Welcome

THE NOTETAKER

Introduction

          In the quiet dark rooms of my memory bank, sun rays shift through the dust onto a small shelf where paperback children’s books sit cross-legged with their backs pressed against the walls. Without a cover, and with tape holding together its pages, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (2) became my first sketchbook. Aside from the associations a bald two-year-old would make with Harold, I connected with his journey of discovery. Following a crayon like a magic compass gave me an artistic license - just like that. Harold never passed go or collected 200 dollars. He simply let his arrow of exploration and moon of curiosity lead the way. Creation became matter-of-fact, and fiction an extending purple landscape of possibilities and adventure. This experience opened up an interactive world of pictures for me. Without reserve, I added my own additions to Johnson's story on top of Harold with my own crayon.

Visual Relationship with Education

Gradually, I watched the relationship between art and education become estranged. When school started pushing reading and writing, art became sidelined. Art practices were polarized to specific rooms and times. Like training wheels to a bicycle, I was weaned off visual language into an educational world of words.

With visual media blossoming and continuously flashing outside of the classroom, I remember becoming increasingly frustrated and bored with the lack of visual information used in school. Teachers were unhappy about my doodling during class, but I had a hard time focusing without being visually involved. Even making arbitrary patterned marks on my papers helped to keep me active if I felt lost. Although it was often discouraged, I struggled to maintain and integrate my dialogue with visual language throughout my primary and secondary education.

    Systemized Notetaking Support

           The history of organized notetaking support began with NTID in the late 1960’s. A basic structure developed, which involved hiring the services of a hearing student or professional to record and supplement the deaf student’s experience with written documentation of the verbal and projected information.

          Over the past 40 years, this process has grown into an extensive enterprise, supporting mainstreamed deaf and hard of hearing students as well as a variety other alternative learning needs in schools beyond our campus and across the world. It has become a recognized standard of support in K-12, college and even professional settings. Last year, RIT alone provided more than 65,000 hours of notetaking services for students. 

Becoming a Notetaker

           I was hired as a notetaker during the first year of my undergraduate program in 2007; a position I had been completely unaware of beforehand. With such a diverse academic population across the campus, I was fascinated by the ways I was able to cross colleges and disciplines as a notetaker, and how important personal documentation was in the educational process. As an illustration student, I was accustomed to taking visual notes for myself, and got great feedback from students when I began to add visual and spacial organization into their supported notes. 

           Dr. Larry Quinsland had heard about what I was doing and asked if I would visit his class to see if my graphic notes would be appealing to his science class, which included some students with secondary disabilities. After sitting in and taking notes, the enthusiasm from the group warranted further conversations with Dr. Quinsland. We proposed a study for the following quarter; I was to work specifically with one of the students and develop a variety of methods to investigate enhancing notetaking support with visual language.  That project continued for over 2 years, and resulted in presentations of our research at PEN-International's Instructional Technology and Education of the Deaf Symposium in 2010 and the 2011 National Conference for the Convention of American Instructors for the Deaf (CAID).