Name:	Tom Humphries, Associate Professor thumphries@ucsd.edu		In his own words . . . VITA
Education:	Ph.D. in Cross Cultural Communication and Language Learning, Union Graduate School (1977)
Research:	My recent work is focused on how “taking culture” among Deaf people helps us understand the circulation of culture in communities and especially the rapid acceleration of consciousness change. Culture has been “on its way somewhere” among Deaf people for 30 years. Tracing the movement of the discourse of culture in places like the Deaf media, in everyday talk, and in other kinds of texts allows us to see how Deaf people imagine their community and how to understand what is being communicated when they engage in such discourse. I am also focused on how a global discourse of culture among Deaf people has contributed to the reorganization of local educational practice for deaf children. I am fascinated with how "culture" has been so attractive to Deaf people as a means of self-representation, continuing the work Carol Padden and I began in Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (1988) and Inside Deaf Culture (2005). In my teaching, I use my work on the language and culture of Deaf people to illustrate problems of silencing and voice, self-expression, self-representation, and dominant/non-dominant group relations. Other recent work includes a paper on teacher talk among deaf and hearing teachers in different types of school settings for deaf children. The significance of this work is that it illuminates our understanding of how ideology shapes teaching practice (specifically, the way teachers' language is structured and things are explained during instruction). In showing how deaf teachers make connections between ASL and English during instruction, we are able to see differences between how deaf teachers and hearing teachers vary in the frequency with which they use some obvious candidates for relating ASL and English such as fingerspelling and "chaining" (a process of combining different media in rapid sequence). We attribute these differences to differing ideologies of the school setting and also to the effect of indigenous practices from the different communities, deaf and hearing. The paper gives us insights into how English literacy is an achievable goal through the medium of a signed language, ASL, a connect that has historically been considered unlikely by many in deaf education. Having a joint appointment to the Teacher Education Program at UCSD and serving as Associate Director, I have spent the past several years developing an experimental curriculum which trains teachers to work with deaf children using an entirely new curriculum construct: the application of bilingual teaching practice to classrooms of deaf children. This project has a number of research goals related to the effectiveness of the curriculum and the impact that teachers finishing this program will have in the workplace once they are in service.
Books:	Padden, C. and T. Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2005 Humphries, T. and C. Padden. Learning American Sign Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1992. Padden, C. and T. Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, l988. Humphries, T., C. Padden and T. J. O'Rourke. A Basic Course in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, Md.: TJ Publishers, Inc., 1980.
Recent Articles and book chapters:	Humphries, T. “The modern Deaf self: Indigenous practices and educational imperatives” in Literacy and Deaf People: Cultural and Contextual Perspectives. B. Brueggemann, ed.. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. 2004. Humphries, T. and MacDougall, F. "'Chaining' and other links: making connections between American Sign Language and English in two types of school settings," Visual Anthropology Review, 15:2, Fall/Winter 1999/2000. Humphries, T. "On deaf-mutes, the strange, and the modern Deaf self" in Culturally Affirming Psychotherapy with Deaf Persons, N. Glickman and M. Harvey, eds., Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. Humphries, T. "Deaf Culture and Cultures," in Multicultural Issues in Deafness Longman, 1993.