Hearing and Deaf Teacher Pupil Control Ideology and Pluralistic Ignorance

The authors employed participant observation, a survey (N = 118) of teachers and selected follow-up ethnographic interviews to examine teacher pupil control ideology in a residential elementary and secondary school for the hearing impaired. Participant observation yielded three hypotheses. First, hearing teachers would be perceived as more humanistic than their deaf colleagues. Second, teachers would perceive their typical colleague as more custodial than was actually the case. Third, teachers' pupil control ideology would be influenced more by the ideology of colleagues within rather than outside of their informal groups. Results of the survey and interviews generally supported the three hypotheses. Pupil control appeared to be a pervasive normative structure of the teacher subculture with variation in ideology related to the intentions and goals held by teacher subgroups for clients.