Hearing and Learning

This week's post, the fourth in a series of posts about embodiment, the senses, and accessible pedagogy, is going to discuss hearing and learning. Before we talk about some of the specifics when it comes to hearing as a sense and the pedagogy we may encounter in our curricular design it is important to frame that hearing is not the same as listening. I know that in eduspace sometimes these words or terms or concepts could be used synonymously, but it is important to differentiate them. Just like the conversation we had last week about engagement, it is possible for listening to happen even if the learners have different hearing. The listening is a more intentional type of engagement and that can happen in many ways in classroom spaces both on-campus and online.

In a space that is designed to be a lecture space, there are assumptions that listening is always happening; that the learners will hear what the members of the teaching team are saying, and that somehow that translates to listening and learning. Of course we know this not true, for many reasons, but one of those reasons is that hearing is happening in different ways in our educational spaces and some of those are deeply not conducive to teaching and learning. 

There are many deaf and hard of hearing students. Statistics from 2022, from StatsCan notes that 5.6% of Canadians have a hearing disability, and for those folk in the age range we may see in our classes at colleges and universities, it is in 1.6-2.6% range. So if you have 200-300 students in your larger lecture 2-4 students on average have hearing that means that they will need to engage or listen in different ways. 

Lecture halls in particular create barriers to learning in relation to hearing. Often times the engagement is unidirectional where the teaching team member is speaking to the class, but then if there are opportunities to do peer work or activities, the larger lecture halls also bring in a cacophony of sound that makes hearing and then listening difficult, for everyone, including students who may not identify as having a hearing disability. This cacophony can also happen in smaller spaces like seminar rooms if there are many students working simultaneously, and campus real estate being as it is, it is difficult to find other rooms or have groups spread out.

One supportive practice for supporting hearing and accessible pedagogy is using a microphone. I know that not all lecture halls or even smaller rooms provide microphones, but they should. So what you need to do is advocate for this at your institution. As we wait for institutions to catch up on accessibility needs in classroom spaces, one thing you can do if you have funding of any kind (or even if you don't and can afford it) is to buy your own lav mic that can be used in the spaces you are in depending on the technology that is also available. Should we be responsible for doing the accessibility work of the institution by paying for these things? No. But does it help accessibility in the spaces where you teach and facilitate? Yes.

Another supportive practice, that does come with some access friction, is the use of captions. Some students need captions as an accessibility support, and some accessibility services will have CART folk come in to caption in real time. However, you can use the captions that are part of PowerPoint or Google Slides for example to caption and have that projected on the screen. Now some of these captions when automatically generated are inaccurate (which is why CART is important), and some students may be more distracted than supported by the inaccurate captions. This is an example of access friction that comes from the use of captions. However, it is often more supportive to have the captions and risk a few words will be poorly written, than to not have that support at all. 

Also if you are showing any multimedia in class, like videos, they should always be presented with captions, and if you are playing an audio clip from a podcast, the transcript should be playing alongside it and visible on the screen. Having any of these resources posted ahead of time on the learning management system can also help those who may need to use different technologies to support their engagement. 

In an online course a lot of these hearing supports are easier to achieve as Teams, or Zoom or any other platform will come with closed captioning that users can toggle on or off for themselves. These platforms also allow to add and pin an ASL interpreter to the meeting to support learners and participants. ASL interpreters are also part of on-campus classroom spaces, and this is also another reason why having the materials available ahead of time would be helpful as the interpreters can then know some of the more technological or discipline specific words that will be used and be prepared to sign them.  This is also part of the intentionality of pedagogical design in a way that supports accessible pedagogy, and also acknowledges that learners will engage in different ways depending on their hearing which is also true of teaching team members.

Sometimes the classroom architecture creates more barriers to hearing because of nature of the classroom design and materials used. One way to help your design choices is try to go to the rooms you will be teaching in ahead of the semester to see where you will be teaching. If you are not lucky enough to do this, see if your institution has a database where you can access pictures or tech specs of what is present in the classroom space. If your institution does not have such a database, this is another space where you can advocate for the need for this from an accessibility point of view at your institution. 

So we have discussed a lot of barriers to hearing and what members of the teaching team can do to decrease those barriers. Listening can be done in different ways as well such as through captions, transcripts, ASL, and flagging the intentionality that can lead to listening by providing prompts for the learners to use and reflect on. However, the other important piece to remember is that listening does not necessarily mean learning is happening, it can, but it is not a guarantee, because well you know as I say often, we are not robots. We need more than listening in our pedagogical design to get to learning. We need practice, we need opportunities to connect to lived experiences. Keeping the barriers to hearing, and the different ways that listening can be supported is one way to get to the possibility of learning in accessible pedagogy, and it's my hope that these series of blogs have supported that reflection for those who are engaging.

Next week I will be back with the fifth and final post in the series with a post on the tactile and learning.