I Fill This Small Space: The Writings of a Deaf Activist

Total Communication

101 Total Communication Many persons have credited Roy K. Holcomb with being the father of total communication. Mr. Holcomb, who is coordinator of the Madison Day School for the Deaf located in Santa Ana, California,5 once mentioned that the idea for the term “total communication” came to him when he noticed the term “total discounts” being used in advertisements by supermarket chains. After he helped to start, use, and popularize total communication, various attempts were made to define the term and there have been reactions that bordered on outright rejection to outright acceptance. Total communication was considered to be old clothes under a new disguise, a placebo, an updated version of the simultaneous method, a right, a philosophy or something that existed for many years but now is being given formal recognition. Questions were raised on the feasibility of hiring deaf teachers since total communication included speech and auditory training without, ironically, taking into account the fact that it also included manual communication , a skill in which many hearing educators are not proficient. All this serves to point out the danger of allowing oneself to fall into semantic booby traps. Too easily lost can be the spirit and the philosophy behind the concept of total communication. It has long been recognized that hearing children are not all alike and that methods or systems that are tailored to their needs work best. It has been known that when hearing children such as the blacks and the Chicanos are forced to fit into a school’s system of educating whites a lot of time and effort go to waste. Total communication then should be looked upon as a right or a philosophy whose basic premise is the belief that each deaf child is as much an individual as any hearing child. Its major thrust depends on a multiapproach concept to meet the individual needs of the deaf child. The The Deaf American (December 1971) 5. Later the Taft School for the Aurally Handicapped, where Newman would come to serve as a principal. 102 concept of total communication moves in concert to the dynamics of normal human development and to basic principles of learning. As a subset of the philosophy of total communication we have various modes of communication and combination of modes. In single fashion they could be listed as follows: a. Reading b. Writing c. Speech d. Speechreading e. Auditory understanding f. Fingerspelling g. The language of signs h. Others By including the above I have left an out for those who may want to have visual aids listed or who may feel the list is not comprehensive enough. The point to be made here is: let us not get bogged down in trees of definitions that we lose sight of the forest. To what degree the above modes are to be used, singly or in combination , is open to argument and to research undertakings. Suppose that some time in the future a research project indicates that total communication is a failure in the sense that deaf children still do not have language and speech skills, what then? Will it be the fault of the type of communication modes and the degree to which they were utilized or to the philosophy of total communication itself? The difference is crucial and should be clearly distinguished. There may be nothing wrong with the philosophy itself but a lot of things wrong with the mechanics of carrying it out. To give one example, a teacher might use only one sign while speaking ten words orally. Now, let us examine and discuss some of the arguments presented by those who completely reject the philosophy of total communication. “Incompatibility” is the word they use. What is meant is that speech, speechreading and auditory skills cannot develop and flourish whenever talking with the hands is permitted. Research findings which showed that the use of manual communication does not have a negative effect on the development of speech and speechreading skills were either rejected or considered not valid. Lately, there have been more research 103 studies that further strengthens the contention that sign language has its place in the educational setup, i.e., “Sign Language Acquisition and the Teaching of Deaf Children,”6 “Language Acquisition of Young Deaf Children, A Pilot Study,”7 “Deafness and Mental Health: A Development Approach,”8 and “A Program for Preschool Deaf Children Utilizing Signs and Oral...