The Rising of Lotus Flowers: Self-Education by Deaf Children in Thai Boarding Schools

Preface

Preface In May 2004, the Southeast Asian nations endorsed a framework for improving the quality of education through “child-friendly learning environments.” The “Bangkok Declaration” declared, “We, Ministers and High Officials of Education from the 10 countries of Southeast Asia recognize . . . our concern for fulfilling the right of all children to obtain a basic education of good quality . . . based on a framework of ‘childfriendly schools’ and ‘child-friendly learning environments.’ ”1 By building on the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child and “Education for All” campaign, the perspectives of children are finally being given due weight. This focus is fortuitous for deaf children because their education has long been misaligned with their needs. The fundamental needs of the deaf child, for example, early and continuous immersion to an accessible language, often have been overlooked during the design of school programs. For guidance in creating supportive learning environments for deaf children , we can look at three settings in which these children are able to be full participants. These three settings have a critical mass of people who use the sense of vision to communicate and interact without restriction: (a) families in which the parents and the child are deaf and use a sign language, (b) gatherings of the signing deaf community, and (c) groups of deaf children in special schools (both day and residential). Deaf parents help their children acquire sign language normally from birth, and these parents give us a wealth of lessons about socializing a child through the visual channel. Because most deaf children are raised in hearing-speaking families, they are at high risk of going through life lacking one of the essential human tools—language. The fact that deaf children who enter residential schools learn to use signs fluently within a few years is a testimony to the resilience of the human mind and to the necessity of immersion in a visual, language-rich setting. Moreover, the interactions of deaf parents and older deaf children demonstrate effective techniques for using a sign language educationally. Parents and educators can draw valuable lessons from these types of vision-centric settings. This book is a study of the after-hours activities and social organization created by a large group of deaf children within a residential school. The location is rural Thailand. Saying that poor, deaf children in an institution xi have something to offer about how others can better teach them may be taken as odd. Yet the condition of deafness does not necessarily imply learning limitations. These limitations are imposed on the child by social conditions and the behavior of caregivers. Few educators have faced the fact that “deafness is a visual experience” (C. Erting 1982) and have designed educational programs around this fact. But deaf students have not stood still, waiting for the improvement of classroom practices or for teachers to learn how to communicate with them. The general view held by deaf people in our study is that most of what they know, they have learned from one another. A strong view, indeed, but this view is shared by many deaf people who still live as if in a “glass room”— able to see and be seen but lacking close rapport with others. A wide communication gap, and resulting psychological distance, separates deaf people from hearing-speaking people in most nations. We see this failure of accommodation as a practice of exclusion that makes it more necessary for deaf people to draw on the resources of their own internal group. The residential school is a setting in which they can use these resources, and our purpose is to document the process and outcomes. We observed, interviewed, and videotaped the children using the indigenous sign language freely during play and daily routines. We described how they helped one another learn their first language, the norms of the school and society, and worldly knowledge. In a purposeful way, they formed groups to carry out a range of activities that are suffused with language use of all kinds—from storytelling to news interpreting to satire. In regulating who can join an activity, they made judgments about language and intellectual levels of each member of the student body (which we refer to as “the social hierarchy of the mind”). This hierarchy provided a pathway of gradually diversified learning activities using language that is suitable for the level and interest of the participants. For example, new pupils were addressed in simple vocabulary that centered on daily routines such...