1: College Transition
Deanna and Kimmy discuss common accommodations used in college for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students. Kimmy shares her personal experiences as a Hard of Hearing college student and describes how accommodations are used in real life. We cover: informal strategies and compensatory skills that students can use, formal accommodations through the disability center, and discuss CART, note taking, and other accommodations.
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Episode 1: College transition
Transcript
Intro: Welcome to the TOD Podcast, or as we like to say, the “TOD POD.” We chat about all things Deaf Education while you drive around. I’m Kimmy from The Hard of Hearing Teacher and I’m Deanna from Listening Fun, and let’s get started!
D: Hey, it's Deanna, welcome to our first episode of the TOD POD. We are so excited to be here with you today. You know as an itinerant TOD I listen to podcasts all day as I drive around so it felt like a natural fit to start one. I often speak on my Instagram stories about different activities and things I'm doing but there's something nice about having a space to talk with other TODs and of course the ability to listen on the go. So I knew I didn't want a podcast where I was just talking at people. I prefer to listen to interesting conversations and that's why I reached out to Kimmy for us to do this together.
K: And I am so glad that you did Deanna, because I also love podcasts and I'm excited to create a new space for TODs to get ideas and feel connected. Being an itinerant teacher can feel quite lonely at times so to hear someone else's voice in your car while you're driving around and to have connections to things that they're saying and to the stories that they're bringing up can help make you feel like you're a part of something even when you're driving around by yourself.
D: Absolutely so our goal with these topics is to be helpful to you so we're starting with one that we get asked about quite frequently, which is supporting high school students, specifically high school students transitioning to college. Since Kimmy is both a TOD and a hard of hearing person, she has an invaluable resource on this topic.
K: And I am happy to share my experience. I'm definitely an open book when it comes to talking about my hearing loss especially when it comes to advocacy and accessibility.
D: So let me set the scene. I am sitting with a high school junior who is planning to attend college. We all have some students who will have other post high school plans, but today we're going to focus on college and I, as the TOD, have already done a fantastic job of teaching them advocacy skills and they know all their high school accommodations. But now I want to help them be prepared for college. So can you talk about some of the things that you Kimmy did that helped make you successful in your college classes.
K: Sure, so now that you as the TOD have provided them with all of these skills that they need to be successful in their classes, there are a lot of things that they can informally do to advocate for themselves. So I used a lot of compensatory skills that I gained and advocated for myself before I even started the formal process with the Disability Center on Campus.
So some of the things I did on my own was sitting in front of the class. I would talk to my professors at the beginning of the semester. I would talk to them about how I wore hearing aids and that I had an app on my phone to change the settings. That one was important to me because a lot of my professor's syllabi would say something about you can't use your cell phone in class. It can affect your participation grade and I would bring that up to them beforehand and say hey my app is actually going to help me access your class, sometimes I need to change the settings on my hearing aids to hear you or the other students better. So if you see me have my phone out, that's why.
I would also ask for captions on videos, I would ask for repetition or clarification in class as needed. I was pretty outgoing so I didn't really have a problem with raising my hand and asking for that. Sometimes I would ask for the powerpoints after class if I really missed something but most of the time I didn't need to because I had friends in a lot of my classes and we would share notes so that was always really helpful.
D: Yeah I like hearing about these strategies because these are things that we can actually teach our students to do and it's helpful to remember that not everything has to be formal and if they do have a friend in their classes they can talk to them and things like that. However I do want to know about the formal process as well. Can you speak on getting the official process started?
K: I would start on the college website to look for the disability center. Especially if this is before a student is going to college. The disability center can have different names on my campus it was called ARC, the accessibility resource center. So when you're looking on the website you might want to search for keywords like disability or accommodations in order to find whatever their center is called.
Once you find the center you're going to want to contact the disability center preferably with the student so that they have exposure to asking these questions and guidance as they're doing it. You want to find out what accommodations and resources they offer specifically for DHH students and then when the student has been accepted there's another process that you have to go through. So that was the beforehand prep work, you're looking at the school and you're trying to figure out who to contact.
Once you've figured out who to contact you're going to be a student there or you are a student there, you go to the disability center and they're going to ask you for documentation. You're going to fill out an application and this might include documentation from your doctor. If you have an IEP or a 504-plan, already they're going to want to look at that because that's going to help inform the accommodation plan that they create with you and you might be asked to meet with a representative from the disability center to talk about the accommodations and what those accommodations are going to look like in your classes as well.
D: Follow-up question for you: for the documentation, is that an audiogram?
K: My school wanted a letter from my audiologist because an audiogram doesn't really mean anything to them. They wanted to know how my hearing loss affected my access to education. So I called my doctor and the nurse answered and we had a very nice conversation. She talked with me about what accommodations I wanted the doctor to include in the letter and she was very willing to just note all of that down. My doctor filled out the letter, signed it and they sent it back to our disability center.
D: Awesome! That makes sense. Once you had that whole process complete, what accommodations did you utilize through the disability center formally?
K: The formal accommodations that we ended up putting together, and I say we as in the ones I asked my doctor for and then talked with the Disability Center Representative about, was captions on videos shown in class which included any thing that they put in our CANVAS or blackboard or whatever the school uses whatever video resources they put in there if it was something they wanted us to watch before class or anything like that I got captions on all of those videos and I would also get a transcript of the captions from the video. And then I also used CART. I didn't use CART for any of my in-person classes. But when I started grad school and I had some online classes, that's when I started to use CART which was helpful because then everything was captioned for me and I also got transcripts from that to use for later.
D: Can I ask you a question about the captions? Were the professors responsible for finding videos with captions or did they have to do the transcript themselves?
