It's appropriate that on this particular day in Storer 1322 Donna Reed is defining for her comparative literature class what a fairy tale is: "The fortunes and misfortunes of a hero or heroine who goes through a series of adventures of a more or less supernatural kind and ends up living happily ever after."
It's appropriate because the situations faced by the young woman sitting attentively in the first row of the lecture hall fit so neatly with that definition. With clear blue Alice-in-Wonderland eyes, a blond ponytail and a personality to fit her sparkle nail polish, Hayley Schafer appears the typical college sophomore.
Outward appearances, though, belie the fact that, at age 20, she has already encountered frightening, life-altering circumstances that could keep a person at any age from following their dreams. But her own perseverance, coupled with assistance she is receiving from the rapidly growing deaf and hard of hearing student unit of the Student Disability Center, are allowing the animal science major to pursue her happy ending.
Schafer is one of two dozen students on campus - including one who also teaches - who are currently receiving assistance from Laurie Mason, the deaf and hard of hearing specialist at the disability center. The center provides students with assisted listening and notetakers. And staff members from the center provide sign language interpreting and real-time captioning services in classrooms.
"I don't think I would be surviving without it," Schafer says of the real-time captioning. "Before that, it was like watching TV. I'd have to turn it up and up and up. And pretty soon I'd just turn it off and walk away, because it's just too frustrating to listen and not be able to hear."
Today, campus real-time captioner Krista Sigarroa is silently keying the stenography machine, which is cabled to a laptop computer set up in front of Hayley. There's a question in the back of the lecture hall, so Sigarroa keys that in as well. Black about half-inch tall characters flow rapidly onto the gray screen.
Captioners also key in any jokes a discussion might inspire and the occasional surprise interruption that turns all the heads in a classroom. In this way, a deaf or hard of hearing student is never left to feel like an outsider, says Laurie Mason, the center's disability specialist for deaf and hard of hearing students.
"That's what our mission is - meaningful participation," Mason says. A variety of campus efforts are coming together - from staffing methods to improvements in technology - to make that more possible than ever before.
UC Davis is one of a handful of universities with an all-staff cadre of captioners. The campus stopped using independent contractors two years ago. "It allows us to have more control with regard to quality of services and in re-sponding to unexpected requests," Mason said, noting that advising meetings or review ses-sions sometimes come up at a moment's notice.
The real-time captioning program began in 1992 with two captioners; two years later two students were using the service in 15 classes. "It was just a slow-growing thing at first," Mason said. But that's changed - fairly dramatically.
A year ago, the deaf and hard of hearing program served 13 students. Now that number stands at 24. And the disability center now provides real-time captioning for 16 students in 93 classes. "There's just been an explosion in the need for captioners - more students are switching to it," Mason said. Captioners added about a half dozen students to their books in winter quarter alone, says Captioning Services Coordinator Denese Harlan.
At any given time, UC Davis' eight captioners might be working simultaneously.
A model program
Last month, Mason and Harlan made presentations at the nationwide Post-Secondary Educational Programs Network conference in Kansas City. "Our program is actually a model for other universities to follow when it comes to setting up a successful in-house real-time captioning program," Mason said. They found that across the country there's a growing demand for real-time captioning. But at the same time there is a serious shortage of experienced captioners.
Voice recognition programs might eventually help fill the gap, Harlan said. And new software allows people who are simply skilled typists to quickly summarize a lecture. The campus is exploring that, Mason said, "because some students don't want a verbatim transcript; it's just so much to weed through."
Doctors have been unable to determine why Schafer's hearing has plummeted in stages that have taken her from basically normal hearing in her early teens to a severe-to-profound loss in both ears now. Roommates have rushed into the apartment where she's quietly enjoying dinner, Schafer says, to alert her that the fire alarm is blaring only a few feet away.
Accustomed to straight-A report cards, Schafer says her freshman year took a heavy toll on her self-confidence. Her notes reflected the jumble of consonants and vowels as she heard them in class. "I thought they were introducing new terms," she says, now able to laugh about it.
A particularly bad experience in class last fall finally prompted her to act. "I had missed the whole lecture, but I was there. I actually went that day to Student Special Services."
Mason gave Schafer an FM system, which amplifies signals transmitted via a microphone that students ask instructors to wear. Schafer started receiving captioning services, too. "I didn't realize how much I was missing until I saw it in front of me," Schafer said. "Now I feel like I really cheated myself out of my first year."
The quick and the well-read
Real-time captioners and interpreters are probably some of the most scholastically well-rounded members of the campus staff. They each might sit in on as many as six lectures a day, covering subject matter as diverse as Japanese history, psychology and biology.
Year after year, a captioner gets to see the same films, hear the same case studies and, sometimes, even the same jokes. "You do get familiar with the classes," says Harlan, who, like all the campus captioners, is a court reporting school graduate.
Because students are reading along right next to them, captioners - unlike court reporters - can't go back and clean up text before anyone sees it. "It has to be as perfect as we can get it right from the start," said Sigarroa.
