SignVote Faculty Champions help students understand the power of elections

With the 2024 elections looming, SignVote has been holding nonstop events here at Gallaudet and across the country to give deaf people access to nonpartisan election information. Part of the Center for Democracy in Deaf America (CDDA), SignVote is on a mission to find new ways to get its message out, and one of these initiatives is its Faculty Champions program.

Executive Director Dr. Brendan Stern, '05, is an Assistant Professor of Government, and elections are naturally part of his courses. But he saw an opportunity for his colleagues across the University to show how voting and the political process touch on so many other fields. "The goal is for students to see the unique lens each area of study brings to understanding elections," he says.

More than a dozen faculty members have enlisted in the program, which asks them to attend SignVote events to enable faculty-student engagement, create classroom presentations on the 2024 elections, and incorporate these issues into assignments.

Dr. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Director of the School of Arts and Humanities, was thrilled to sign up. "As an educator who teaches philosophy, a field that focuses on the nature and structure of good reasoning through argument analysis, the skills I teach are highly transferable for helping our students learn how to evaluate the political decisions they make as voters," she says.

This semester, Burke is teaching a mixed undergraduate and graduate class, "Bioethics and the Deaf Community." Earlier in the month, she welcomed a guest speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Dietz, a postdoctoral scholar at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who gave a lecture on abortion and reproductive rights policy and disability. That led to questions from students about a range of topics connected to the presidential election, including informed consent, government restrictions on health care providers, and government definitions of gender. Just this week, Professor Tawny Holmes Hlibok, '05 & G-'10, a White House Fellow working in the Biden Administration's Domestic Policy Council, shared her insights bridging her work experience as an academic and advocate.

Burke wants her students to recognize that consequential decisions are made not just at the presidential level, but at every level of government. "In my individual conversations with students, I have emphasized the importance of looking beyond the top of the ballot candidates to local races - namely school board races - to consider how these elections impact state and local curriculum decisions about textbooks, book banning and other library censorship, and other issues impacting what our children learn," she says. "How our children are educated and what they have access to, as well as the literacy skills in assessing misinformation and disinformation is critical to growing a responsible citizenry."

Another Faculty Champion, Senior Lecturer Margaux Delotte-Bennett, G-'07, has been using her course on social work practice to highlight the impact of disenfranchisement and voter suppression in vulnerable communities. As a social worker, she says, it's crucial to think about whether a client who is homeless or doesn't have the correct form of identification would be turned away at the polls. "Social workers tend to be nonpartisan when interacting with our clients and creating space for them to determine their own values, but we always stand on the side of social justice and self determination," she says.

The class recently held a discussion about policies that might impact their client's housing, insurance, education, and relationships. "Voting touches all of those areas," Delotte-Bennett says. "It's how we get access to our needs." In an upcoming class, she plans to center a discussion on information from the website, "Voting is Social Work," which was developed by the University of Connecticut.

Efforts like these are paying off, says Stern, who notes that Gallaudet's student voter registration numbers are going up. "The motivation, education, and participation of our students this semester wouldn't have been possible without our SignVote Faculty Champions," he says.