Deaf Education in America: Voices of Children from Inclusion Settings

Preface

ix As schools are increasingly moving toward integrating deaf and hard of hearing children, it is important for educators, parents, and policymakers to recognize the complexity of this issue. A deeper look at the influences of communication and relationship building, as well as their interaction, may help to identify for whom and under what circumstances integration is successful. Improved decision making by those involved in placement and implementation is only possible when the perceived benefits and risks associated with the integration of deaf and hard of hearing children are identified and carefully weighed. Since the communicative needs of deaf students are unlike those of other groups of students with disabilities, their plight cannot simply be an extension of the overall movement toward integration of students with disabilities. Instead, their fundamental human right to language must be examined, studied, and planned for in their daily lived experiences in school. In considering the quality of communication and relationship building in the learning environments for deaf students, it is useful to gain an understanding of the nature of the real-life communicative relationships of deaf students in inclusive settings. This information can be gleaned only through the perspectives of deaf students exposed to inclusive learning environments and the professionals who give them access to the voices beyond them. The interviews contained in this volume are the culmination of a qualitative research study investigating the quality of relationship building and communication in the integrated learning environments of deaf students. Since the research in educational interpreting has been scant, this study originated as an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the perspectives of students and interpreters on their relationships and other factors that influence success in an interpreted educational environment. A secondary goal was to gain knowledge of the barriers that deaf students face in Preface Preface x accessing communication in integrated learning environments, as well as the support structures they need to succeed. The data gathered for this text comes from interviews with 10 deaf students , 5 deaf adults, 10 educational interpreters, 4 regular education teachers , and 2 deaf education teachers involved in the integrated experience of deaf students. Interviewing seemed particularly important for the population of deaf students in that it allowed them to communicate through their native language, American Sign Language (ASL), while removing the possible barrier of not understanding written English surveys or forms. This method also allowed a clearer understanding of the perspectives of these individuals while offering an opportunity to explore the themes embedded within their stories. A foundation for designing effective interviews was drawn from the ideas of Rubin and Rubin (1995) in their book Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. From this perspective, qualitative interviewers listen to people as they describe their lives, based on their understanding of the world. A narrower form of qualitative interviewing is evaluation interviews , a tool the researcher uses in discovering the views of those interviewed in the successes and failures of a program or project. Another form of qualitative interviewing is cultural interviews. This tool allows the interviewer to ask about shared understandings, standards of value, and mutual expectations (Rubin & Rubin, 1995). My goal was to combine elements of evaluation interviews with cultural interviews to gain dual insight into the cultural and evaluative perspectives of environments for deaf students At the beginning of each interview, each participant was asked to identify his or her language preference for the interview: spoken English or American Sign Language. Nine of the deaf students chose ASL as their preferred mode of communication for the interview. One student (identi- fied as Leslie) chose to conduct the interview in spoken English. All participants were interviewed directly through ASL or spoken English by a bilingual researcher fluent in both languages. Interviews conducted in ASL were videotaped and transcribed by a certified interpreter. Interviews conducted in spoken English were tape recorded and transcribed by a native English transcriber. A substantial decision in planning for interviews seemed to be the choice of whom to interview. The goal was not in conformity, but in xi Preface the complexities of the viewpoints and their places of divergence and intersection . Initially, it seemed that the greatest opportunity for understanding would come from choosing pairs: education interpreters with the children they service. But this would be asking interpreters to violate their code of ethics by disclosing information about a specific client. Therefore, this study focused...