Ethnography & Education of Deaf Children

Summer 1985 ETHNOGRAPHY & EDUCATION OF DEAF CHILDREN Madeline M. Maxwell Hearing novelists have frequently used deaf characters to personify isolation and the inability to communicate. Educational traditions generally have ratified this view by emphasis on overcoming the pathology of deafness that could lead to such isolation and by "integrating" deaf persons into "the hearing world" by teaching them to use residual hearing and to learn to speak. The deaf have been studied from the perspective of their hearing abilities, their speaking abilities, their speechreading abilities, their reading and writing abilities, their educational achievement, their psycho-social development, their marriage patterns, and their employment characteristics. Usually such studies detail the implications of the pathology of deafness for normal development. What has not been studied is the normal interaction of deaf people among themselves. On finding oneself among a group of deaf children or adults, however, many a hearing person has thought not about their isolation but about his or her own inability to communicate with them. Once researchers looked, they saw that there is Deaf culture and Deaf language, and even the conviction that "Deaf is beautiful." (Capitalizing the word deaf connotes a cultural identity and reserves the lower case "deaf" as a descriptor for audiological status. One may be deaf, that is, but not Deaf, and one may be Deaf without being profoundly deaf. Investigation into American Sign Language (ASL) has surprised much of the world by describing a language that is as complex and able as any sound-based linguistic system. The description of ASL has demonstrated that not everything about deafness can be learned through comparisons with "normality." ASL is not derivative of, nor a less competent version of, English or other hearing behavior. In fact, the investigation of ASL and of language acquisition in Deaf families has forced us to awareness of a new instance of normality. Deaf children with Deaf parents who sign learn language normally. Investigation of the Deaf community, especially by researchers who are also lifelong participants in the community, has led us 0 1985 Linstok Press. See inside cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 47 Intro. : 98 farther and farther from the image of the deaf person as pathological. The educational world does not know what to make of this new information. The fact is that most deaf children are not born into the Deaf world but have hearing parents. Most teachers of deaf children are hearing people. Only a few of the professionals in the field of education of the deaf are deaf themselves, and these are most likely to be seen outside the classroom or working with older children in boarding schools (Corbett & Jensema 1981). Examination of requirements for teacher certification administered by the Council on Education of the Deaf, which are mirrored at least partially by most state boards of education, and a survey of research published in the field leave no doubt that in educational circles speech and hearing far outweigh other aspects of deaf children's development. Most educators of the deaf share the belief that the primary goal of the education of deaf children is to prepare them to join the "hearing world." Most controversy, and there is a great deal of it, is about how to achieve this goal. Little of this controversy touches the possible place of the language, customs, and values of the Deaf community in the education of deaf children. What has always embroiled the educational community in controversy is the role and use of signs; yet usually there is an assumption that signs, if used, are not to substitute for but to enable the development of spoken English. Educators argue and parents fret over whether the deaf child is best brought into the hearing world through aural (hearing-emphasis) methods of instruction, through oral (visual speech-emphasis) methods, or through total communication (a possibly balanced combination of aural, visual, speech, and visual sign) methods. Oddly enough, in a field so dominated by discussion of methods of teaching communication, there has been very little study of communication as it proceeds either inside or outside the classroom in schools where deaf children are being "educated." All observers of deaf children have been struck by the...