Amy Ruberl began her career in oral deaf education—and was quickly put off by it. Learning how to cue totally transformed how she views the language-learning process for deaf and hard of hearing students. In this episode, Amy talks about her path into the profession and the history of cueing: how it came to be, how it works, and what problems it aims to solve. We get into ASL-Cued American English bilingualism, the politics around cueing in signing and speaking-only spaces, and what Amy tells parents who are weighing their options in a world of cochlear implants, automatic captioning, AI, and other technologies. It was so fun to speak with her! The video podcast is captioned, and I’m including the transcript below. Learn more about the book Amy co-edited, Our Chosen Path: The Transformative Impact of Cued Language, which is available on Kindle for $9.99. Also consider attending the National Cued Speech Association’s 60th anniversary celebration July 17-19 at the Silver Spring, MD Civic Center. Register before June 22. Thanks for reading and listening to Needs Editing! This post is public—feel free to share it. Description: On the left of the split screen is Amy Ruberl, a white-presenting woman with shoulder-length dark gray hair, black rimmed glasses, and a black button up shirt. She is sitting in a blue office. On the right is Sarah Katz, a white woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a black sweater. She is sitting in her own white office. To the left is a dark green curtained window. - Hi, so I’m Sarah Katz, the host of “Needs Editing,” a podcast about a deaf experience from my perspective as a deaf native cuer who uses Cued Speech to communicate. Cued Speech is a visual communication system based on the phonemes of spoken languages. And I use Cued American English, which is the form of Cued Speech people in the United States use to communicate. My guest is Amy Ruberl, who is hearing. And I’m going to give her bio in a second. I invited Amy because she’s an expert on the history and the terminology around cueing. I wanted to talk to her about the what, why, and how of Cued Speech and other topics. There’s a book that just came out called “Our Chosen Path: The Transformative Impact of Cued Language,” which you should check out. I’ll include a link in the description. I’m sorry. My cueing is awful, but I’m trying my best. - You’re doing great. - Thank you. So I’ll include a link in this description. And Amy contributed a few chapters to the book about some of the topics we’re discussing today in further depth, so. - Yeah, and I was an editor. I was one of the five editors. - Okay. - Yeah. - You were one of the editors. And so Amy has been involved with cued language. This is her bio. She’s been involved with cued language at both regional and national levels since 1987. She earned a Master’s in Education of the Deaf from Smith College and a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Amy is chair of the National Cued Speech Association’s Instructor Certification Committee. Previously, she served the NCSA as executive director, director of programs, initiating workshops and camps across the United States, and regional director for the capital area, which includes Maryland, DC, Virginia, and West Virginia. Amy was the director and assistant director of Cue Camp Friendship in Maryland for many years, where I spent many summers. - See, that’s where I met you, I think, you and your family. - Yeah, and she was the first president of the Maryland Cued Speech Association. Amy worked as communications specialist and teacher for Montgomery County Public Schools for students who were deaf and hard of hearing, working with signing, cueing, and oral students for 10 years. Amy is also the owner of Cuers, LLC, where she creates materials for learning how to cue. So, Amy, I wanted to start by talking about you. So you earned a degree in teaching deaf people, and you’ve served many roles in the NCSA. How did you come to this work? And why is this all so important to you? - In college, I took a ASL class, and I loved it, and it was great, it was really an interesting time. And then I was getting ready to graduate. I was like I wasn’t ready to be an adult yet. So I thought, “Grad school, I can do that,” right? And for deaf ed, I have an aunt and an uncle who are oral deaf adults, and like they gave me the interest in looking into deaf ed. So I went to an oral program at Clarke School for the Deaf at Smith College, and I loved my time there. Those teachers are so amazing, but I was really frustrated, because the kids there, it was before implants, and the technology just wasn’t there for getting them to listen well enough to learn language easily that way. So I was feeling very frustrated by the end of my time there. When I applied for a job in MCPS, Sheila, Sheila Doctors, said, “Would you