Carrie Irick: The Path to Becoming an Inclusive Educator
With both excitement and some nervousness, I opened my laptop and began the journey of broadening my education in a new, unknown field.
For the past three years, one of the top things on my bucket list was to learn American Sign Language. So when I had to decide what kind of experience I wanted to explore over the summer, the answer seemed obvious. I chose to use the program “StartASL” to help me learn this language.
The logo for the StartASL program
StartASL is an online program that allows one to learn sign language by following the guidance of instructors who are actual trained signers. Through this program I learned the basics of sign language including things like counting, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, and more. I am still in the process of learning, but this program has provided me with the fundamentals I need to communicate with others.
The process of learning American Sign Language was a journey in itself. It was not necessarily action-packed or eventful, but it had great meaning to me and tested my resolve as both a future teacher and a student. Doing an online program over the summer revealed a lot to me about myself. I was reminded about the importance of a learning community. I struggled a lot with motivation despite ASL being something I have been wanting to learn for so long. And I realized that this was because I was not surrounded by others that were going through the same thing I was; there was no one to learn beside and help me to know that I was not having to do it alone.
Carrie practicing sign language using her online program
Despite this small obstacle I had to face, I am grateful that I had to face it because it showed me some new things about myself as a student and made me appreciate my college experience and my classmates all the more. It revealed to me how much I thrive working in a community of other learners and how I struggle with having intrinsic, or internal, motivation when I am doing educational experiences independently. This is great to know about myself as it helps me see where I work best and also some things that I can work to be better at in the future. After working through this mental hurdle, I was able to explore a new language in an engaging, impactful manner.
With that being said, I think it is important I discuss my motivation behind learning ASL and why it was so special to me to become educated in it. I am an Early Childhood Education major here at Lander and a soon-to-be teacher; and one of the biggest takeaways I have gathered from my education is that one of the key jobs of an educator is to be welcoming and inclusive to all the all the children they may have in their classroom. This means I need to be doing everything I can to make my classroom an inviting, warm environment where all of my students will feel seen and understood.
There is a term I have been recently made aware of called “implicit bias”. This is when a person is biased about a topic in some way without realizing it. The important thing to understand about this is that everyone is biased in one way or another. No one is above it completely. Many people are biased towards individuals that they see themselves in or whose ideals align with their own. I have had to face biases of my own and am trying to be more mindful to teach my students in a way that is best for each of them as individuals and not just how I would expect and want to be treated in a classroom. It is important to remember that my students are not me and will have different needs than I did; needs related to their learning styles, cultures, familial backgrounds, learning disabilities, etc.
All of this to say that when I become an educator, I want to be open minded and acknowledge my students as the individuals that they are. Because an educator is guaranteed to have a diverse classroom and I want to make sure I am catering to all of my future students' needs and backgrounds equally. One of my first steps to do this was to learn ASL so I could incorporate it into my teaching. There may come a time when I have a student who suffers from deafness or a hearing impairment, and it is important that they are given the same learning opportunities as everyone else. And even if I never have a student who depends on sign language, I still think including ASL in my classroom is needed. I want to encourage inclusiveness not only in my own life, but in my students’ lives too.
Looking back on my experience, I now understand the true significance of it to my life and the lives of others. I took the ASL course because I had wanted to learn it for the past couple of years and I was excited at the prospect of being able to communicate with others in a new way. Despite my initial struggles with the online medium of the program, I was able to overcome them and be successful in beginning the process of learning this new language. And having to face those issues made this experience mean all the more to me.
I went into this with the mindset of wanting to be able to be more inclusive by using ASL, but it was not until well after my summer experience that I realized just how useful of a tool this language could be for me to create an intentionally inclusive classroom. And that really is the biggest goal of my prospective teaching career-- to make my students feel comfortable and recognized as individuals as well as instilling in them the importance of making others feel that same way.
Carrie Irick is a senior Early Childhood Education major from Florence, S.C. She completed her learning experience with StartASL during the summer of 2021. She will graduate from Lander University’s Honors College in May 2022, and plans to return to Florence where she will work to get her master’s degree in school guidance counseling before becoming a teacher and running her own happy, healthy classroom.