Alone in the Mainstream: A Deaf Woman Remembers Public School (review)

"I was the only one." Oliva begins her book with this quote, which she reports she has heard over and over again during her 30 years at Gallaudet University. She then proceeds to integrate her experiences as a person who spent her entire academic career as the only deaf or hard of hearing student in a regular school from kindergarten through her junior year in college with the experiences of other deaf and hard of hearing individuals, to whom she has given the designation "Solitaire." The author chronicles her growth and development from a young girl with a progressive hearing loss, moving from being hard of hearing to deaf to Deaf to d/Deaf through different stages of her life. She interweaves her autobiographical story with the responses of 60 participants in her Solitary Mainstream Project.

I was particularly struck by Oliva's opening sentence and related to it strongly, even though, on the surface, the perspective of a hearing man would seem to be quite different from that of a d/Deaf woman. However, we both are Gallaudet professors, we both grew up in ethnic neighborhoods in Connecticut, and we both have been involved in research with deaf and hard of hearing individuals who have spent most or all of their academic careers primarily with hearing classmates. Over the years, I have been impressed by the growing numbers of Gallaudet undergraduate and graduate deaf students who are educated in mainstream, usually oral, environments, sometimes even through their undergraduate years, and then decide to enroll in a university with a majority of deaf students, often against the wishes of family members. Many of these students have grown up in families in which the emphasis is on speech and integration into a hearing world, where there is little or no contact with other deaf or hard of hearing children or adults, and where a hearing loss may be considered a mark of shame to be denied. I, too, probably in common with most Gallaudet faculty members, have heard and seen students state, "I was the only one." What motivates such students to seek out an education and social experience outside the mainstream?

Oliva describes her epiphany, which occurred in the cafeteria during lunchtime in her junior year at Washington College in Maryland. Because of difficulties following group conversations, she usually busied herself with lunch while the other girls talked away. She happened to look up, and noticed a group of young men "engaged in the most animated conversation I have ever seen in my life," and thought, "Oh my people!" They were members of the Gallaudet soccer team at the college for a game. She writes, "To this day, I marvel at the depth of feeling that I had for this group of strangers. I had never seen anyone signing ASL before. And yet, I knew instinctively that I had an indelible bond with them. They were like me. I was like them." This experience led her to spend her senior year at Gallaudet and to enter the Deaf culture. She describes the process as helping her experience the best of both worlds and refers to herself as both deaf and Deaf, or d/Deaf.

The process was not an easy one, and Oliva was motivated to investigate the experiences of other deaf and hard of hearing individuals who had had the same kind on mainstreaming experiences in the elementary and secondary grades. This effort culminated in the Solitary Mainstream Project.

Although the sample represented a range of backgrounds and opinions and there were frequent exceptions, several themes emerged. The most common and most powerful was what might be designated the academic/social gap. In general, respondents expressed satisfaction with their academic opportunities, but reported a sense of social isolation, a lack of connectedness with teachers and fellow students. The academic satisfaction is somewhat of a surprise given reports of teachers who did not want to deal with a deaf child, who would talk while facing the blackboard, who made derogatory comments, or who...