Deaf Student to Professor to Deaf Students

Born deaf, he earned a Master’s degree and improved the education of the Deaf community by teaching at the university level to hearing impaired students while researching and writing about geographic differences in sign language.  

FAMILY BACKGROUND

CC was born deaf to parents in Sweden, neither of whom were deaf. 

EDUCATION

CC’s parents were very supportive, sending him to a specialized school where he learned Swedish sign language in class and taught himself written English and German through a correspondence school. 

Later, CC would emigrate to the U.S. and graduate from a university. 

RANDOM MEETING IS FIRST SMALL STEP TOWARD A CAREER

Editor’s note – The more career stories you read within this collection, the more you will find that random (unplanned) events (e.g., meeting new friends or working as a part-time intern or enrolling in a potentially interesting college course) may become the first step toward an interesting, long-term career.

A chance encounter with the president of Gallaudet University (in Washington, D.C., the only university for the hearing-impaired in the U.S.), who was traveling in Europe, persuaded CC to come to America to study at Gallaudet, from which he eventually graduated with a degree in English. CC was immediately hired as a junior faculty member while taking graduate courses at a nearby university, from which he earned a Master’s degree in English. 

Despite his degree and strong recommendations from his professors, the graduate university declined to admit CC to its doctoral program because its director thought it would be too difficult for a deaf person. (Editor’s note – too difficult for the student who had already proved himself a dedicated scholar or too difficult for the faculty, who might have to slightly alter their teaching approach to accommodate this bright and determined student?? The reader may guess which alternative is the most likely to have occurred, in the opinion of this Editor.) 

JOINING A RESEARCH PROJECT LEADS TO CREATIVE THINKING TO HELP OTHERS

While teaching English to hearing impaired college students, CC was asked by a newly arrived faculty member, to participate in a study of sign languages: whether the traditional forms of signing could be modified to account for different signage used as slang and possibly based on differences in communications in different areas of the country, just like people without hearing impairment can tell the difference between Southern, New England and Texan accents. 

For his role within the research project, CC traveled throughout New England and the South, interviewing Deaf residents, and conducting ethnographic studies (relating to the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits, and mutual differences). What CC found may not have surprised his research subjects, but it astounded other linguists because he identified significant regional variations: for example, the sign for cheese was different in Washington, D.C. than in nearby Virginia. Catholics and Protestants had different sign words for the same religious objects. And he found different sign dialects among old and young, and between Black and White people. The divisions between sign languages could be mapped geographically. 

CC published his results as two appendices to “A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles”, which became the most widely used text among Deaf scholars. 

ONE PERSON’S CAREER MAY INFLUENCE MANY OTHERS

Having earned his Master’s degree in English, CC continued to teach at Gallaudet and over time became an inspiration for a new generation of linguists and scholars of Deaf studies, who created programs and departments at Boston University, at California State University in Northridge and other institutions.