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SLS 48 Fall 1985 THE SEARCH FOR THE EMPTY CUP CONTINUES Kim Corwin Sherman Wilcox Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to Inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself: "It is overfull. No more will go in." "Like this cup," Nan-in said; "You are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you about Zen unless you first empty your cup?" -- Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps The problem. Anyone who has ever worked in the field of deafness will immediately understand the relevance of the story of the empty cup. We regularly meet people who are full of their own opinions and speculations about deafness. Although we tend to think that misconceptions about deafness are found only among lay people, this is not always the case. Like Nan-in's visitor, these opinion filled people are sometimes university professors. The popular image of deafness in America can be found in all levels of society, including the American university. What is this popular image? Most often it is expressed by a hearing ethnocentrism that defines deafness as pathology, that the language of deaf people is not really a language, and that it is nonsense to think that Deaf people have a culture. In opposition to 1985 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 Corwin & Wilcox : 250 this popular conception of deafness, researchers have claimed that the Deaf community does have a language and a culture of its own (Stokoe 1960, 1980; Klima & Bellugi 1979). This claim has gathered enough momentum, based on solid evidence presented by linguists, anthropologists, and others, so that many in these professions rarely question it. Yet this position is not widely accepted, even in the scholarly community of the American University. Recent years have witnessed a widespread increase in sign language and interpreter training programs in universities across the United States. Students and professors in these programs have begun to petition to have American Sign Language (ASL) accepted for foreign or second language credit. Frequently, however, these proposals are met with resistance from academic faculty. We confronted this problem recently when we began a project to have ASL accepted as meeting the foreign language requirement for undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico. In 1983 our university established a four year Bachelor of Science degree program in Sign Language Interpreting. Students in the program are required to meet a general undergraduate requirement of at least fourth-semester mastery of a foreign language. We felt that since the university was now teaching ASL it was appropriate for these classes to meet the foreign language requirement. The Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was approached on this matter but was not actively receptive to our idea. He did, however, suggest that we submit a proposal to the faculty of the college for their consideration and approval. Our first step was to survey other colleges and Fall 1985 SLS 48 Corwin & Wilcox : 251 universities across the United States to determine if there was any precedent for our proposal. During the Fall semester of 1983 we mailed survey questionnaires to more than one hundred colleges and universities to ascertain their policy on the matter of accepting ASL as a foreign language. This article is based on responses to this survey. While we found several colleges and universities receptive to the idea that ASL could be used to meet foreign language requirements and several where this policy was already in effect, we also found a surprisingly strong resistance to such a suggestion. The responses that we received from several of these institutions explaining why our proposal was nonsense are, we believe, indicative of an underlying American myth about deafness. ASL as a foreign language. When we began our project, we expected that many respondents in the institutions would balk at the idea that ASL is a language. This was not the case. Most replies do seem to...

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