Signs and Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language

Introduction

1 Introduction When I was a child growing up in the 1970s, my family had a Sunday morning routine. My brother and I would watch Popeye cartoons until we had to get ready for church. While we were cleaning up and changing, my mother or father would change the TV channel to a televised church service. When I was dressed and ready, I would go back and sit in front of the TV until it was time to leave. I didn’t watch the preacher standing behind the pulpit, but I did watch the sign language interpreter sharing the screen. My first exposure to the deaf community in the United States was through this sign language interpreter in the little bubble on the right side of the screen interpreting a sermon delivered by a Baptist minister. I continued to be exposed to the deaf community at the schools I attended. As a hearing student in public schools during the 1970s and 1980s, I sat in classes experiencing the results of Public Law 94-142 (Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now called Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA]), which was passed by Congress in 1975. In order to receive federal funding, schools were required by law to develop and implement policies that would ensure a free and appropriate public education to all children with disabilities. For many deaf and hard of hearing students this meant attempts at mainstreaming, which were often unsuccessful: “The idea of ‘integrating the handicapped’ with the larger population has an inherent attraction, but the mainstreaming movement has caused disruptions in the education 2 Introduction of deaf children.”1 Since its inception, mainstreaming has taken on a variety of appearances in public schools. In some schools, a single deaf student sitting in the front row of a classroom trying to read the teacher’s lips was considered a mainstreaming program. In other public schools, more elaborate systems were created to include multiple deaf students in classes with an interpreter sitting in the front of the classroom and signing all verbal communications. I attended mainstreamed schools that housed the programs for all deaf students and students with hearing loss in southeast Los Angeles County (the program was referred to as SELACO). At these schools, deaf students, often in clusters of threes, sat in the front rows of math, science, and occasionally history or geography classes. One interpreter sat off to the side in the front of the class, signing for the teacher and voicing for the deaf students. I never saw deaf students in English classes, which I assumed were held separately from the classes for hearing students. At the schools I attended, mainstreaming did not mean the deaf and hearing students were together in every class for every subject. Deaf students may have had language and English classes separate from hearing language and English classes. These campuses had temporary buildings that housed the SELACO program. Offices, classrooms, and open areas were set up in these “trailers.” Because I attended mainstreamed schools, I was allowed to take sign language classes as elective credits as early as the sixth grade (the other schools in our district did not offer sign language classes). A few of my friends and I took sign language classes in junior high school so that we could better communicate with the SELACO students in our classes (and “talk” with each other in class without making noise and getting in trouble). As part of the sign language classes, we often visited the trailers to “perform” songs in sign language for the deaf students and their teachers and interpreters. At that time I didn’t know about or understand all of the educational and sociological complexities involved in mainstreaming. I just Introduction 3 knew that throughout junior high school and high school I could communicate with the deaf students in my math classes with the little bit of sign language I had learned in the sixth grade.2 Mainstreaming has been criticized for many reasons. Some people have argued that when PL 94-142 was passed, money and students were taken away from state residential schools that served deaf students: “Within a decade under this law, residential schools that had once enrolled as many as five hundred children found themselves with as few as one hundred and fifty.”3 Fewer state funds for residential programs of course meant fewer students attending residential schools. Besides its...