After a quick hiring cycle, Dr. Stephanie Gardiner-Walsh arrived in Bloomsburg in August hoping to teach Deaf Education. However, the first day of class brought with it news to Dr. Gardiner-Walsh and the students of Bloomsburg’s Deaf Education program that the students had failed to learn even the basics of American Sign Language.

According to several students in the program, the problem isn’t the result of a failure to learn but rather a failure to teach. Several students reported issues ranging from an outdated curriculum to a failure to retain students and staff, and by the end of the fall semester, Gardiner-Walsh would go from building a new curriculum to handing in her resignation.

Outdated and Offensive

Jamie Decker is a senior who transferred to Bloomsburg for the Deaf Education program. For her, it started with what she described as a “flawed” curriculum.

“A lot of it was not updated information about the Deaf Community and more ways of approaching inclusion and especially not using signed English, which is pretty offensive to the Deaf Community.”Going further, she said, “I knew going in that the program was a bit flawed because of those morals.”

She gave examples such as queued speech, visual phonics, or disabilities coupled with deafness.

“Once we got our new professor this semester, Dr. Stephanie Gardiner-Walsh, it seemed like there was light at the end of the tunnel.”

Chloe Johns is another Deaf Ed major and she said, “The program you quickly find out is very outdated and was not with the evidence-based times.”

She would describe student expectations with the course as being comprehensive, stating that they were supposed to be learning the “total communication side of things,” as she referred to it, including ASL as a form of teaching and communication and verbal for students with processors such as hearing aids as well as learning Deaf Culture.

“It was walking into a very negative and unsupportive environment,” she stated.

The Struggle for Practicums

Gardiner-Walsh came to a similar conclusion fairly quickly.

“They didn’t have foundational knowledge that was a prerequisite for my class so I ended up doing a lot of rehashing,” she said about her students.

“When I arrived, I was given prior syllabi for the course. I wasn’t given enough information ahead of time to know I had to find my own practicums.” Gardiner-Walsh said.

“I didn’t realize I was in charge of placing students, which also meant I had to develop all of these relationships really quickly and find placements for them.”

Decker shared with The Voice about the issues of practicum from a student perspective.

“The entire semester we were supposed to get a practicum but we barely did. We got one day at the Scranton School of the Deaf towards the end of the semester and that’s it…. [Gardiner-Walsh] fought really hard to reach out to schools to see if we could get a practicum.”

They were supposed to spend two days at the Scranton School of the Deaf; however, one was canceled due to weather and the second ended up being a half day…. “That wasn’t a practicum. We deserve a practicum; we were promised a practicum.”

She further went on to say, “After that, I realized it seems like they’re to get rid of this program altogether.”

Resignation

Looking at the issues her students face, Gardiner-Walsh said, “For [students], I think the biggest hurdle has been an inconsistency of faculty so there’s no cohesion from the beginning of the program until the end and so standards that should have been met sequentially haven’t been.”

“One of the problems and one of the things I was tasked with was coming in and updating the program and getting it modern and getting it up to the new standards,” she said. At this time she was doing student teaching supervision up in Potter County as well as in Lancaster.

“In a semester, the work that it took me to redo a program was already kind of switching here in Illinois to the one in Bloomsburg. The switch took me almost a year here in Illinois; I was given a semester and no support.”

Her task had been to modernize the program. She learned that there had been a program evaluation done before, which gave some information to go off of. However, as she stated,

“My task was to modernize the program and bring it up and realign it.

“By the end of the semester, I found out that that was going to be the entire program revision and the work that I was doing to align and to reenvision the program and bring it up to where it needed to be was not going to be allowed.”

It was that realization that her expertise and skills, as well as the evidence-based practices she had been working to develop throughout the semester, were what proved to be the final straw for Dr. Gardiner-Walsh. Dr. Gardiner-Walsh would learn this news around election day. She would hand in her resignation soon after.

An Outsider’s Perspective

Mackenzie Flanagan is a teacher for the Deaf at the Scranton School of the Deaf. During her time there she has had the opportunity to work with students and alumni of Bloomsburg’s Deaf Ed program.

“I would say the students that go through the program are fantastic students. They’re motivated; they’re willing to take feedback and use it in their lessons they are designing themselves.”

Going further, she stated, “Unfortunately, I feel like sometimes they are a little fearful and I feel like they come to us a little blindsided.” Mackenzie originally attended school in Florida, where she learned Deaf Education.

She described her program as, “The program I went through required us to be on campus in Deaf classrooms pretty much from day one.” A description that seems to be a stark contrast from the program students are currently a part of.

University Response

The Voice reached out to the head of the department and provost for comment. At the time of publication, no response had been received