MJ Muller-Chillier has long blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She knows four languages. She lives by herself in an apartment near Eastern Market, her white Sidekick pager seems to constantly show new messages and she is generally well accessorized with coordinated earrings and bracelets. Tucked behind her left ear, MJ sports one other item – a hearing aid.
MJ, short for Marie-Jeanne, was diagnosed as hard-of-hearing at the age of three, and her hearing capacity has since decreased almost totally. Nevertheless, she is now an independent and worldly 23-year-old in her junior year at Gallaudet University, in the District of Columbia. She is also the first Gallaudet student in at least 10 years to take a foreign language class through the D.C. Consortium, and she has opted to do it at Georgetown.
“It is a Gallaudet rule that NO undergraduate student is allowed to take foreign language outside of Gallaudet,” she said in an e-mail. “I had to convince the chair of the [French] department first, then the department had to convince the dean of the university … and the head of the Registrar.”
From GU to GU
While the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits federally funded universities from discriminating against students with disabilities, Gallaudet is the world’s only university specifically dedicated to serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students. It is also one of 12 universities and two colleges that make up the D.C. Consortium, a network that includes Georgetown University, American University, Howard University and others.
Muller-Chillier, an international relations and French double major who reads the paper daily, said she often feels that her IR program is not challenging enough.
“I tell my classmates I am a government major because I don’t think most of them know what ‘IR’ stands for,” she said. Even in high school, she pushed herself, taking college-level French classes at nearby University of Colorado at Boulder. Now, she has signed up for a Georgetown French class, “North Africa: Issues and Impacts.”
“The purpose [of the Consortium] is to enhance the offerings in areas of their curriculum that might not be covered at that particular time or by that particular institution,” Georgetown University Registrar John Q. Pierce said.
Muller-Chillier’s family is of Swiss origin, and her mother has spoken French to her since her birth, when her hearing capacity was greater. As a native French speaker, Muller-Chillier has an advantage over most Gallaudet students who want to take foreign language classes. She explained that, unless they are raised bilingual, most deaf students have an extremely hard time learning another language when they are struggling to speak English.
Muller-Chillier has another advantage. “I have been told by my speech therapist, deaf specialist, interpreters and hearing friends that I have mastered speech-reading better than anyone they know. I understand about 97 percent of the time,” she said.
Even so, in getting signed up for the class through the Consortium, Muller-Chillier said, “I got the rules to bend.” According to Barbara Proctor, Consortium Coordinator, Graduation Specialist and Registration Official at Gallaudet, an average of less than 30 of the University’s students participate in the Consortium.
Before enrolling in the Georgetown class, Muller-Chillier used Gallaudet Interpreting Services, a paid campus service, to find a certified interpreter. She was paired with Emily Shaw, a Georgetown graduate student in linguistics who is fluent in English, French, American Sign Language and French Sign Language, or LSF. Shaw said she could not comment on her work with Muller-Chillier for professional reasons.
Muller-Chillier said that finding Shaw to be her interpreter was “like winning the lottery. It’s this amazing miracle.” It is nearly impossible, she said, to find someone certified as a French and English sign language interpreter.
In addition, Muller-Chillier said that without Shaw and this class, she would not get to use LSF. It is also Shaw’s first time translating in LSF in a classroom setting.
Between the bells
Talkative in the second floor hallways of the Intercultural Center, Muller-Chillier is serious and visibly focused in class. She sits in the front row and directs her attention to Shaw, who sits in front of the class next to the professor’s desk. Shaw, petite with wavy, dark brown hair with a few strands of gray, is animated from the moment Professor Noureddine Jebnoun begins class.
Her eyebrows raised and eyes wide open, Shaw mouths, in French, and signs, in LSF, the words the professor says. Her expressive face follows the mood of discussion. If the professor is talking about the conflict over Western Sahara, Shaw’s eyebrows will furrow. If she is explaining to Muller-Chillier that the class is laughing, her face brightens as she explains the joke. When Jebnoun cites Arabic names that she and many members of the class do not recognize, she tries to spell out the word letter-by-letter.
