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EHDI Annual Conference
Topical Session 4 - Capitol 3
March 18, 2024
4:10 - 4:35 P.M. CDT
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	>> Hello, there we go.  It might be a little helpful if it's on.  All right.  Good afternoon everybody my name is Claire I'll be the room moderator for today so please try to keep it at a minimal ladies I'll have to call the EHDI police if it gets too rowdy they were giving us that instruction in our training and I really don't want to have to call them so thank you for coming to Know Thyself:  Linguistic Bias and Awareness of Skill Sets.  
	I will go ahead and fill you in on our wonderful presenter this afternoon.  
	Claire Lombardo-Miller is a speech-language pathologist and certified ASL English interpreter.  
	She earned a BA in early childhood education at Smith College.  And her Master's in speech-language pathology from Boston University for 20 years she worked at the Learning Center for the Deaf as an SLP early intervention provider, educator and mentor.  The Deaf Community has been a beacon for her learning and professional and personal growth.  
	Allyship and continued cultural understanding is at the center of her professional practice.  
	So without further ado, I'll pass off the microphone.  
	>> CLAIRE LOMBARDO-MILLER:  Thank you, other Claire.  
	All right.  I know this is like basically the lateish session of the day besides the plenary and you're all here to get uncomfortable with me so these are the brave faces who came in here to get uncomfortable and do some unpacking and think about linguistic bias so thank you for being brave.  
	Maybe you're here on behalf of some colleagues that you think could maybe do a little unpacking.  I hope you can leave this session with some things that you can take out of here to talk about with your colleagues, with clinical fellows, with interns, with your grad students, with your families.  
	There's going to be a lot of applications to the survey that we talk about today and that you get to try a little bit yourself.  
	So this is me.  
	I'm a person with bias.  Because I'm a person.  So you're all people with bias because you are also people.  
	So biases aren't necessarily bad things.  Biases are trends.  It's where we lean, biases can cause harm but not all biases are bad.  Biases can stem from lots of different things.  It's just important to know what our biases are and maybe think about where they are from and in this case think about when we bring those biases to the table of our education, of our counseling, of our engagement with families, what kind of impact do those biases leave in their wake.  Some objectives we are going to talk about the BADE questionnaire.  
	The BADE.  
	We'll take a little bit of it.  We'll talk about our own accountability.  And we'll talk about allyship mindedness.  
	And in this case I mean meeting your discomfort with a lens of learning and curious and this idea of, tell me more.  And maybe even telling that to yourself.  Hey, self, what do you mean?  Why are you feeling this way?  Let's talk about it.  So the Beliefs About Deaf Education scale was developed a while ago it was a joint effort between Gallaudet and the NSF and the reason it was developed is because there really wasn't a systematic approach to look at the attitudes that providers or even families were bringing to the table of Deaf ed and how can you look at the impact of bias if you haven't even uncovered what the biases are.  So really the BADE was developed to give a reliable and valid measure of beliefs.  
	So we can look at what is prevalent in certain heritages.  What is prevalent in certain family structures or in places where you might not have a lot of Deaf adults.  Or things like that.  So we can see ultimately their impact on education.  
	You can use it to obtain your bias baseline if it's the first time you've ever taken it.  You can take it over time to see if your bias changes over time.  
	With every new person that you meteor family that you sit down with or a story that you hear, your bias can shift.  
	You take a class.  You get a new degree.  You go to a new country.  Your bias can change.  
	And so it's -- you can take the scale over time to kind of check in with yourself.  
	The BADE has both individual and larger scale uses so it's been used in larger scale research to look on cultural and educational bias effects the Journal of Latinos and Education has a great article about using the BADE on Hispanic families to look at the influence of their want to preserve heritage language and their learning toward more oral/aural approaches because of the desire to preserve that language.  You can use it with your families but the downer is it's really only available just in English right now and probably won't be translated into other languages because it's been around for a while.  
	You can use it with college students, grad students, new professionals, interns, EI, professional development, and yes seasoned professionals, too, I just took this.  I've been doing this 20 years and I just took it for the first time.  It's paper based.  It's got 26 questions.  All the questions are answered on a 1 to 5 scale of extreme disagreement to extreme agreement with 3 being neutral within those 26 questions, there are four question categories kind of randomly scattered within that correspond to four subscales of bias and we will talk about them.  I don't want to do spoiler alerts.  Because you're going to take a little bit of it.  It's free.  
	And you can get it there.  Just Google BADE assessment Deaf and it will pop up and you'll have the whole package right there it will tell you how to score it you're going to get all the questions, it's going to tell you all the things.  
	You're going to take it right now.  
	So around the room and here is a QR code or a simple URL.  There's a couple on the wall there.  
