From an early age, Michael E. Skyer learned to value diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. His lived experiences with disability and deafness profoundly affect his outlook on the present and future of deaf education. Skyer was raised bilingually in ASL and English by deaf parents. His education included working-class and immigrant community schools with a radical mix of exceptional, disabled, and nondisabled students. Skyer holds pre-Doctoral degrees in deaf education and fine arts. Skyer lives with a rare neurological disorder (Neurofibromatosis 2 Related-Schwannomatosis; NF2-SWN), for which over the past decade, he’s endured experimental chemotherapies.

Skyer has taught across sites of community, public, special, and higher education. He has educated people from ages 4 to 99, from pre-school to graduate school. Skyer attained his doctorate in 2021 in the field of Education, with a focus on Teaching, Curriculum, and Change. His dissertation focused on deaf higher education, and the role of faculty who are deaf and use visuality and multimodality as pedagogy and curriculum.

He joined the faculty at University of Tennessee in 2022 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education. Prior that, he worked at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology (NTID/RIT) for 11 years, equally dividing his time between teaching academic writing and teaching future deaf educators about theoretical and applied deaf pedagogy.

His current research examines axiology, the domain of philosophy where aesthetics and ethics converge. Subtopics include dialectic studies of deafness in relation to:

power and self-determination
ecology and indigeneity
language and writing
disability and curriculum
deafness and queerness
teaching and learning
educational jurisprudence and biomedicine, and
architecture and text design.

His CV can be found here: https://utk.academia.edu/MichaelSkyerPhD/CurriculumVitae