Sociocultural Dimensions of Deaf Education: Belief Systems & Communicative Interaction

Summer 1985 SOCIOCULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF DEAF EDUCATION: BELIEF SYSTEMS & COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTION Carol Erting There has been a recent trend in educational research toward the use of ethnographic methods. Often ethnographic studies of classrooms are microanalytic, detailed analyses of recorded video and audio data. While yielding insights into interactional processes that might not have been obtained through other research strategies, these studies can be most useful when the microanalysis is supported by macroanalysis. By approaching research questions from a variety of perspectives on both the micro- and the macro- levels, researchers may achieve an understanding of social life that would not have been possible had the questions been pursued from only one perspective and data examined at only one level of analysis. The following account of research conducted at a school for deaf children illustrates the fruitfulness of this broader approach (Erting 1982). The study combines microanalysis of the communicative behaviors of individuals with the sociocultural analysis of groups within one institutional setting. Analysis revealed that three domains need to be taken into account in any attempt to explain everyday behavior in the school. These domains are: (1) the sociocultural context, (2) the individual, and (3) the interactional spheres of participation. Although explaining behavior is difficult, it is possible to begin to understand everyday social life within the school by examining variables from these three domains and the complex ways in which these variables interact. In the first section which follows, the structural features of the school environment are described, as are two of the cultural systems that operate within the school -- those of the hearing educators and of the deaf parents. Changing the focus from the group to the individual, the second section describes some of the social actors (one hearing teacher and three deaf children) whose communicative behaviors were examined during the interactional analysis described in the third section. The final discussion integrates the macroanalysis and the microanalysis in an attempt to understand certain sociocultural aspects of deaf t 1985 Linstok Press. See inside cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 47 Erting : 112 education and the specific communicative behaviors that both derive from the system and contribute to its maintenance. The sociocultural context: Schools for deaf children schools for deaf children. are typically complex sociolinguistic environments . At the Jackson Elementary School for Deaf Children (not its real name), where the present study was undertaken, there were adult native speakers of English, adult native signers of American Sign Language (ASL), and young deaf children, acquiring both ASL and some variety of manually encoded English (MCE). The adults, regardless of their hearing status and native language, all used signed communication some if not most of the time. This visual-manual communication included ASL, fluent English signing (often labeled Pidgin Sign English), MCE without accompanying voice, and Simultaneous Communication (hereafter, sim-com; i.e. some variety of MCE accompanied by spoken English). In addition to being a complex sociolinguistic environment, however, the school is an equally complex sociocultural environment. Participants in this setting include deaf children with hearing parents, deaf children with deaf parents, hearing parents and deaf parents, hearing teachers and deaf teachers, and hearing administrators and deaf administrators. These different categories of participants are structurally interrelated and each brings characteristic views of deafness, parenting, language, and education to this cultural scene. In the school, as in most social environments, the distribution of power is a critical variable. For the most part, power to make educational decisions resides with adults rather than children, teachers rather than parents, and hearing people rather than deaf people. According to a recent study, only 13.6% of teachers of deaf children in the United States are hearing impaired themselves (Corbett & Jensema 1981). Thus, educational programs for deaf children are shaped and implemented by hearing educators; moreover, 91% of these children have two hearing parents (Rawlings 1977). As a result, deaf children probably learn very early what all children learn -- that adults have control and children do not; but in addition they see an even more important structural relationship among people who are deaf (themselves and few others) and people who are hearing (most of the adults they encounter). They learn, in SLS 47 Summer 1985 Erting...