As a kindergartner, Lily Plummer ’20 thought she could predict what her teacher was saying by reading her lips, which were just ahead of her words. By the time Plummer was 16 years old, she was a soprano in the choir and a member of the cheer team. But while her mother watched her at practice one day, she thought Lily was rude to her coach because she wasn’t paying attention.
Appears InThat’s when she decided to get her daughter’s hearing tested. Lily, born with hearing, was profoundly deaf. She couldn’t even hear her own voice.
Kaity Bricker ’19 can relate to that story because she lived it. At the end of her school day, she’d fall asleep over the arm of a plump chair, exhausted from compensating for a hearing loss no one knew she had.
Both are teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Plummer teaches preschoolers at Metcalf School, and Bricker is an itinerant teacher for the Heart of Illinois Low Incidence Association, based at Metcalf. Bricker travels to schools more than an hour away, working with students with hearing loss who are mainstreamed into general education classrooms.
DHH teachers are in high demand, and Illinois State University is the only university in Illinois that still has a teacher of Deaf education program, which offers licensure for pre-kindergarten through age 21. One of the top five producers of certified DHH teachers in the U.S., Illinois State is also ranked second in the country for special education, according to College Factual.
The University’s reputation is what drew Associate Professor Stef Gardiner-Walsh to join Illinois State’s Department of Special Education in 2015. Enrollment was steady, with 85-90 students in the major each year.
“A lot of schools closed their Deaf ed programs because they’re small and expensive,” Dr. Gardiner-Walsh said. “I feel very lucky at ISU because the administration understands that we are absolutely critical to ensuring that deaf children get educated in the school system. We are gigantic in the field of Deaf education.”
Plummer teaches in a “total communication” classroom, which means she uses all forms of communication: formal signs, natural gestures, finger-spelling, body language, listening, lip-reading, and speech. Her 3- to 5-year-olds use a variety of assistive technology devices, including cochlear implants, digital hearing aids, and FM listening systems.
“A lot of schools closed their Deaf ed programs because they’re small and expensive. I feel very lucky at ISU because the administration understands that we are absolutely critical to ensuring that deaf children get educated in the school system.”
—Dr. Stef Gardiner-Walsh
Developing receptive and expressive language from birth to 5 years old is critical, she said. Children who do not have access to language face language and literacy delays.
Two to three of every 1,000 children in the U.S. are born with a detectable level of hearing loss in one or both ears, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. More than 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents.
Gardiner-Walsh’s father was deaf; her mother was hearing. At about 7, she started losing her hearing, but it didn’t impact her academic life because she was gifted and able to compensate. In college, her classmates signed. But when she started teaching high school, her support systems disappeared. She was the only deaf teacher in her school.
“That’s when it hit me that it was a barrier,” she said.
While working as an itinerant teacher, she pursued her doctorate. In the last year of her program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she was recruited to Illinois State by Dr. Maribeth Lartz, now retired after teaching Deaf education for more than 30 years.
“She’s a large part of why this program thrived,” Gardiner-Walsh said of Lartz. “She was a powerhouse of grant writing. She was really good at bringing in resources.”
The majority of faculty who teach in the DHH program are deaf or hard of hearing, and about 10% of students, but Gardiner-Walsh would like to see more.
“I highly value having deaf students and hard of hearing students in our program. They’re the role models for these kids,” she said. “I don’t have to teach them as much about deaf needs because they’ve lived it. They’re a small fraction of our students but bring a mighty powerful experience.”
Savannah Staff ’15 is hearing but was attracted to the field after learning some sign language at her local community college. Signing came naturally to her, and she decided teaching deaf students was what she was meant to do. She transferred to Illinois State and now teaches kindergarten, and second- and fifth-graders at Metcalf.
It’s not unusual for students to be the only deaf person in their family, and often parents and siblings struggle to learn sign language, so the classroom becomes their community and extended family, Staff said.
“A lot of these kids will be friends for life,” she said. “They are each other’s people, and sometimes we are all they have as far as communication.”
When Plummer meets preschool parents for the first time, she asks them about goals.
“Do they want (their child) to go to college, work a trade, get a job? What can I do at age 3 to work them up to those life goals?” Plummer said. “We need to act with a sense of urgency. It’s language, language, language all day long. I want these kids to be successful in life when they leave the school setting.”
Staff said teachers also want their students to have the same emotional experiences as hearing children.
“We want them to have a crush, get a valentine,” she said. “They deserve to have equal access to everything everybody else has all their life.”
And that includes finding ways to bond with parents who can’t easily ask them what they did at school that day. Plummer finds a way to make that happen, sending parents daily emails, sometimes with a video clip of their child making a craft or learning a sign.
Bricker has older students in the K-12 classrooms she supports, and is often the only person with hearing loss they know.
“They may be the only kid in the school with a hearing aid and they struggle with it,” she said. “I can look at them and say, ‘Do you have your hearing aid? I have mine. Let’s put it on together.’”
Outside the classroom, Gardiner-Walsh works to provide education on Deaf culture, emphasizing deafness is not a disease or illness that can or needs to be fixed. Some may consider it a disability while others consider it a “linguistic minority,” she said.
“The truth is we fit in both. If I’m in an area where everything is captioned and accessible, I have no disability. When I’m around hearing people who don’t know how to communicate with me or make things innately inaccessible, that’s when I function as a disabled person. It’s not me that’s the problem; it’s the environment,” Gardiner-Walsh said. “I tell my students that deafness is not a cognitive disorder; it’s an access issue. Deaf people can do anything if given the support to access the language.”
It’s not unusual for deaf students across majors to seek out Gardiner-Walsh.
“We have students you might not know are deaf or hard of hearing,” she said. “Either they haven’t accessed services, or they can do almost anything with minimal support until there’s a big block.”
To help remove those blocks, she works with Maggie Snell, senior staff interpreter with Student Access and Accommodation Services, providing support to DHH students, faculty, and staff. Those resources may include an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, closed captioning, or an FM system.
—Kaity Bricker
“They may be the only kid in the school with a hearing aid and they struggle with it. I can look at them and say, ‘Do you have your hearing aid? I have mine. Let’s put it on together.'”
Another resource is Deaf Redbirds Association, a registered student organization that provides opportunities to learn about the Deaf community’s culture and experiences as well as sign language. It offers a beginner’s sign language practice, an advanced class, and a conversation room for those more fluent. Gardiner-Walsh advises the group that welcomes deaf and hearing students alike.
This spring she is teaching an honors course, Deafness in Literature and Film, which explores how deafness is portrayed in literature and entertainment. “When we look at what deafness is, it’s a part of a character, not their only character,” she said. “Their personality isn’t deafness. They experience deafness.”
And that’s true for Plummer, who hasn’t let deafness define or change her. At 24, she’s married, bought a home, is working on her master’s, walks her two labs around the neighborhood, and loves the sound of thunderstorms.
“I’m really proud of who I am,” she said.