Shaw also encourages Muller-Chillier. The first time Muller-Chillier addressed the professor, he did not fully understand the wording of her question and looked to Shaw for help. Shaw would not speak for Muller-Chillier, and instead turned to her and signed for her to clarify herself. Muller-Chillier reworded her question and found an answer.
Muller-Chillier said she is intimidated by the amount of reading for the class, and confessed to exhaustion at the end of one session. She said she is normally able to read lips very well, but that Jebnoun speaks too quickly for her to understand him. She added that she feels “extremely nervous” about her oral presentation later in March. It will be her first in English in five years, and her first in French in six.
Yet the challenges at Georgetown are not only academic. In class at Georgetown, if Muller-Chillier drinks too noisily from her water bottle, Shaw smiles but waves her hands and signs to alert Muller-Chillier of the sound. At Gallaudet, Muller-Chillier answered questions loudly in a study area and met no complaints. The students at their laptops remained focused, and others in conversation continued signing.
In an e-mail, Jebnoun praised Muller-Chillier for her perseverance. In French, he wrote, “What impresses me about Marie-Jeanne is that she not only chose to enroll in a class that it must be said is not easy, above all at the level of the terminology, but also that she has put herself at the same level of hearing classmates and surpassed her handicap.”
He said he has never had a hard-of-hearing or deaf student in a class, and added, “I try to articulate clearly, but sometimes I have a tendency just to speak loudly.”
Muller-Chillier’s Georgetown classmates are also supportive of her participation in the class. “I think it’s so inspiring,” classmate Katy Bohinc (COL ‘07) said. Jeremy Domergue (COL ‘08), who takes notes for Muller-Chillier, said, “To be honest, it was distracting at first. Now, I’ve just gotten used to it and it doesn’t strike me as odd or unusual.”
Unique but not so different
Created in 1864, Gallaudet University offers over 40 majors and minors, including deaf studies. Gallaudet is, in Muller-Chillier’s words, “the Mecca of the deaf world – everyone tries to come to Gallaudet at least one time before they die.”
The phones for University offices are all equipped with TTY, which allows users to type, rather than speak their messages. The University President, I. King Jordan, is deaf, and the search for his replacement in January 2007 is a major topic of conversation on campus. Gallaudet is also home to the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center, which hosts an elementary and a secondary school for deaf students.
Mike Fleck (COL ‘07), the son of a Special Education teacher, and his friend Dunlea Bates (COL ‘07) enrolled in a beginner ASL class at Gallaudet in the spring of 2005.
Describing his experience in an e-mail, Fleck wrote, “We both never realized that the campus would pretty much be quiet, and you start noticing different things. Like we both would carry our books. People could spot us as hearing students simply because of that, because we weren’t using our hands.”
While Gallaudet is tailored to deaf and hard-of-hearing students, it is in many respects like any other university. According to a University web site, the admission process for new freshmen involves sending $50, a high school transcript, two letters of recommendation and ACT or SAT scores. In addition students must send “a certified form signed by your audiologist that determines your hearing loss in detailed format with a graph of frequency levels.”
At lunchtime inside one of Gallaudet’s eating areas, there is a flurry of motion. Students sign to one another, some laughing loudly between bites of pizza or sandwiches. Muller-Chillier said students call the small cafeteria “deaf world.” The walls are decorated with banners inviting students to join campus fraternities and sororities. The portion of the room where food is served is filled only with the sound of feet shuffling, trays hitting countertop, and cash registers opening and closing.
“In terms of similarities, I was kind of shocked (I’m embarrassed to say so, but it’s true) that there were pretty much the exact same social events being advertised,” Fleck said. “I would have never thought that there would have been dances and hip-hop competitions at Gallaudet … but then it was explained to me that there are special floorings that vibrate to the sound of the music, and at times, some deaf people were actually better at dancing than many hearing folk.”
Walking through the Gallaudet campus on a weekday morning, you will see students walking to class in pajama pants and hooded sweatshirts. Others sport expensive-looking winter coats, heels and European handbags. Muller-Chillier owns a pair of flip-flops emblazoned with her school’s name.
