is, you know–I’m going out of my way to do that [00:11:00] but…Yeah, so it was very frustrating in school, having teachers not believe me, and it was kind of disheartening, because it was kind of, you know, “Should I be able to do these things, because clearly the teachers think I should be able to, but I can’t, so maybe I should be able to do these things, but then I can’t.” So it’s just stuck in this difficult position, because it’s also–I don’t wanna argue with a teacher, because they’re grading my work, and especially in elementary school when you just have the one teacher, you’re stuck with them for, whatever, six hours a day, five days a week. You don’t want to get into a bad situation with them, you don’t want to make them mad or anything.

Mihai Covaser: The age-old problem.

Elise Doucet: Mhm. So, yeah.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, I don’t know, I mean–On the one hand, I understand where [00:12:00] maybe lack of understanding, lack of education, or, as you say, lack of willingness to be supportive, can play into that, but you just have to wonder what benefit a student would get from pretending to be Deaf in class? If they’re not willing to accommodate you anyway, so that you’re not getting “special treatment”, how is that logical?

Elise Doucet: I don’t understand it either. There’s no benefit to it, but yeah, I’d like someone to just tell me, like why would I be getting benefits because so far, all the benefits–I mean, not benefits–all I’ve gotten so far is discrimination.

Mihai Covaser: Mm. So, speaking of which, speaking of supports that might help you and that you’ve used in the past–which, again, I don’t have personal experience with, so I’d love to hear your take on it. [00:13:00] You have used service animals, right? Service dogs in the past to help you out, is that correct?

Elise Doucet: Yes. So I’ve never had my own service dog; I’ve shared a service dog, which is a little bit different. So my mother is also Deaf, so when I was–oh, this was years ago–She went to get a service dog, because the technology, she didn’t want to do–There was kinda two main routes to making things accessible, it was kind of technology or service dogs, and if you know my mother, you’ll know that technology doesn’t really work for her. So she went the service dog route, and so we got Felicity, and I think she’s nine this year?

Mihai Covaser: Oh, wow.

Elise Doucet: And we got her when she was like almost two, or two something? She was pretty actually still very puppy-ish when we got her [00:14:00]. She comes from Ontario, actually, the Lions Foundation, and she’s wonderful, she’s a yellow lab. And she’s quite small for a lab, too, because they breed them to be smaller so they’re more compact for when you’re going in public spaces, which is different from autism support dogs, where they want them to be bigger so that they can act as an anchor.

Mihai Covaser: Ah, very interesting.

Elise Doucet: Felicity’s quite small, and yeah, so it was really–She’s still helpful. We went from always eating burned food to having properly cooked food, because my mother wouldn’t be able to hear the timer go off, so Felicity would alert–Felicity’s the dog’s name–Felicity would alert my mother to the timer, so my mom wouldn’t be burning food all the time, so that was kind of the immediate benefit, as well as…She would just know when people were at the door, whereas before, you know, [00:15:00] you don’t hear people knock on the door, so sometimes people would come to the house, and they’d be like, “I was knocking on your door for ten minutes, why didn’t you come?” But it’s like, because, you know, we don’t hear you knocking on the door and we didn’t have the technology, and sometimes people wouldn’t think to text or anything, because, you know, obviously we can get a text. You’ll see the text on your phone a lot easier than hearing the knock from across the house, or even in the same room, sometimes. If you don’t have your hearing aids in, then you can’t really–I couldn’t hear that, and my mom wouldn’t be able to hear that, so that was kind of another thing, is when people showed up to the house, Felicity would let us know and we’d, you know, be able to tell that, oh yeah, there’s a person here, we should probably, like, let them in. Which is sometimes a handy thing to know, when someone’s, you know, at the door.

Mihai Covaser: You’d think.

Elise Doucet: Yeah, so that was helpful, and yeah, a lot of timers and…yeah, and…yeah, so Felicity’s been great and [00:16:00] we haven’t had any super bad experiences with Felicity. There’s been like a couple situations, mostly when we’re at the coast, in Vancouver, trying to take a cab. Some people don’t see Felicity, and they won’t–they’ll just drive off, they don’t want to have a dog in their cab, even though it’s illegal, like they have to, and we did get refused from a restaurant once because of Felicity. They said no dogs allowed, and it’s like, she’s a service dog, she’s legally recognized as medical equipment, you can’t tell someone, you know, before going to a restaurant, “Oh, sorry, you have to take out your pacemaker.” You don’t say that, and you can’t say that for a service dog, either. I mean, the only place I think service dogs aren’t allowed is…It’s professional kitchens and like one other thing, but [00:17:00]...

