Rethinking the "Interview a Deaf Person" Assignment:

By William G. Vicars, EdD, (with minor collaborative support from Gemini AI)
10/14/2025

For decades, a common assignment in American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf Studies classes has been for students to find and interview a Deaf person. The intention is noble: to connect students with the living culture they are studying, bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world experience, and foster authentic interaction. However, while well-intentioned, this assignment model is fundamentally flawed, often placing an unfair and uncompensated burden on the Deaf community. It's time we reconsider this practice in favor of more ethical and effective teaching methods.

The Unbalanced Transaction: Taking Time and Labor:

Being interviewed is a form of work. It requires time, mental energy, opportunity cost, and often emotional labor. The person being interviewed must schedule a time, be "on" for the conversation, thoughtfully answer questions, and navigate the interaction. This is labor that requires sacrificing the opportunity to engage in other activities -- including potentially income producing activities and at a minimum time that could be invested with family or in personal projects.

At its core, an interview is a transaction. The fundamental problem with the student-led interview is that this transaction is almost always one-sided.

The student is taking.

What is the student giving in return? This is a critical question.

In professional contexts, the value given back is clear:

* A journalist gives the interviewee a platform and access to an audience, which can help promote the person's own agenda, business, or cause.

* A peer-reviewed journal gives an academic interviewee prestige, a publication credit, and a valuable line on their CV that helps with tenure and promotion.

* A market researcher tends to give interviewees money or free products for their time and opinions.

* A celebrity or an interviewer who is an influencer tends to provide an increase in perceived status, exposure to a large audience, and increased viewership or opportunities for their interviewees.

A student, however, typically offers none of these. Students usually have no significant audience, no professional prestige to confer, and no budget for compensation. The student gets a completed assignment and a grade; the Deaf person gets...nothing of tangible value. The student is simply taking (sometimes an hour or more of uncompensated labor) from a member of a community they claim to respect.

The Emotional Burden and Inherent Power Dynamics:

Beyond the issue of uncompensated time, the assignment places a significant emotional and educational burden on the Deaf individual. They are often asked the same introductory questions repeatedly by random students semester after semester: "What was it like growing up Deaf?" "What's the hardest thing about being Deaf?"

This turns individuals into representatives of a monolithic "Deaf experience," forcing them to perform the role of educator and cultural specimen. This is emotionally draining. Furthermore, it reinforces a problematic power dynamic where the Hearing student is positioned as the researcher and the Deaf person as the subject, a dynamic with a long and painful history of Hearing people studying and speaking for Deaf people.

Pinpointing the true source of the problem: Paid Teachers Using the Deaf Community as Unpaid Co-Teachers:

While students are the ones conducting the interviews, the ultimate ethical responsibility for this practice lies squarely with the instructors who create the assignment. An instructor is a paid professional, compensated to design and deliver a complete educational experience. When they require students to find a Deaf person for an interview, they are, in effect, outsourcing a core part of their teaching duties.

They are using members of the Deaf community as unpaid co-teachers and uncredited guest lecturers.

This practice leverages (and by leverages we really mean "takes advantage of") the goodwill of the Deaf community to fill a gap in the curriculum, providing the invaluable cultural immersion that the instructor is being paid to facilitate. It is a form of professional exploitation, where one paid educator uses their position to extract uncompensated labor from community members to benefit their own students and fulfill their own pedagogical goals.

The problem isn't just a flawed assignment; it's a systemic failure to value and compensate the very community that the course claims to celebrate.

Better Alternatives for Authentic Connection:
Pivoting away from this assignment doesn't mean abandoning the goal of connecting students with the Deaf community. It means doing so ethically. Here are several superior alternatives:

* Engage with Deaf-Created Content:
Assign students to watch films, vlogs, and documentaries created by Deaf artists. Have them read books, blogs, and articles written by Deaf authors. This approach allows students to learn from Deaf voices while directly supporting Deaf creators.

* Invite Paid Guest Speakers:
Bring Deaf professionals, storytellers, or advocates into the classroom (in-person or virtually) and pay them a professional speaker's fee. This models a respectful, reciprocal relationship and correctly frames the Deaf person as an expert whose time and knowledge have value.

* Attend Public Deaf Community Events:
Encourage students to attend Deaf coffee chats, festivals, or signed performances. Public, Deaf Community oriented events are okay. Burdening Deaf attendees of semi-public Deaf events by asking Deaf attendees to shift their focus from the purpose of the event to instead perform the labor of being interviewed, recorded, photographed, or place their signature on forms is not okay. The key difference is that students should attend as respectful observers or invited-participants in a public space, not as unequal-transaction seeking individuals demanding one-on-one time. The assignment needs to shift away from extraction and instead focus on immersion or possibly even contribution.

