by Carolyn Ginsburg
I was asked to send to you a personal account as to why CART services are extremely beneficial for students with hearing loss.
I am a graduate of Northwestern University (BA 1989) and recently graduated from Columbia University Business School (MBA 1999). I also have a severe-profound progressive bilateral hearing loss since childhood and am a high functioning oral communicator (I use speech reading and powerful hearing aids). I communicate best in very quiet one-on-one situations and have difficulty hearing in meetings, study groups and classroom discussions/lectures. I do not know sign language fluently enough to follow an interpreter (English is my main language) and have been mainstreamed in public school for my elementary and secondary education.
Because I attended undergraduate school over 10 years ago, I did not know about support services like CART. But, for my Columbia Business School education (10 years later), I was fortunate enough to have CART for all of my classes. After explaining why I wanted CART support, the business school was more than happy to help me perform my best. CART allowed me for the first time in my entire academic career to follow classroom discussions, participate in classroom discussions and take my own notes. What an incredible experience this was. It was very liberating, made me finally feel equal to my peers in the classroom, gave me equal access to information and gave me more confidence to express my opinions and answers.
I remember in my undergraduate experience I rarely participated in class because I never knew what the other students were saying and it was hard to follow discussions. This made me feel very insecure and unable to fully appreciate the teaching environment. I also remember studying for exams with my friends and was surprised at how much more they knew about a subject matter than I did. (They would tell me they picked up a lot of information discussed in class -- not everything discussed in class was available in the books.) As you can see, CART is powerful and does so much more than what a note taker can provide.
Since graduate school, I have been working as a brand manager/marketer for a Fortune 500 company. In this position, I have to attend a lot of training sessions. For these sessions, I also use CART. I cannot express enough the freedom, information and extra support it provides for me.
CART minimizes my disability and allows me to perform beyond my abilities simply because it helps me focus on the subject matter instead of wasting energy trying to understand speech, locate the speaker and follow discussions (most of the time this is impossible to do). I am sure CART will do the same for your students who have hearing loss.
If you have had an experience with captioning or CART that you would like to share, please e-mail it to Peter Wacht, pwacht@ncrahq.org, or mail it to his attention at NCRA, 8224 Old Courthouse Road, Vienna, VA 22312.