Tom's page at UCSD's Communication Department

VITA

For more information on the M.A. program in Deaf Education at UCSD see the website: http://tep.ucsd.edu

 

The following is all true…..I was born and raised in the community of Possum Fork and later in the town of Johnsonville, South Carolina to hearing parents. My father was initially a farmer, and later a factory shift supervisor and my mother was a homemaker all of her life. To say we were poor is not quite accurate because everyone in this area of the country pretty much struggled at one time or another and we always seemed to manage somehow. But, yes, I was at least 9 years old before I lived in a house that had a bathroom or was painted. I stopped hearing when I was about 6. I was very ill and my parents were told that I might not survive. Medication that I took at that time (a mycin) may have been a reason I stopped hearing. I attended public school in Johnsonville for 12 years, a school populated by my relatives. For example, I paid my aunt for my lunch everyday and got my food in the cafeteria line from my grandmother, and in class I sat with at least three or four of my cousins among my other classmates (who were the same for 12 years). No, there was no signing involved, and no, I had no “oral education” of any kind. I guess you would say that I created my own school within a school and it worked for me.

I learned to sign at Gallaudet College beginning at the age of 17. The transition from small town to big city Washington, D.C. was nothing compared to the transition from a hearing school to a college where I was immersed overnight among 1000 Deaf people with whom I could barely communicate. It took at least 2 years of total immersion for me to become decently fluent in ASL and to learn to be Deaf. My time as Gallaudet coincided with the emergence of the early work on ASL and the beginning of a discourse of “Deaf culture”. This was to influence my later work in communication and culture as well as in education. My experience of learning ASL as an adult must have also sparked my interest in learning ASL as a second language since I later published two ASL textbooks.

As many have asked, yes, I did coin the word “audism” while working on my dissertation in 1975-1977. My dissertation was on a bilingual approach to teaching Deaf students. When I published my dissertation, I did not include the part on audism. However, some xeroxed copies of the pages on audism apparently were circulated for years afterwards. I derived the word from the Latin audire and defined it simply as: “The notion that one is superior based on one's ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears.” Other writers have found the word useful and have defined it more fully.

My first job out of graduate school was as a curriculum specialist for an experimental project at Gallaudet University to create a more holistic learning environment for new students. This experimental project later merged with the English Language Program and I moved to the English Department. Interestingly enough, I am now teaching at the University of California, San Diego, where I recently developed an experimental teacher training curriculum which requires teachers of deaf children to have bilingual education certification as well as deaf education certification. Experimentation with new approaches has apparently been attractive to me.

I taught at Gallaudet for six years before leaving to accompany my wife, Carol Padden, to San Diego so that she could attend graduate school herself. I was an Associate Dean in the local college system for about 12 years before moving to UCSD to gain more time for my own research and writing. Carol and I ended up settling in San Diego and have one daughter who is hearing and bilingual in ASL and English. Carol and I have been married for 25 years as of 2003 and we are active in social and community causes, serving on numerous Boards, committees, and task forces. We are deeply committed to all aspects of Deaf life, the arts, Deaf cultural studies, the language, and to promoting scholarship among Deaf people.