Literacy and Deaf People: Cultural and Contextual Perspectives

The Modern Deaf Self: Indigenous Practices and Educational Imperatives

pearance parallels the documented deaf world phenomenon of deaf children often growing up not knowing what will become of them as adults or even, since they rarely see deaf adults, assuming that they will die or be killed before they become adults. We need many more studies of literacy learning by deaf people in different cultures, communities, and contexts. Almost ten years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Yerker Andersson (then the chair of Gallaudet’s new Deaf Studies Department), and he claimed too that he believed we needed more ethnographically oriented studies of various sites, scenes, and locations in the overall global deaf world. We need more culturally and contextually based research into questions like these: • What is it like for a single deaf child coming to literacy in a mainstreamed school on the plains of Nebraska? • How do literacy-learning practices for deaf people in X country affect deaf people in Y country? • How do deaf college students learn the kind of “critical literacy” that is so often required in college-level reading and writing classes? • What literacy learning takes place for a deaf adult who finds him or herself suddenly thrust into an e-mail-rich work environment (having not grown up with e-mail or other computer-based forms of interaction and written communication)? • How could an effective adult literacy-learning program be built for deaf adults? What are the limitations and advantages for such a program? • What literacy-learning challenges do children with cochlear implants now face? • How do senior citizens with serious progressive hearing loss negotiate new or different literacy skills with their changing social interactions? • How is the thumb-writing of pagers changing the deaf visual field (and thus, changing their own dominant literacies)? • How do people—deaf, hard of hearing, hearing, young, or old— read and make meaning with captioning? • How is captioning (closed, open, real-time) changing the profession of interpreting—and vice versa? 22 Brenda Jo Brueggemann • How were the “little papers” and deaf newspapers in America (before television) read and how did they impact the lives of the specific American deaf communities they circulated in? • How do deaf people “read” the Internet? • How is the popularity of ASL in high schools and colleges across the United States impacting the study of English and other language learning? Here, I have only begun to list some of the contextual and cultural questions that interest me for further exploring how literacy engages deaf people and how, too, deaf people engage literacy. Perhaps with less focus on what goes wrong between deaf people and literacy, and also with a little less concern over finding just the one right or best way to educate deaf children, we could also then begin to attend more to these less-conventional “alternative perspectives” (as Claire Ramsey has called for in one of the opening epigraphs)—aiming instead for perspectives that explore the endless and exciting potential “happenings” between literacy and deaf people in contextual and cultural frames. LITERATURE CITED Ahlgren, I., and K. Hyltenstam, eds. 1994. Bilingualism in deaf education . Hamburg: Signum Verlag. Batson, L. G. 1989. Language without sound: The orality of literacy of the deaf and ASL. The Writing Instructor 8 (2): 68–75. Bednar, L. 1989. Letter to the readers: Literacy and the deaf. The Writing Instructor 8 (2): 53–56. Belenky, M. F. et al. 1986. Women’s ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: Basic Books. Bolander, A., and A. N. Renning. 2000. I was number 87: A deaf woman’s ordeal of misdiagnosis, institutionalization, and abuse. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. Brueggemann, B. J. 1999. Lend me your ear: Rhetorical constructions of deafness. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. ———. 2001. Deafness, literacy, rhetoric: Legacies of language and communication . In Embodied rhetorics: disability in language and culture, ed. J. C. Wilson and C. Leweicki-Wilson, 115–35. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Introduction: Reframing Deaf People’s Literacy 23 Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Burke, K. 1966. Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cixous, H. 2000. The laugh of the medusa. In French feminism reader, ed. K. Oliver, 257–76. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. De Cartagena, T. 1998. The writings of Teresa de Cartagena. Translated by D. Seidenspinner-Núñez. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Derrida, J. 2001. Signature...