COUC 504 Week 7 Cultural Immersion Project Part 3 Paper Example

Cultural Immersion Project Part 3: An Interview With a Deaf Woman Who Found Her Language at Twenty-Five

Arranging the Interview

I interviewed a woman I will call Rebecca, whom I met at the Deaf coffee social and again at the ASL worship service described in Part 2. She is in her mid-forties, works as a pharmacy technician and lives in a suburb of Columbus with her Deaf husband and their two hearing children. We met for an hour at her church on a weekday evening. Although Rebecca reads lips well and offered to use her voice, I arranged a certified ASL interpreter so that she could use her preferred language and so that I would not miss anything. I explained the purpose of the project, told her I would use a pseudonym and remove identifying details, and said she could decline any question. The interpreter agreed to keep the conversation confidential. I took notes by hand and wrote a fuller account that night.

Childhood in a Hearing Family

Rebecca was born profoundly deaf to hearing parents on a dairy farm in western Ohio. No one in her family had met a deaf person before. Doctors advised her parents to avoid sign language so that she would learn to speak, and for most of her childhood she attended speech therapy and a mainstream public school with a hearing aid and a part-time aide. She described herself as "good at faking it." She learned to nod, laugh when others laughed and copy answers from the student next to her. At home, the family loved her, she said, but dinner was the loneliest part of the day. "Everyone talked, everyone laughed, and I watched." When she asked what was funny, the answer was often "I'll tell you later," and later never came. Speech therapy took two afternoons a week for eleven years, and she remembers her therapist's praise as one of the few times she felt successful. She also remembers the drills as exhausting, and the moment in middle school when she realized that classmates could understand her speech only when they already knew what she meant to say.

She was a strong student in subjects that relied on reading and struggled in discussion-based classes. She had one close friend, a hearing girl from church who learned some fingerspelling for her. Rebecca said she did not think of herself as having a culture, only a problem: "I was a hearing girl with broken ears." Looking back, she thinks her teachers and parents measured her mainly by how well she spoke, not by how much she understood, and she did not know there was another way to be deaf.

Finding ASL and the Deaf Community

At twenty-five, working at a pharmacy, Rebecca served a Deaf customer who signed to her, assuming from her hearing aids that she would understand. She did not. The customer wrote a note inviting her to a Deaf bowling league, and she went, mostly out of curiosity. She described the first night as "like coming home to a place I didn't know existed." Within a year she was signing fluently, and within three she had stopped wearing hearing aids most of the time. She met her husband, who grew up at the Ohio School for the Deaf with Deaf parents, through the league.

Learning ASL changed more than her communication. She said that for the first time she understood jokes as they happened, argued with friends and felt smart in conversation. It also brought grief. She realized how much of her childhood she had missed and felt angry at the doctors and, for a time, at her parents. Her parents eventually took ASL classes, and her mother now signs well enough for simple conversation, though her father never learned beyond basic signs. Rebecca said that the moment she forgave her parents came years later, when her mother signed "I'm sorry we didn't know" at a family reunion, slowly and with mistakes, in front of the whole extended family.

Identity Today

Rebecca now calls herself Deaf with a capital D. Her husband's family welcomed her into a Deaf heritage that goes back three generations, and she said that marriage gave her "a Deaf family to go with my hearing one." Her two children are hearing and grew up bilingual in ASL and English. She worries about asking too much of them, especially her older daughter, who sometimes interprets at the doctor's office or on the phone. "I don't want her to be my ears," she said, "but sometimes the world makes her be." She described her life now as moving between two worlds every day: Deaf at home, at church and with friends, and hearing at work, at her children's school and with her parents. She does not see the two as equal. "In the Deaf world I relax," she said. "In the hearing world I work." She is proud that her children are comfortable in both, and she hopes they will choose to stay connected to the Deaf community as adults.

Discrimination and Barriers

Rebecca described barriers that are routine rather than dramatic. Doctors' offices often refuse to provide interpreters or suggest that her daughter interpret. Coworkers sometimes speak to her slowly and loudly, as though she cannot understand English. She was passed over for a supervisory position, she believes, because her manager assumed she could not handle phone calls, although the pharmacy uses text-based relay services. She said the hardest part is not the big incidents but the constant small effort of explaining herself. She estimated that she asks for an accommodation of some kind nearly every week, and that each request carries a small risk of being seen as difficult.

