Chris Driscoll: "The Big Ear” 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Educated: Being, Self, Other
Chris Driscoll: "The Big Ear”
Yet the partial answer to that “why” comes in the second clip here when Chris Driscoll narrates his own version of the mythical “Big Ear” experience known to most deaf people. (This narrative is akin, say, to the “coming of age” narrative structure in larger cultural discourse—or any similar “rite of passage” or “core identification” moment.) Driscoll is a recent graduate of Gallaudet University, holding a B.A. in Deaf Studies and American Sign Language education; he was teaching ASL courses at Ohio State at the time of this interview. Driscoll explains the cumbersome apparatus—as well as the “care and feeding”—of the FM system technology that is attached to his body. Even though the FM system was a crucial “literacy technology” that primarily enhanced the conduit of communication between deaf student and his/her teacher, Driscoll also demonstrates its physical (and no doubt, psychological) interruption in his ability to express himself in his native language, ASL. But most importantly, he calls out how “they were really really worried about my hearing…. But not about my learning.” It is precisely this recognition of his learning body as only a “big ear,”—with all the focus primarily on his hearing, and not then on his intellectual or social advancement—that helps us understand the situation Fernandes was also in as she came to teach herself “correct writing.” So while these assistive/aid/hearing technologies were intended to mediate the deaf student’s learning between hearing peers and teachers, they more often than not only ironically isolated further.