K: So once it was formal, once I had the formal accommodations through the disability center, the professor's responsibility was to send the videos to the disability center. The disability center sent the videos out to a company that did captions and then they would send the video back to me. So it went from the professor to the disability center to the third party caption person and then they would get sent to me. If the video was being shown in class, the professor was supposed to have this done beforehand or have videos that had captions on them.
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D: Are there any other accommodations you've seen that you think are worth mentioning?
K: Yes, so a few other formal accommodations that you can have are powerpoints requested officially so that can include either getting the powerpoints before class or any other presentation or after class you get the powerpoints if the professor doesn't want to share them before class. It really depends on the class for that.
Notetaking is a big one. So there's professional note taking and then there's peer notetaking. So professional notetaking can look likes someone either being in your class or there's a microphone in your class kind of like you have with CART and they're listening and the person is taking notes as if they were a student so that's different than CART because CART is a transcript of word by word, everything that's happening in the class. The professional note taker’s job is to take notes as if they were a student, so they can summarize things, they can paraphrase. They can write diagrams and such.
And then peer note taking is kind of the same except it's someone in your class doing it. I actually was a peer note taker for someone and I think one of the advantages to that is that there's nothing extra happening for any of the other students to know about it is kind of like a classified relationship between the 2 peers and the professor.So sometimes the peer note taker doesn't even know who they're taking notes for they just know that they're providing the professor notes. Sometimes if the student that's receiving the notes feels comfortable talking directly with the student who's taking the notes then the student can talk to each other but the student taking the notes cannot share with anyone else that they are a peer note taker and I like this option because especially for students who are more discreet about their hearing loss and their accommodations because nothing looks different right? I'm just another student as the peer note taker taking notes in class and I was taking them for myself anyway.
So we have powerpoints. We have note taking, CART. And CART I wanted to mention can be for online classes or in-person classes. There's a microphone and the student has a computer out. Again, this can be a little less discreet because if other students in the class don't have their computer out and you're the only one with your computer out because it's part of your accommodations it's definitely more noticeable. The teacher has to wear the microphone for the CART transcriptionist to hear them and take the notes. But CART isn't only for classes. It can also be used in assemblies, on campus presentations, club meetings, you can request CART for things that are outside of just your class and I've seen that done on a projector or if there's an extra screen in the room that the assembly or presentation is happening in the CART will be up there and then the students who are using the CART just tend to sit closer to that side of the room.
And then one other accommodation is ASL interpreting. So if a student uses sign language, they can request an interpreter. Also can be used for more than just their classes interpreting can be requested for extra curriculars just like CART and they can be alternated so if a student prefers CART for one class and an ASL interpreter for another class. That's something they can talk with their disabilities center rep about so all of it's very personalized just like an IEP is in a way, but a lot more ownership is on the student.
D: Yeah, that's really interesting. I like hearing about the peer note taking as an option because I can definitely think of a few students that I know who would prefer that more discrete option. And with the CART, so I saw CART when I was in college people using it, but you know sometimes it looked like it made a lot of errors. Obviously I wasn't using it firsthand, so for our listeners who have not seen or experienced CART, can you provide some firsthand experience? Is it actually very helpful?
K: So cart is very helpful. It is obviously a little delayed because there's a real person typing what they're hearing happening in class they are typing in code. So when they're typing in that code, it actually is appearing on the student screen in code and in real time turning into words like right in front of you. As they're typing, obviously there are going to be some mistakes or they might not know the specific language that's being used in all of the classes because they're a professional typist, they're not a professional in all of the different topics that they could be typing about. Sometimes they do have to go back and fix certain words. My CART transcriptionist was really good about if there was a break in the conversation in the class I could see her cursor go up and she would change a few words but then they also have like one to two days sometimes a little longer to tidy up their transcript and then send it to the student.
D: That sounds like it would be very helpful to have it because when I was watching it I realized there were mistakes, itt was also hard because I don't think the connection to the microphone was that strong. The technology I think is better nowadays, more clear connection. But I was like there's so many mistakes I'm not sure how helpful it is but to know that they actually go back and fix it makes a lot of sense and is probably much more helpful.
K: Okay and the nice thing too is if you're taking an online class the CART transcriptionist can actually be in your Zoom meeting which helps a lot because they can see the presentation that's happening on the screen so that helps reduce the amount of errors of academic language that they may not have known if they couldn't see what the words were.
D: Yeah I can imagine. That's very helpful for the transcriptionists. So let's go back to when we're actually talking to the students about this and we're helping them look at different options at different colleges online. What would you look for when you're going on the websites or online, what kind of information would be helpful to them to look for?
K: So I followed my school on Instagram before I even went and they posted a lot of information that was helpful. The disability center actually has their own Instagram account. The leadership center has their own account and at my school they were connected. They worked together a lot so they pushed out a lot of information together. It's also a good idea to go through their website and their other social media accounts. You really can observe the language of how they talk about disabilities to see if it sounds welcoming and inclusive. If you can talk to someone who has been there who has a disability, especially if it's the same as yours, if you can find another deaf and hard of hearing student to talk to who's been there, that's really helpful. And also something else you want to find out is if they offer programs that cost extra for accommodations. So some schools will offer extra accommodations or extra tutoring or just extra resources and extra support for students with disabilities but sometimes you do have to pay extra tuition for those programs. So that's something that you want to be on the lookout for when you're looking at different schools.
D: Awesome Kimmy. Thank you so much for sharing all this helpful information and your own experiences. This is one of those topics where a lot of us TODs know in theory what is possible but hearing about how it actually is used in practice is so so valuable.
So that's it for the first episode of the TOD POD! A full transcript, show notes, and links can be found at listentoTODPOD.com, see you next time!