Speakers talk at about 150 words per minute, but the captioners must be able to key at least 180 words a minute, Harlan said. "You're on automatic pilot," she said. "You're doing five things at once - you're paying attention, writing, punctuating, identifying who's speaking and correcting your spelling. There's a lot going on in just a matter of a few seconds."
An hour-long class can generate up to 20 pages of notes, Sigarroa said. When not in the classroom, captioners are cleaning up those transcripts and e-mailing them off to students, usually the same day.
Where others sometimes dream of accidentally wearing pajamas to school, Harlan and Sigarroa said their nightmares usually take the form of forgetting to put an essential computer cable into the large suitcase of equipment they tote with them to every class.
Both agree: They might never overcome the anxiety that comes from knowing they play a pivotal role every time they sit down to caption. But that can be a good thing, Harlan says. "You always have to have that little fear to keep you on your toes and make sure you're going to work hard," she said, adding, "For as stressful, hard and frustrating at times as it is, it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done."
Harlan said she hasn't heard what impact the increase in summer class offerings this year might have on her unit. Usually captioners are furloughed from the end of June to September. Summer finds them freelancing - captioning at conferences or for various government meetings. But every so often that truly unusual opportunity comes around - like in 1995 when Harlan captioned for a Rolling Stones concert in Oakland. "That was cool," she said.
Expanding horizons for the deaf
Get ready to see more students like Hayley Schafer, who are pursuing careers once thought unattainable for deaf and hard of hearing people, says UC Davis' David Evans.
Born technically deaf, Evans is a teaching assistant working on his doctorate in U.S. history. He received his undergraduate degree from Gallaudet University, a liberal arts university for the deaf in Washington D.C., and a master's from Utah State University. His wife, Tiffany Green, who works in the registrar's office and also is deaf, has taught sign language courses at the Experimental College and Sacramento City College. She is now considering law school.
Evans say services offered on campus are contributing to the "normalization" of the deaf population. "In the last 20 to 25 years there's been an awakening in the deaf community, which isn't settling for what general society says they can or cannot do," he says. "I don't buy the saying that deaf people can do anything but hear. But I think we are capable of doing much more than people expect us to do."
With help from campus interpreters, Evans leads discussion sections for a course on post-1945 U.S. history. In addition to their everyday vocabulary, interpreters work from a repertoire of some 14,000 technical terms that they have created and standardized for use across campus. Evans typically does his own talking; the interpreter signs questions from the class.
He also belongs to a Listserv started in March by about 250 deaf scholars around the world. They are uniting to address issues of equal access for individuals with hearing loss who are coming up the ranks of academia. Their message, Evans says, is: "We are here and we're not leaving. We are forming professional groups and support groups to help students get to graduate school and beyond."
The goal is to reach the point, he says, "where the student doesn't have the burden of thinking about their disability; so they can focus on achieving what they can."
To that same end, UC Davis is enhancing assisted listening technology campuswide.
An infrared future
New infrared transmitters will eventually be installed in 80 classrooms, Mason said. And the older FM radio signal systems will be phased out, says Erick Sprunger, manager of IET's classroom technology team.
Students sometimes find it difficult to ask instructors to clip on the extra microphone that goes with an FM system, Mason said "There's a hesitancy to stand out," she says. The infrared system keeps students from having to ask. Transmitters are connected to existing PA systems, so when an instructor switches on his or her own microphone, the infrared transmitter automatically turns on.
Transmitters send a signal to a cigarette-pack-sized receiver that amplifies the instructor's speech for a student's ear piece.
FM radio signals are capable of traveling through walls, Sprunger says. So, if a receiver isn't dialed in correctly, a student sitting in Chemistry 194 could conceivably pick up an instructor from the adjacent Chemistry 179. Conversely, an infrared signal can bounce around inside a room - which is actually an advantage - but, when the door is closed, the signal is contained. Also, students don't have to fumble to readjust receiver frequencies - the infrared signal is the same in all classrooms.
Larger rooms are being equipped with two infrared transmitters. "We try to make sure a student could sit anywhere - that there aren't any blind spots," Sprunger says.
Last fall installations of the infrared systems began; eight classrooms are now outfitted - Chemistry 179, Haring 2205, Kleiber 3, Roessler 55 and 66, Storer 1322, Wellman 2 and Hunt 100. And four more are slated to receive the systems by mid-summer - Chemistry 194, Social Sciences 1100, Young 198 and Everson 176. Sprunger says, in the fall, the next 10 largest rooms needing infrared will probably get it, including Wellman 106, 126, 6, 26, 234, 216 and 226, Young 194 and Olsen 6 and 206.
Meanwhile, Hayley Schafer is continuing to pursue her dream of becoming a veterinarian. She says she will likely never forget that Fall 2001 classics class in Greek and Roman mythology - her introduction to real-time captioning.
"It was like going to a whole new class," Schafer said. "There wasn't as much confusion coming out of a lecture - that was a big stepping stone for my learning."
She said immediately after the class she called her mom and excitedly told her the good news: "I heard the lecture today!" •