Waving to a pretty friend across campus, Muller-Chillier added, “There’s a misconception that everyone here [at Gallaudet] is completely deaf and no one talks.” While many deaf students have difficulty learning to speak because they cannot hear the sounds to imitate, Muller-Chillier speaks, or, as she said, she “voices.” She said that many of her friends are able to do the same. Speaking about deaf students, Muller-Chillier explained, “We just process information differently.”
Hard work
In some respects, Muller-Chillier’s childhood was like that of many college students. Born in Boulder, Col., she attended private school from kindergarten through seventh grade. Outside of school, she has been dancing ballet for 15 years.
She went on to a public high school, which she said she remembers fondly. She had several close friends, but she said that many people in high school knew her simply as “the deaf girl with the interpreter.”
“It was not until junior or senior year that people really knew who I was,” she added.
Yet, Muller-Chillier explains that growing up hard-of-hearing meant, “I always had to work harder.” She learned ASL in sixth grade, and when she was 12 she began lip reading. She has been working with a speech therapist for 17 years.
She cited her close relationship with her mother, Jacqueline Muller, as one of the reasons she has succeeded. “My mother has been very involved in my education, and because of her I’ve learned to educate myself,” she said. “A lot of deaf students lack support from parents or a support system within the school, and that’s why a lot of them struggle.”
Muller-Chillier applied to Gallaudet; California State University, Northridge; Colorado University at Boulder; and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The former two offer Deaf Studies programs, RIT offers a Deaf Studies certificate and all four have support centers for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Muller-Chillier chose Gallaudet for its reputation in the deaf community.
Despite her respect for her university’s mission, Muller-Chillier has more than once looked beyond Gallaudet for her education. In the fall of 2004, she took time off and created her own internship in Lausanne, Switzerland, her parents’ native country, at the city’s Deaf Cultural Center. A few months later, she worked with three- to 18-year-olds at Lausanne’s Deaf Institute.
During this time, Muller-Chillier learned to lip read French and match signs in LSF. Muller-Chillier described the experience as a challenge but said, “I would totally redo it if I could.”
She has traveled throughout Europe and Central America, and in the summer of 2003 she traveled to Finland for an international conference for the hard-of-hearing community.
Muller-Chillier continues to live independently. She is officially a D.C. resident, and she rents her own one-bedroom apartment. She has recently had to settle disputes with her landlord, who thought she was making too much noise. Muller-Chillier contested, “I rarely have parties. I barely even play music in my apartment. I just come and go often, and the stairs are near her room.”
The other side
Fleck and Bates are not the only Georgetown students who have taken classes at Gallaudet. Proctor, Consortium Coordinator at Gallaudet, said sometimes as many 20 to 25 students take classes at the University through the Consortium.
“The whole experience connected me with a culture that I didn’t really know anything about … it was so different,” Fleck said. He said his professor was profoundly deaf and did not allow students to speak. There were nine students total, many of whom were in their 30s and 40s, Fleck said.
Although it does not offer ASL classes, Georgetown College recognizes it as foreign language. “ASL is not a simplified gestural system, as many people believe. It is a full and complete language, just like any of the 4000+ spoken languages of the world, with its own complex vocabulary, syntax and morphology. … There is no doubt that ASL is ‘foreign’ to native English speakers,” Sue Lorenson, Associate Dean of the Georgetown College said.
What next?
While Fleck said he does not have room in his schedule to take more ASL classes, Muller-Chillier has two semesters left at Gallaudet and is thinking ahead to Masters programs. She is interested in one of Gallaudet’s newest tracks, International Development with Disabilities. She is also looking for an internship for the summer, and she said she has considered applying to positions in Hawaii, where her boyfriend Brandon will be stationed.
Brandon has already been on two tours of duty to Iraq, and may go again. Muller-Chillier, who wears Brandon’s dog tag around her neck, stiffens at the thought. For someone who defines herself as a “GDI – God Damn Independent,” it’s just too much.