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Elise Doucet: Basically everywhere and then, like, there’s a couple, you know, they don’t recommend taking your dog to the zoo because it will be stressful for, you know, your dog, as well as all the other animals involved. But it is something that you can do. So yeah, it’s been great having Felicity. She is retired now though, and we have started making the switch to technology instead, so right now, when the doorbell goes, instead of–I mean, there is a doorbell sound, but the lights also go; there’s a light that goes, so it’s visual.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Elise Doucet: So that is Felicity’s replacement, which is very sad, but it’s, you know, something. She deserves a retirement.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad to hear that it’s been such a great experience for you, and I think that it’s a resource that maybe people don’t immediately consider, because it’s difficult, right, to take care of an animal in the house and to take on that responsibility, but hearing you talk about it, I can see that [00:18:00] maybe there’s a lot of people who would benefit it–benefit from that, if they were to consider it. So, I think I’d like to take the opportunity now to take a short break, before we move on to the second half of our episode. Don’t go anywhere, audience members! When we come back, we’re gonna be having a discussion about Deaf culture and history, as well as what we call the “social versus medical model of disability”. We’ll be right back.

Mihai Covaser: Welcome back to Help Teach. My name is Mihai Covaser; I am your host, and I have with me today Elise Doucet, and we’re having a discussion about being Deaf or hard of hearing, and what that’s like in a variety of contexts. So, to continue our discussion from our first half there, I’d love to move the conversation towards Deaf history and Deaf culture, [00:19:00] which I think is something that maybe is a term that our audience members would have heard. It’s often used on social media and on other platforms as an advocacy term or tool, as well as just a community tag, but I think that people don’t quite understand what the difference is, maybe, between being hard of hearing and having another disability with regards to community and culture. So what is Deaf culture?

Elise Doucet: That is a very big question.

Mihai Covaser: The Reader’s Digest, if you will.

Elise Doucet: The Reader’s Digest. Well, it’s a–I mean, Deaf culture, it’s like any other culture. We have our own languages, our own history, our own traditions and cultural values. So, you know, for example, for language, we have here–We have ASL, which is American Sign Language, and you might be like, “Why isn’t there a Canadian sign language?” [00:20:00] Just simply, it’s called ASL just because there isn’t a big enough–There isn’t enough distinguishing features between the ASL that we use in Canada versus the States to, you know, differentiate.

Mihai Covaser: You can’t exactly spell words with O-U-R.

