Carol Ashey

ENGL 391
Dr. Land
7 April 2014
Prospectus Draft 1
At the time I wrote my Proposal, I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of Deaf
Education while somehow interweaving my own story. I didnt have the English component until
after my first mentor meeting. When I first started doing searches for my topic, I used the ERIC
search engine under the term special education, which generated many results. Most of these
results talked about the inclusion process that schools are taking today and how Special Needs
students were not being considered. As I thought more about my topic, I used different search
terms, such as deaf education, bilingual education (general), bilingual deaf education,
accessibility in education, hard of hearing, and hard of hearing accessibility in education, each
of which turned up fewer and fewer results. For example, Bilingual education turned up 12,256
results on ERIC, Deaf Education 1,678, and Hard of Hearing Accessibility in education only one.
After finding that my own group was virtually non-existent in any conversation, I knew I had
found the basis for my topic.
When I started with hard of hearing (HH) as my new topic, I only knew of two sources
that covered it: Missed Connections by Barbara Stenross, which I had read previously, and Many
Ways to be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities, which I had used as a source for
a project in another class; this source had a whole chapter dedicated to the HH population in the
United States. Interestingly, most of the sources I picked up were about the d/Deaf with little or
no mention of the hard of hearing. This was because I learned that people who are hard of

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hearing are either a part of the Deaf culture or they are not; they fit into both factions of society. I
know this from personal experience as I have fit for most of my life into the hearing world;
learning about the Deaf world has only been a part of my life since high school.
The literary aspect of my thesis was one that interested me because I had only read one
book about being HH in elementary school. I decided to search for characters in books who had a
hearing loss, the terms I used were hard of hearing, hearing loss, and hearing impaired. Most of
the results that turned up in my initial searches were childrens books, along the lines of I wear
a hearing aid and this is what it does. I found more of the results I was looking for by using the
term hard of hearing/hearing impaired characters in young adult literature. I also had to use the
term deaf because using the former terms yielded few results. The sources for this category have
turned out to be the most abundant, which was wonderfully surprising. What I noticed most with
these sources was that the story was more often told in first person. Also, the characters in these
stories proclaimed themselves to be deaf or hearing impaired rather than HH.
After multiple mentor meetings, I came to the conclusion that there is one theme that will
be the skeleton for my thesis: Identity. This is where my own story will come in, with my
experiences being the foundation for everything else. The other three themes are Education,
Literature, and Society. The title I have in my head is how the HH identity impacts education,
literature, and society, and/or vice versa. One part of the identity aspect I thought was important,
was to get the perspective of me from my family. I asked my parents and my siblings what it has
been like to raise a hard of hearing child and what it has been like to have a sibling who is hard
of hearing. The answers they gave, have shed wonderful insight onto myself. In short, my family
has learned along with me, what it is like to be hard of hearing and how much it is a part of me,

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since that was not the case right up until my sophomore year of high school. My thesis will
definitely have personal aspects to it, by this factor alone.
While I am able to successfully answer the questions I posed in my proposal, the question
I have now is how do I approach this? My current thoughts are to look at each theme and pull out
what stereotypes there are. For instance, in the literary branch, hearing loss is viewed as a
tragedy. I found this to be most true in The Hunger Games, and in Belonging by Virginia M.
Scott as the main characters lost their hearing during their teens. The other common view I have
found is that the other characters lost their hearing as children, so they are more accustomed to
living with half of a sense.
The other glitch that I have come across so far, is that I am not just HH, but I also have a
cognitive disability/learning disability. I dont feel like I can leave it out and just talk about my
hearing loss, because this disability has shed the most light on why I had such a hard time in
grade school with learning, especially math. It feels like I might be leaning more towards a
disabled identity rather than just a hard of hearing identity. If this is the case, then I could tie in
more on Disability Studies, which has become a growing interest as I have done my research.
One of the things I know I want to do is to show how my grade school education should have
gone, had my parents been properly informed on hearing loss, and that I had certain testing done
earlier in my life rather than now, during my years at college. I also thought of using the phrase
bridging the gap somewhere in my thesis, but Im not sure yet how or where to incorporate it
at the moment.