Faith

Faith has been both a source of belonging and of pain. Her childhood church loved her but offered no interpreter, so she sat through sermons she could not follow. At her current church, worship happens in her language, and she said she understood the Gospel "for real" only as an adult. "God didn't change," she said. "My access changed." She added that she does not blame her childhood church, which did not know what to do, but she wishes someone had asked her what she needed instead of deciding for her. That wish, she said, sums up most of her life with hearing people, and she hopes counselors in particular will learn to ask.

Mental Health and Counseling

Rebecca saw a counselor briefly in her thirties after a period of depression following her father's heart attack. The counselor was kind but did not sign, and the agency used a video remote interpreter whose connection froze repeatedly. She stopped after three sessions. She said she would return to counseling only with a counselor who signs or with a skilled in-person interpreter, and that she would want the counselor to understand Deaf culture well enough not to treat her deafness as the problem. "My ears are fine for me," she said. "What hurts is when people don't want to talk to me."

Connecting the Interview With the Sources

Rebecca's story fits the research closely in some ways and challenges it in others. Mitchell and Karchmer (2004) showed how rarely deaf children are born to deaf parents, and Rebecca's childhood illustrates what that can mean: a loving family without a shared language. Fellinger et al. (2012) linked deaf children's mental health to how early they could communicate fully with the people around them, and Rebecca's lonely dinners and later depression are consistent with that emphasis, though one person's story cannot show cause. They also documented barriers to mental health care, and her experience with a failing video interpreter is a concrete example.

Her identity changed over time in a way the research invites but does not fully capture. Bat-Chava (2000) found culturally hearing, culturally Deaf and bicultural identities in roughly equal measure. Rebecca moved from the first to the second as an adult, which suggests that identity type may describe a point in a life rather than a fixed category.

The two films from Part 1 also helped me interpret her story. Through Deaf Eyes (Hott & Garey, 2007) describes the long period when educators favored speech over sign language, the approach Rebecca grew up with. CODA (Heder, 2021) portrays a hearing daughter who interprets for her Deaf parents and feels the weight of it, which is almost exactly the worry Rebecca expressed about her own daughter.

What the Interview Taught Me

The interview taught me that for Rebecca, deafness itself was never the deepest wound; the deepest wound was years of being near people who loved her without being able to talk with her. That reframed what I had assumed in Part 1, when I thought of deafness mainly as a loss. It also made me think about families in general. Rebecca's parents did what they were told was best, and they were not cruel; they simply lacked information and support. As a counselor, I may meet many parents in a similar position, whether their child is deaf, disabled or different in some other way that the family does not yet understand. The interview also humbled me. In an hour, Rebecca shared more of her life than I had any right to expect, and she did it in a language I could not follow without help.

Implications for My Practice

First, I will treat communication access as a basic ethical requirement: a qualified interpreter or signing counselor, not a family member, and a referral if I cannot provide that. Second, I will ask deaf clients how they identify and how their identity has changed rather than assuming. Third, I will listen for grief about lost childhood connection, which may sit beneath depression or anger. Fourth, with Hays and Erford (2018) in mind, I will remember that systemic barriers, such as a doctor's office that refuses interpreters, are part of a client's mental health picture and may call for advocacy. Finally, Rebecca's words about her children remind me to consider the hearing children of Deaf parents as clients in their own right, since they may carry adult responsibilities early. Above all, I want to remember her request: ask what the person needs instead of deciding for them.

References

Bat-Chava, Y. (2000). Diversity of deaf identities. American Annals of the Deaf, 145(5), 420-428. https://doi.org/10.1353/aad.2012.0176

Fellinger, J., Holzinger, D., & Pollard, R. (2012). Mental health of deaf people. The Lancet, 379(9820), 1037-1044. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61143-4

Hays, D. G., & Erford, B. T. (2018). Developing multicultural counseling competence: A systems approach (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Heder, S. (Director). (2021). CODA [Film]. Apple Original Films.

Hott, L. R., & Garey, D. (Directors). (2007). Through deaf eyes [Film]. WETA; Florentine Films/Hott Productions.

Mitchell, R. E., & Karchmer, M. A. (2004). Chasing the mythical ten percent: Parental hearing status of deaf and hard of hearing students in the United States. Sign Language Studies, 4(2), 138-163. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2004.0005