Elise Doucet: Yeah, I mean, it’s like Canadian English versus U.S. English versus British English; it’s just minor differences, but it’s still the same language. So we have ASL; in Quebec, they have LSQ, which is Langue des Signes Québécoise, as well as indigenous sign languages. But, in general, if you meet a Deaf person, you’re going to- who does sign, they’re going to be using ASL. So ASL, it’s very intertwined with kind of the Deaf history, because the roots of ASL is actually in French sign language [00:21:00] because the original, kind of the birthplace of Deaf education in North America was from French educators coming over from France in kinda the early 1800s. So this was Gallaudet and Clerc. You might’ve heard of Gallaudet University; it’s the only Deaf liberal arts university in the world and the only Deaf university in kind of North America, point blank, so it’s really important for a lot of Deaf people to have Gallaudet. So, obviously, yes, Gallaudet University was named after Gallaudet–I forget his first name. Anyway, he came over–I think he was actually originally American, but he teamed up with Clerc, who was from France, where kind of the birthplace of Deaf education was, to kind of start building schools. [00:22:00] What’s interesting is that, throughout the 1800s, it was actually all about sign language, and sign language was kind of seen as the way to get Deaf people to have language. So then we had Deaf residential schools, which are really interesting, because, I mean, I know a lot of people–You know, you know about residential schools for indigenous people, but we had residential schools for Deaf people as well, and they’re different in a lot of ways, but there are also a lot of similarities. In any situation where you have a marginalized group, you put them in a school, have it run all by the dominant group, you know, there’s gonna be oppression, there’s gonna be bad stuff that happens. We don’t need to get into that, though, because that’s an unpleasant discussion, but what’s interesting, though, is because Deaf people were born to hearing people–95% of Deaf kids are born to hearing parents–so we’re a culture, [00:23:00] but we don’t have that lineage in the sense of, we don’t really have Deaf families. I mean, we do have Deaf families, but it’s not the majority, whereas, you know, if you’re Italian, your whole family is Italian, whereas if you’re Deaf, it’s a lot more likely that you’re the only Deaf person in your family, so the Deaf residential schools, despite being meant to take Deaf people and turn them into hearing people as best as the hearing people could manage, it actually kind of was the birthplace of Deaf culture inadvertently because putting all the Deaf people together, that’s how they developed sign language. Which was originally because they were bringing over the French sign language from France, but by the turn of the century, late 1800s, I think it was in 1892, there was a conference and I forget where it was, but it has a name, it’s like the Berlin conference or something, [00:24:00] and they made the decision–and there was only hearing people allowed to vote, by the way, on this decision to only teach Deaf kids English, like spoken English–and so they voted for English for the rest of the 1900s, and continuing on today, it’s all about kind of suppressing sign language and promoting English and spoken languages.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Very, very interesting. That’s, I mean, a lot in there that I had no idea about, and–Yeah, it’s very interesting to talk to someone, who…You know, we often talk about the disability community and having community, but this is a very different, a very much more comprehensive kind of experience for you, which is very interesting to hear. For audience members who want to do their own research on that, [00:25:00] so as we said, Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. It was named after Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, so if you wanna do some research on that. But yeah, no, I really appreciate that description and that little history lesson for us. I think that really goes to show that, you know, you have the opportunity, as someone with a disability, to really build a community, but for some, it really does go beyond that, and I think it’s important to recognize where someone has values and experiences that are shaped by, you know, the way in which they live. It puts into perspective, you know, how someone can have their worldview changed by the experiences they’ve had, so that’s very, very interesting. So the last subject that I wanted to touch on here together, speaking of this social aspect and this cultural aspect of living with a disability, [00:26:00] is this social versus medical model of disability, which we won’t go in too terrible detail with, both for the sake of time and for our audience, we don’t want to get too technical on you here. But I would love to talk a bit about what the model is, how it affects us, all that kind of thing. So I’ll just start by briefly saying that the idea behind this model is that there are two sort of primary ways–the way it proposes is that there are two primary ways of looking at living with a disability. And one is social, and one is medical. And so what that means is that when–most often, disability is looked at via the medical model, which means there is some kind of medical condition, some kind of issue that has symptoms and that causes problems to quality of life, for example, and that as such, it’s a problem to be treated [00:27:00] and to be fixed, in whatever manner possible. Whereas the social model of disability proposes that living with a disability, as you’ve heard from my guests previously and from Elise today, living with a disability has–It’s a complex sort of gamut of experiences that don’t necessarily all amount to a problem to be fixed, but rather, they can have a variety of effects on the way in which you view the world, the way in which you live. They can have unexpected benefits, for example, I mean, you know, they can influence the way that you act and the things that you do in a positive, as well as a negative way. And basically, it views disability as a complex social, cultural experience and story, as opposed to just a medical issue in need of fixing. So I’ll just turn it to you there, if you wanna add anything to that [00:28:00] or how you see that issue, and how it’s affected you in your life thus far.