	So thanks to a tech savvy husband, two of the subscales have been randomly mixed up and put into a little version of this.  That you are going to take right now.  
	I'm going to set a timer just for like 5 minutes.  I think it's roughly 10 to 16 questions.  I can't remember.  
	You're going to answer those questions.  And you're going to get two sample subscale scores.  
	Are people getting it to show up.  Okay I'm getting mostly yeses.  
	So once you take it, you're going to get this ugly looking mathematical formula at the end.  It's going to say subscale 2 with eugh.  And then subscale 3 with eugh, this formula.  
	If you have a big beautiful math brain, please feel free to figure that out on your own.  If not, cut and paste it into Google or cut and paste it into your phone calculator so you can get an answer that comes out between 1 and 5.  
	I have faith that you can do this.  
	You have 5 minutes.  
(Standing by).  
	>> CLAIRE LOMBARDO-MILLER:  Okay.  Who had a hard time with some of those questions?  Uh-huh.  Did you overthink them, sir?  
	>> (Speaker off microphone).
	>> CLAIRE LOMBARDO-MILLER:  Yes I struggled when I took this because I was like, I don't know the background.  What kind of access do they have?  What's the parenting like?  Like it was really hard to answer some of these questions but I do believe now I didn't develop this but I think that that's a little bit on purpose because you're looking for a knee-jerk reaction I think a little bit in some of these and I took this with my department over at the Learning Center there were like 17 of us and everyone was like oh I don't know because it could be this it could be this.  It's like just answer whatever your gut is telling you, just put a number down.  It's really a guide.  Oh, go on.  
	>> (Speaker off microphone).
	>> CLAIRE LOMBARDO-MILLER:  Thank you for your confidence.  Oh, yes, he said I'm looking forward to you developing something with a little bit more detail.  
(CHUCKLES).  
	>> CLAIRE LOMBARDO-MILLER:  So did everyone, were you able to get your two subscale scores, something between 1 and 5?  Now I'm going to discuss what those are.  So there are four subscales in this survey.  One is literacy through hearing technologies and/or visual support for speech comprehension so that basically means you're using some kind of hearing technology plus a Cued Speech or speechreading.  Not ASL.  We're talking English paths here.  Two, visual language and bilingualism.  Now we're talking ASL, Listening and Spoken Language, self-explanatory.  You did those two, questions from those two subscales, 2 and 3.  Four is difficulties associated with hearing parents learning ASL.  
	So questions pertaining that subscale 4 of things like, it's too hard for hearing parents to learn sign language or the opposite, of course hearing parents can learn sign language.  
	So if you scored say a 4.1 on subscale 2 that means you support or your biases lean toward visual language and bilingualism.  
	Say you got a 1.1 on LSL.  Well that means you're kind of the opposite end of the spectrum and you're not feeling so good about Listening and Spoken Language.  So the point in doing this is to start analyzing your results, seeing if there were any surprises, and then thinking about where your trends maybe come from.  
	So where are biases from?  Are they cultural?  Are they based on your comfort zone?  Like do you like the visual language and bilingualism because you are Deaf or because you're a hearing signing bilingual and that's your comfort zone and that's what you know and that's the research that you have read, are you more an LSL person because you don't know sign and you feel threatened and inadequate in sign language environments?  Where does your bias come from?  Are you anti-LSL because you as a Deaf person experienced trauma?  These are all things that we can do as we start to unpack where some of the trends kind of stem from.  
	Can you think of people that can benefit from trying this kind of self-assessment people do sit down with families for whom this kind of thing is something they would like this is not for everybody but some families would like this kind of thing.  
	Is this something you think you would want to give over time to see how biases shift as you grow as a professional or as the intern that you're working with grows or the class that you teach you know pre-your course and post-your course, see how their views on things changed?  
	So part of knowing yourself is of course knowing where your biases stem.  It's a hard but necessary part of knowing who you are.  
	But as a provider working with families that have ASL goals for their kids, you also have an obligation to know yourself when it comes to your abilities with the language.  Now I'm a hearing person.  Who came into learning ASL later in life.  
	And there's been a lot of humble pie eaten.  A lot of mistakes made.  
	Most hearing people come into this field not related to Deaf adults.  Myself included.  With minimal real life experience in the Deaf world.  And even though I've been in the field now for a very long time, I'm still a guest.  It doesn't matter where my bias trends.  I'm still a guest in this community.  
	There's no arriving, I'm in.  No, even when I got my shiny interpreting certificate, it's like no, I'm in, no, it's just not how it is.  
	And that idea of allyship as MJ talks about is continuous work.  It's a state of mind.  It's not an end goal or an achievement where you walk away with a certificate or card.  Right?  And part of knowing yourself is how you conduct yourself in Deaf space as a hearing person.  And some of that is knowing how fluent you are in ASL.  
