Office: SLHS C233
Karen Boyd teaches three levels of undergraduate courses in American Sign Language including Deaf culture as a world language, and her interests are grammatical properties, sentence structures, mouth morphemes, and cultures. She also teaches graduate courses at University of Northern Colorado in national standards in teaching American Sign Language using American Council on the Teaching of World Languages (ACTFL) model, and teaching approaches and methods.
Karen received her master’s degree in bilingual education with the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her main areas of research are ASL linguistics and bilingualism, and her M.A. thesis examined second-language learner perceptions of spatial tracing constructions in ASL with Dr. Karen Emmorey of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University.
Karen was the president of American Sign Language Teachers Association of Colorado, and she served on the ASL Task Force with the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, Colorado Department of Education, and the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind. Karen appeared in 9News, a local television program, for her extraordinary work in teaching ASL and Deaf culture. She has worked as a volunteer for sports organizations and served as Logistics Officer for the USA Deaf Team participating in Deaflympics. At CU Boulder, she was a committee member of the Chancellor's Committee of Women, and received a Women Who Make a Difference recognition award in advocating women at CU Boulder, and had taught ASL to Native American students with the Upward Bound program.
Karen was born deaf to deaf parents and has deaf siblings. American Sign Language is her heritage language and she is a member of Deaf culture. Karen hikes and travels, namely a few, Russia, Peru, Baltic Sea to meet Deaf people to learn their sign languages and cultures.