Elise Doucet: Yeah, I’d say Deaf culture kind of was heading towards that, in the previous discussion, is that Deaf culture does indeed view and prefer the social model a lot better than the medical model, because, you know, we have our own history and everything, and you perfectly said benefits, and for example, in Deaf culture, we use ASL, we use sign language, and you know, if it’s a busy, crowded place and people are being loud, and there’s speakers and everything, it’s a lot easier to sign, rather then to talk. Because signing is visual, it doesn’t get–unless there’s something physical in the way of two signers, it doesn’t really matter what else is going on. [00:29:00] So, I mean, there’s a benefit right there; Deaf people, we tend to be a lot faster communicators. There’s a whole book called Deaf Tips, about how Deaf people communicate and a lot of the benefits, and how hearing people should learn from us. And there’s a lot of great examples in there about how looking at Deafness as kind of just a social, linguistic minority, a social difference, kind of brings a lot more diversity into our world that just… It brings so many benefits.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Elise Doucet: Just like in hearing aids and everybody doesn’t benefit, it doesn’t benefit everybody.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s important for our educators and our audience members to keep in mind, because I think a lot of people naturally move to or think in the medical model kind of perspective, because, I mean, obviously we are aware that our disabilities [00:30:00] have impacts on us that, you know, have negative consequences that of course, we might rather not have in some sense. I mean, we don’t often disillusion ourselves about that, but at the same time, there are ways–If you think about it as something, as a story, as a lived experience, and as something comprehensive in that way, you really open your mind to being inclusive and adapting things to allow people who live like we do to be involved, rather than trying to fix those people to somehow incorporate them into the existing system and the existing, you know, structures of society, so a pretty important point there. Well, I would love to turn it, on that note, to our key takeaway for our episode today. So, for you educators out there, we have a bit of a bonus for you, [00:31:00] if you will; we have a couple of things that we would give to you. But let’s just start one at a time. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what we would suggest first for our educators in the classroom, Elise?

Elise Doucet: Yeah. So the first key takeaway is that, when you’re gathering classroom material, make sure that all auditory content is applied with transcripts or captions.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, absolutely. So just as easily as you can find a YouTube video out there that doesn’t have, you know, captions included, you can find another one that does. So using classroom materials and when you’re gathering them for your classes, besides the fact that they should be updated once in a while just, you know, to keep on top of being recent and being correct, you can also update them to make sure that there is some kind of written transcript or captioning available on the video, so that everyone can watch and participate and learn together. And that’s a really easy thing [00:32:00] that you can do with your classroom materials, so that would be our main takeaway for you today. But, in addition, if you’d like to do your own research, in the notes for today’s episode, you will find a link to the universal design principles of the National Disability Alliance. So universal design principles–I won’t go into too much detail here–but essentially, it’s a list of principles or recommendations that allow the structure of education, of built environments, of all kinds of things, to be designed, as it says, universally, or in such a way as to be inclusive for everybody in as many ways as possible. So you will find in there plenty of advice, little tips that you can consider when you’re building your classroom environment, and because it’s a resource that’s free available online, you can take it as far as you want, in terms of talking to your administration about implementing it more widely, [00:33:00] bringing it to your fellow teachers, your co-workers…You can take it as far as you want. And last but not least, Elise, I know you’re a fan of blogs and reading blogs, and that’s another great tool that you can use to just learn a little something every day about living with a disability and how you can support those people. So linked, you will find in the episode notes, once again, the universal design principles and some blogs that we’d love to share with you, but if you can remember from our key takeaway today: When gathering classroom material, please ensure that all auditory material is supplied with transcripts or captions, so that everyone can participate equally. Well, thank you so much for coming onto the show today, Elise. It was a wonderful conversation. You taught me a lot, I’m sure you’ve taught our audience even more, so thank you. Thank you for coming on today.

Elise Doucet: No, no, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.

Mihai Covaser: [00:34:00] You’ve just heard another episode of the community audio project, Help Teach. I’d like to give a huge thank you to my other co-leads on this project, Payton Given, Maggie Manning, Elise Doucet, and Alexis Holmgren, all youth leaders at the Rick Hansen Foundation, who I’d also like to thank for their continued support in this initiative and others. Big thank you to Every Canadian Counts and their #RisingYouth initiative for funding this project. I’d like to give a huge shout-out to our community mentor for this project, Charl Coetzee, and to our professional contact helping in the editing process, Chester Hull. My name is Mihai Covaser. I am your host, editor, and producer for this podcast series, and you can look forward to finding this podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts soon. Also, in the show description, on either site, you will be able to find a link directly to my website, where we will be posting transcripts for each episode for whoever would like to access those, and any further links [00:35:00] to other resources will also be put in the show description. So everything that I talked about in this episode, you can find handy in the notes once we post it. Tune in next time for more great conversations and key takeaways that you educators can implement in the classroom today, to make it a more accessible and inclusive place for all. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.