ASL Instructor: The Deaf Soapbox 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Educated: Being, Self, Other
ASL Instructor: The Deaf Soapbox
Still. Despite being “stuck” and despite being often wedged between educational and social rocks and hard places in their literacy learning, many deaf people have still found a way, the way, some way. And they have found—and made—power from those ways. There is almost no better illustration of this than the third clip, “The Soapbox Moment.” This ASL instructor at Ohio State University (another graduate of Gallaudet University) turns to educate us about what is currently being called in Deaf Studies the “deaf gain” experience (not hearing loss, but deaf gain). At the end of each of the DALN/DHH interviews we tended to ask the interviewee if there was anything else he/she wanted to say, anything he/she had forgotten, anything he/she felt compelling or summative. Time and again, the subjects in the DALN/DHH interviews rose to “deaf gain” in a “soapbox” moment similar to the one clipped here (although none were so eloquent as this one)—my own narrative included. When asked “what else?” they did not turn to tell yet another forgotten literacy learning moment in their history. They did not typically turn to stories of self. Instead, almost without fail, they took up that “what else?” invitation as the moment to tell “us”—to convey to a wider audience—what deafness is and isn’t, what it means to be deaf, how one’s deaf life is a gain, especially when placed alongside other deaf lives, in community. Here the deaf person becomes the interpreter, the translator, the literate meaning-maker, the go-between as she articulates the power and grace and gifts of her betweenity. I cannot explain it any better than our narrator in this clip.
