Translating Environments: technologies of access for environmental education

• In Event: Environments for Every Body: Panel 1 - Disability

Abstract

In 1990, two seemingly unrelated Acts of the United States Congress were passed: the National Environmental Education Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The former established the Office of Environmental Education within the U.S. EPA to “improve understanding of the natural and built environment…including the global aspects of environmental problems,” and the latter “ensures equal opportunity for persons with disabilities” to a host of public services and institutions – including public and private education. This paper brings these two contemporaneous efforts together by exploring the history of techniques and technologies designed to provide access to environmental and outdoor education for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH). Utilizing archives, articles, oral histories, and interviews with educators and students from grade schools to graduate schools and public institutions such as national parks, this paper asks what it means to provide (and experience) “access” to outdoor spaces, environmental education, and ecological knowledge production. I focus in large part on notions of access tied to translation: both the translation between senses (e.g. auditory information into visual information), and the translation between languages (spoken and written English into American Sign Language and vice versa). Exploring translation in these multiple registers opens up a host of questions surrounding ‘successful’ pedagogical technologies vs the road(s) not taken, as well as questioning the notion of access for persons with ‘disabilities’ in our pedagogical institutions more generally. A close look at the translation of the environment and environmental knowledge allows us to reevaluate inclusion and ‘access’ to environments, environmentalism, and perhaps even environmental history.

Author

• Kristoffer Whitney, Rochester Institute of Technology