be interested in learning how to cue?” I said, “Sure.” Okay, I think I had a sentence about that in my classes. “I’m game if it will give me a job, sure.” And so I learned to cue, and then didn’t cue at all for a few years. And then one student started to go to his homeschool. He was a cuer, and they didn’t have any itinerant teachers who knew how to cue. And Sheila said, “Amy, you took the class. You did well. Wanna go?” I was like, “Sure. Okay.” So my poor first student, I was so slow. I was like, “Hi, my name is, is...” It was painful, but I discovered that this student was amazing. And then I started working with all these other high school cuers. It was like these kids are amazing. They don’t really need language help. They need, like, navigating-the-world help. Like how do you get a CLT for a doctor’s appointment, or a play, or whatever? How do you get yourself up in the morning, like, without your mom coming in time to wake up, right? - Right. - So, but they didn’t need that intensive work. My oral and signing kids did to like backfill language. They didn’t have holes in their education. I fell in love with it. And just, like that was the beginning of the end for me. I just kept doing cueing things. Yeah. - So for people who don’t know, who is Sheila Doctors? - Oh, I’m sorry. She was the director of the DHOH program in MCPS. - Yeah, I remember her fondly. - Yeah. - Great. So you worked with cueing, signing, and oral kids. So you noted that they had like some backfilling of language that was necessary. Were there other particular challenges you noticed in comparison with the cue kids? - I don’t know. I think the signing kids kept to themselves. Like they had a more difficult time making friends with the hearing kids in the classes, because their lip-reading or speech-reading skills just weren’t as strong, because they didn’t have as strong of English to guess what the kids were saying. - Yeah. - Right? And the oral kids were just, they kind of thought they got it all, but didn’t know what they were missing. I don’t know. - Yeah. - I mean, they were all amazing, and I loved all my kids that I taught, but I think I saw more weaknesses in the oral and deaf kids, in the signing kids, than I did in my cueing kids. - And the signing kids were in, I mean, all of these kids were in hearing mainstream settings, I imagine? - Yeah, well, the signing kids were often in a self-contained classes in a mainstream school, but most of their classes were with other signing kids. I was called in to do speech and listening drills with them, which they didn’t particularly care for. Yeah, I was one of those people, you know, “Here, feel my face. Do you feel it vibrating? You can say “v” too.” You know, I was like, “Yeah, lady. This isn’t so much fun.” I mean, I did that with cueing kids too, like, to help with pronunciation when an oral report was coming up. Like, “Well, let’s talk about your speech patterns and how you can make yourself accessible to the class,” because, you know, cueing doesn’t really help with speech, and also language, access, and pronunciation, but not how to say the sounds and make them. And a lot goes on behind the scenes to make speech work, you know? - Yeah, yeah. And so much happens like behind your, you know, your lips. - Yeah, like, yeah, it’s back there, where you can’t really see what’s going on, like “is the voice on or off?” If you can’t hear it, you don’t know. - Right. - I don’t know, like- - I’ve read that only 30 to 40% of information in spoken English is visible on the lips. - Not even that. I mean, in context. You might get that consistently if you know the topic. I mean, you must know this, you get irritated when people assume that you know what they say, because your speech is great. If people didn’t know you were deaf, they’d be like, “I don’t recognize your accent.” - Right. - Right? It’s not that you’re deaf. And so they assume you can understand them, and I know. I’ve been with you and forgotten to cue myself, because it’s easy to forget with you. And I’ve been like, “Oh,” kicking myself. You are one of the people who I’m like, “I need to cue all the time. It doesn’t matter. If the cuers are around, I need to cue, because they need it. It makes life easier for all of us if I’m cueing, even if my cueing is sloppy and off, like-” - Yeah, but yeah, I mean, my hearing has declined over the years, but my speech, people say, sounds really good. But I have severe to profound hearing loss in my left ear now, moderate to profound on my right. So you can never tell based on someone’s speech how much hearing they have. - And as I get older, and my hearing is going, I have a high-frequency hearing loss that I left alone for a long time. And then I noticed, “Oh, shoot, I’m not getting it in crowds.” More than four people in a room talking, “Ooh, I need something.” And so I finally
