Kathleen “Kat” Brockway Inducted into the Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame

The Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame was established by the National Disability Mentoring Coalition (NDMC) to honor those individuals who are making a significant difference in the lives of youth and adults with disabilities through mentoring and to raise awareness about the importance of mentoring for individuals with disabilities.

We are proud to induct Kathleen Brockway  into the Susan Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame.

Kathleen Brockway, better known as Kat, is the National Association of the Deaf’s (NAD) Deaf Culture & History Section Chair since 2014, as well as an author of Baltimore’s Deaf Heritage and  Detroit’s Deaf Heritage, just released on June 20, 2016.

Born in Washington, D.C, Brockway was adopted by a retired U.S Army Colonel and his wife. At that point, Brockway had already become profoundly deaf because of Rubella. Her adoptive parents did not know American Sign Language (ASL), but they learned quickly at Gallaudet University and exposed her to sign language at home. After moving around a lot because of her father’s job, she graduated from Model Secondary School for the Deaf and continued on to Gallaudet University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Business Management at University of Phoenix online and pursued her passions in writing. In addition, she has been an activist for a long time as she could remember since High School in 1989.

Currently, Brockway is also the NAD’s Deaf Culture & History Section Chair where she is trying to preserve Deaf history and ASL. One of her main projects is collaborating on preserving Deaf schools’ history with their teachers and students. Another one of her main projects is called the Deaf Cultural Digital Library online. The purpose of the library online is to collect as many resources including ASL resources as possible. This resource is helpful for learning about Deaf history and the culture, but it is also for hearing parents. Brockway recently stated that the Digital Library is, “also to digitize the resources to get through the search engines so hearing parents of the deaf children can find resources how to interact, communicate, and encourage social skills with their deaf children.”
Language acquisition is a very important issue to Brockway. She is very grateful to her parents that they learned ASL and gave her the proper language exposure that she needed before she was a toddler. She hopes that all deaf children can get proper language exposure and break down the stereotypes of deaf people in the hearing world.

Brockway’s passion for history and Deaf culture will help preserve the culture we love so much.

To find out more about her books, please visit Arcadia Publishing (www.arcadiapublishing.com) , her activism can be found through www.nad.org at http://nad.org/deaf_culture_history-section and www.katbrockway.com.

Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame: Information and Inductees

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