ASL-English Interpreting standout Dr. Robyn Dean ’90 returns to Maryville College for program’s celebration
March 10, 2025
The VHS tape that sold Dr. Robyn Dean ’90 on her alma mater is likely long gone, but the impression it made is something she still remembers fondly.
On March 21, Dean will return to Maryville College to discuss the life and career that spun off of her decision to attend MC, as well as take part in an alumni panel featuring fellow Scots who also majored in American Sign Language-English Interpreting.
Throughout the 2024-25 academic year, the College is celebrating the program of study’s 50th anniversary, and with a career that’s culminated in her current role as an associate professor in the Department of ASL and Interpreting Education and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology, Dean is one of its standouts.
As a high school senior, however, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. At a Thanksgiving visit with family, however, her cousin — Kathy Long Alwood ’83 — put a well-worn VHS tape into the VCR, and Dean immediately found herself drawn to the picturesque, bucolic campus. Alwood was working in the MC Admissions office at the time, and while Dean wasn’t particularly convinced that interpreting was her future career path, she had become conversant in ASL through her involvement in a Deaf theater program, she said.
“My cousin Kathy told me, ‘We have an interpreting program,’ and while it was one of the only four-year programs in the country at the time, none of this really sort of registered with me as important or relevant because honestly, I didn’t really want to be an interpreter,” Dean said. “From my limited experience with interpreters at the time, I knew that they were strictly present in situations to aid in communication, and as such basically had to keep their thoughts and opinions to themselves. I was pretty sure that was not something I would be very good at! But still, here was this interesting inroad into Maryville, and I loved the promotional video that was produced around that time, about 1985.
“In any case, I ended up applying, then getting a scholarship, and when I went up for the scholarship interview, I just fell in love with the campus. We were living in Florida at the time, and I was just happy to get out and back to seasons. Florida is no place for a redhead to live!”
A lifelong love affair
Once in the program, Dean fell in love with interpreting, and the courses opened her eyes to the ways it worked different parts of the brain.
“This idea that you can process information by listening to one language and simultaneously producing a second language, like that whole cognitive process was just fascinating to me,” she said. “In the end, I certainly did pursue interpreting, and once I graduated went straight into practice as an interpreter at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology.”
Roughly a decade into her career, however, she began to explore ethical questions in the field with her colleagues, and in the mid-1990s, while still working full-time as an interpreter, she started conducting research and publishing scholarly works. At this point in her academic career, she estimated, she’s written more than 30 publications, including a co-authored textbook that details a theoretical framework to better prepare interpreters to work in service and community service settings.
“That’s how my interpreting work took me down the trajectory of an academic career — I asked questions about my practice,” she said. “But it’s ironic, as I mentioned, in that I didn’t think I could keep my opinions to myself as an interpreter. In the end, I found a way to do both! I worked as an interpreter but through my research found ways to express those opinions about the work!”
Many of those publications, she added, involve improving interpreter preparedness, interpreting ethics and professional development activities that sustain interpreter growth and development throughout their careers. And that, she pointed out, grew out of the faculty members under whom she studied at Maryville College. She arrived as the first director of the program, Irma Young, was retiring, but she was able to take one class under her. Young, she said — along with adjuncts Marie Griffin and Nancy Leisering Hayes ’81 —helped her see “the importance of bringing the experience of interpreting practice and the real world into the classroom.”
“And the other thing that I think is certainly important goes back to the liberal arts education philosophy — the importance of thinking and working in interdisciplinary ways,” she said. “A lot of my academic and published work looks into those things outside of the interpreting field and incorporates them, which I think has enhanced my work so very effectively.”
While at MC, Dean and many other interpreting majors were able to put their education to work in the field by interpreting for their instructor, Ruth Sandefur-Yates, a Deaf faculty member who taught ASL. As an interpreting instructor, Sandefur-Yates used regular campus events to give students real-world interpreting experience. By Dean’s senior year, she was involved in classroom interpreting, and taking what she learned in the classroom and putting it to work not just in the field, but for her peers, was rewarding beyond measure, she says.
“I appreciated the ability to do the work as an interpreter in these carefully supervised ways, and while I still was a student, I was hired to work at the Knoxville Area Communication Center for the Deaf,” she says. “For several semesters, I worked there and learned so much just by being surrounded by interpreters and Deaf people. That world of practical experience really did allow me to sort of hit the ground running when it came time to graduate and move on.”
March 21 event open to the public
The March 21 celebration of American Sign Language-English Interpreting graduates begins at 5:30 p.m. with a check-in and social in the lobby outside the Harold and Jean Lambert Recital Hall of the Clayton Center for the Arts, on the MC campus. An alumni panel discussion in spoken English with ASL interpretation beginning at 6 p.m. will feature Dean alongside Heather White ’95, Lydia Edrington Harmon ’04, Kristi Pearson ’10 and Emilia Klinzing ’24, all in the Lambert Recital Hall. At 7:30 p.m. in the Lambert, Dean will give an individual presentation in ASL about her career as a lifelong ASL advocate.
The evening is free and open to the public, but reservations are required due to space limitations. To register, visit https://www.maryvillecollege.edu/academics/divisions/behavioral-sciences/lecture-reservation/. For more information, call Associate Professor of American Sign Language-English Interpreting Will White at 865-981-8148.