From an early age, Michael E. Skyer learned about the impact of ethics and aesthetics in education. His lived experiences with disability and deafness profoundly affect his outlook on the present and future of deaf education and disability education. Skyer was raised bilingually in ASL and English by deaf parents. His early 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 is a working artist in a variety of media—and recently was contracted to design a book cover for a volume on multilingual and multimodal deaf education. 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 multiple educational sites, including community, public, residential, 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 Education, specializing in Teaching, Curriculum, and Change. His dissertation focused on deaf higher education faculty who are deaf and use visuality and multimodality in within their pedagogies and curricula. This study documented and analyzed over 500 modes of language and communication used in deaf higher education pedagogies.

He joined the faculty at University of Tennessee in 2022 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education. Since that time, he has worked to imbue the department with a forward-thinking research agenda that balances pragmatism and critical insights. Prior to that, he worked at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology (NTID/RIT) for 11 years, dividing his time between teaching academic writing to undergraduates and teaching graduate students about theoretical and applied deaf pedagogies.

Dr. Skyer’s current research examines axiology, the domain of philosophy where aesthetics and ethics converge. Subtopics include dialectic studies of deaf ways of knowing, being, and valuing, in relation to:

• knowledge and curriculum
• power and self-determination
• ecology and Indigenous Deaf people
• language and writing
• disability and curriculum
• gender and queerness
• teaching and learning
• educational jurisprudence and biomedicine, and
• architecture and physical design

Research Interests:
• DESIGNING theory and methods for deaf critical pedagogy and curriculum studies in deaf education
o Including praxis foci on deaf-positive, anti-ableist, anti-audist axiologies in deaf studies, deaf education, and sign language studies
• OPERATIONALIZING qualitative methodologies in deaf education and deaf studies
o Including methodological foci on deaf people with additional marginalized subject positions: Indigenous Deaf scientists, deaf and queer teachers, Black deaf poets
o Including pioneering research theories: deaf-positive ideology, deaf pedagogic multimodal transduction, the biosocial paradigm, embodied learning, and educational interactions
• CONDUCTING scholarly research intersecting knowledge/power and aesthetics in deaf higher education
o Including theoretical foci on self-determination and sociocultural forces
o Including in the following professional licensure-granting units: deaf education teacher preparation, ASL education, audiology education, and sign language interpretation

Full CV – https://utk.academia.edu/MichaelSkyerPhD/CurriculumVitae

ORCiD – ID: 0000-0002-8057-7146 – http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8057-7146

National Science Foundation ID 000827595 –https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/michaelskyer@national_science_foundation/cv/361090/#downloadDialog

Google Scholar – https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=h8PM-pUAAAAJ&hl=en

Academia.edu – https://www.utk.academia.edu/MichaelSkyer

ResearchGate.net – https://www.researchgate.net/Michael_Skyer