	Do you care to know?  Why not?  Or why?  How are you showing up in Deaf spaces?  
	This is something that we're talking about a lot in my program.  
	Assessments cause big feelings.  
	I have embodied all of these at any point where I've had to be assessed especially of my ASL skills.  
	Assessments cause big feelings because we all fear failure.  
	We maybe have test anxiety.  You think you might not represent yourself well or show what you know.  
	You don't know what a test might contain.  You might fear freezing or bombing.  It's just also hard to hold a mirror to yourself.  Maybe your results show that you've got some work to do.  
	Maybe you're afraid someone is going to find out about your results.  
	But knowing yourself means taking risks.  It means acknowledging your accountability to the community that you serve.  
	And the community, it could be that one Deaf kid in a living room surrounded by all hearing providers and hearing family members.  It's still that kid's room.  It's that kid's Deaf space.  It's that kid's community.  
	And accountability to that kid.  
	And so things like a bias self-assessment, an ASL assessment, and really being mindful of how you conduct yourself in Deaf space.  
	Do you conduct yourself in Deaf space?  Do you enter?  How do you engage?  What kind of language use do you use?  What's your comfort level?  Unpack some of that stuff.  
	So there's two ASL assessments I'm going to briefly talk about today.  
	Both are available to register for them online, if it's something that you're interested in.  The first is the ASL P -- the ASLPI which is offered through Gallaudet.  It's a video interview with one Deaf interviewer.  It's about 20 minutes long.  It's all done remotely.  They are going to assess your grammar, vocab, all the things you might expect, comprehension, et cetera.  
	That video is then sent to a team of evaluators who rate you on a scale of 1 to 5.  Excuse me; 0 to 5 with 5 being native-like proficiency and you can have a plus value like a 3 plus or 5 plus or excuse me a 4 plus and if you want to see samples of hey I think I might be a 3 you can go see what a 3 looks like on their website and get examples.  
	RIT has one, as well called the SLPI the SLPI.  
	Sign Language Proficiency Interview.  
	Very similar to the one from Gallaudet, it's a video interview with one Deaf interviewer about 20 minutes long they will ask you kind of the expected things about work or home or family and hobbies, things of that nature.  Looking at the same areas, grammar, vocabulary, et cetera.  
	They talk on their website about using local evaluators to accommodate for regional forms of ASL when they evaluate your video.  You get a verbal rating when you get your score from novice to superior.  
	And again, you can see live samples of each score on their website.  
	So the BADE assessment, which is what we learned about today is a free and quick way to start identifying some attitudes and biases in four areas related to Deaf ed, it has small and large scale applications.  Both from individual providers and families all the way up to research on prevalence of trends among groups.  
	It can be given to new and seasoned providers as a bias check-in.  
	But the most important part to take away from this today is to think about the interplay between your bias and how you talk to families about language.  
	What's driving?  Is it your bias?  Is it research?  Is it your comfort zone?  Is it where your training lies?  Is it what you've always done?  Rather than maybe where you could be.  
	Again if you were just in my last talk, we talk a lot about meeting families where they are at.  Does your bias allow for you to meet families where they are at?  Or is your bias deciding where that family goes?  
	Part of knowing yourself and for signing hearing providers that means have a Deaf-led assessment of your skills, even if it feels scary it's part of your accountability and there are a couple of remote assessment tools available to signers at any level and some families might like that, too.  
	Parents, providers, teachers, anyone can take those tests.  It doesn't have to be people like us in this room, providers.  It could be parents.  Who are curious about where their ASL skills are at.  
	There are some families who thrive off of that kind of feedback.  
	Make that available to families for whom that makes sense.  
	Because the more you know of yourself, the better you can serve your families with intentionality.  And that's where it all comes down to is meeting these families with intentionality from where you come from so you can meet them where they are coming from.  
	And you can help them go down a road that you are plodding together knowing that maybe you're packing some stuff, they are packing some stuff, and that's all normal and human.  But making sure that you have research and guidance and all of the things to guide you down that path in a research-led way, even if it means being uncomfortable.  Even if it means uncomfortable conversations with yourself or your colleagues or with what you think you need to do next to bring your practice to another level or your cultural allyship to another level.  
	Ta-dah.  
	Any questions?  There's a two-minute marker.  This is the last like session-session of the day that's not a plenary so I applaud you all for being alive and making through to the end.  
	Any questions or comments or any feelings come up in taking the BADE?  Do you have any ideas of where you might like to apply it in the future?  Were you like, I hated doing this?  Like we're all here to have open and honest and free discussions.  So if anyone has anything to share, feel free to share it now or you can find me here at EHDI for the next couple of days.  
	Thank you.  
	(APPLAUSE)