* Support Deaf-Owned Businesses: The instructor can take money out of their paycheck and support local or online Deaf-owned businesses or organizations and in doing so (if appropriate), provide opportunities to interact with Deaf business owners in a natural consumer context.

Keep in mind that it is inappropriate to require students to pay to attend an event unless such expense was clearly spelled out prior to the student registering for the class and such expenses have been cleared with administrators who are aware of and sensitive to the housing and food insecurity faced by many students.

By shifting our pedagogy away from the extractive "interview" model, we can teach our students the much more important lesson of how to engage with the Deaf community not as a resource to be mined for a grade, but as a diverse and vibrant community of individuals to respect, interact with, and learn from in an ethical way.

 

Sample reference:
Vicars, W. (2025, October 14). Rethinking the "interview a Deaf person" assignment. Lifeprint. https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/interview-a-deaf-person.htm

Note to readers:

This next bit of discussion is a bit of a touchy topic -- but it is strongly related to ASL and ASL instruction. It is from a post at Lifeprint.

To put it in perspective, you need to remember that other people's students are constantly requesting that I help them do their homework for them (instead of them doing their own homework). Often they contact or approach me because their instructor has "required" them to interview a Deaf person.

I try to always be available to every student (both mine and the students of other instructors), but, you can understand, after the first thirty or forty interviews (that is not an exaggeration) a person starts to ask himself if the problem isn't the student, but rather it is the instructors who are assigning their students to go interview Deaf people -- instead of arranging for Deaf people to come to the classroom.

Putting the burden on a student to find a Deaf person to interview is a lazy and cheap way to teach.

Below is an example of several questions asked of me by somebody else's student and my answers. They sent me the questions in an email.

Question: Do you feel that sign language should be used with handicapped people? Why or why not?

Response: Yes. Sign language enhances communication by either augmenting spoken communication or replacing it when it isn't available. Sign language encourages and expedites cognitive development, especially if and when used prior to acquisition of verbal (spoken) language skills.

Question: Should there be boundaries set with this communication?

Response: Oh sure, there should be a few boundaries. No using sign language while standing naked in line at the supermarket. No using sign language while holding on to a vial of nitro glycerin. No sign language while holding TWO cups of piping hot coffee. No sign language....

Jeez! That question is whack. Plus, you misspelled "boundaries" (but I corrected it for you).

I mean, that is like asking, "Should there be boundaries set on women?"

Question: Do you feel that the hearing community has taken advantage of sign language to communicate with HC people?

Response: [I just spell corrected "fell" to "feel." Advice: If you want interviewees to take you seriously, use "spell check."]

Sure, I fell, er, I mean feel Hearing people have "taken advantage" of ASL. But the phrase "taken advantage of" is really short sighted. We need to look at the big picture. I think that the more Hearing people that learn and start using ASL, the more opportunities there will be for Deaf people to prosper in more areas of business and commerce. When more and more people learn and use ASL it becomes contagious and spreads and everybody wants to learn it. Thus more and more jobs will open up for both Hearing AND Deaf in ASL-related areas.
 

Question: Any other comments.

Response: Tell your Deaf Culture Teacher he owes me $20 for helping him teach his class. (Requiring students to interview Deaf people is a form of "asymmetric instruction." (Shifting the instruction to a different time, place, or person). It is no different really from having a guest instructor come to your class and spend twenty (or more) minutes of their time with your students. Your (college) instructor typically gets paid $60 an hour or so for student/teacher contact. So, now I've invested 20 minutes (longer actually) in contact with one of his students, he should come teach my class for 20 minutes or pay me $20. [Or stop requiring students to request unremunerated (unpaid) donations of time and expertise from the Deaf community].
 

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Note: Readers of the information above may feel that I've been overly harsh or rough in my replies to this student, but ask yourself:
"How much time and effort did the student put into this situation?"
(Answer: Not much!)

I love helping students. My comments are more directed toward the instructors out there who give their students assignments without providing appropriate avenues and methods to complete the assignment.
 

I knew an instructor once who required her ASL 2 students to each interview a Deaf person and RECORD IT ON VIDEO as proof that they did it. (This was back before cell-phones recorded video and for most students it was a major endeavor just to find a video camera.) That means 25 students are now going to go waste the time of 25 Deaf people and glean only a very, very small fraction of the information they could have gotten had they read a decent Deaf Culture book instead.
 

[Or these days, they could watch vlogs, etc.] While many of these Deaf individuals won't mind doing the interview, many will do it out of guilt or some sense of not wanting to be a bad person when they would RATHER be chatting with their Deaf friends instead of chatting with a beginning level ASL student. Can you see it from the point of the Deaf person? Sitting there patiently waiting for the Hearing student to struggle through sentence after sentence.

And it happens semester after semester.

Notes: