Audism and racism: The hidden curriculum impacting black d/Deaf college students in the classroom.

There is a historical legacy of dual discrimination and institutional oppression against Black d/Deaf students within the educational system. This oppression has manifested itself in many ways including in the classroom as the hidden curriculum (i.e., the unattended outcomes of the schooling process). The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study is to understand the ways in which racism and audism might still contribute to the hidden curriculum in the college classroom and how Black d/Deaf college students resist this oppression. The theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory and Critical Deaf Theory along with the analytical frameworks, theory of microaggressions and Black Deaf Community Cultural Wealth guide the data collection and analysis. The findings are presented as an inverted counternarrative showing how students experience issues of audism and racism
through faculty’s non-diverse curriculum, hearing-centric evaluation methods, and racist and audist faculty-student interactions. The study concludes with practical recommendations for faculty.

Keywords: Audism, d/Deaf College Students, Racism

Themes:

• Invisibility
• Trivialization
• Distorted Expectations