A Sustainability Perspective on the Potentialities of Being Deaf: Toward Further Reflexivity in Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

Sustainability and a Reconceptualization of the Potentiality of Being Deaf

The emphasis on potentiality needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of deaf education and the place of sign language in deaf education. We can look upon this evolution from a rational perspective. However, this can only be understood and adequately addressed while also taking into account the emotional chord that is struck in deaf people and deaf communities around the world, and in their partners, when it comes to the impact of educational practices of excluding accounts of deaf people's lives (see also De Clerck, 2015).¹

The notion of potentiality relates to this process of "realized and unrealized possibilities" (Pratt, 2007, p. 403): being deaf in the past, present, and future. This is captured in the last point of the Accord for the Future, which was issued at the 21st International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (ICED), in 2010 in Vancouver, Canada: "[We] call upon all nations of the world to recognize and allow all Deaf citizens to be proud, confident, productive, creative, and enabling citizens in their respective countries" (Jamieson & Moores, 2011, p. 26). Sustainability is fundamentally about reflexivity on these realized and unrealized possibilities of being deaf, especially in times of transition and in response to challenges which, in their complexity, extend us as individuals, communities, and societies and need to be addressed on multiple levels (see also De Clerck, chapter 1; De Clerck, 2016).

The perspective on human beings as learners is an epistemological and ontological perspective of subjectivity: Human beings are active subjects who shape their selves, relations with others, and material and sociocultural worlds and also give meaning to these selves, relations, and material and sociocultural environments. This perspective enables us to understand how these frameworks of human rights and of the Accord for the Future have been created through intense negotiations among a diverse group of people and can be learned and discussed, and inspire future practice, research, and theorizing (De Clerck & Pinxten, 2012, 2016).

This stance of subjectivity and of human beings as learners also provides room for the making of meaning. The meaning-making activity is related to Patricia Hermann-Shores's theoretical framework of language learning (chapter 6). She draws on Bruner (1999):

Meaning making involves situating encounters with the world in their appropriate cultural contexts in order to know "what they are about." Although meanings are "in the mind," they have origins and significance in the culture in which they are created. It is this cultural situatedness of meaning that assures their negotiability and their communicability.

(p. 149)

We can then connect this human activity of meaning making with the question What does it mean to be deaf? which is discussed by Alys Young (chapter 3). She presents a focus on being deaf as an alternative to a focus on deafness:

To force oneself to consider being deaf rather than deafness forces attention on the onto-logical—the experience of being deaf both in terms of how the self experiences the surrounding environment and how this environment is influenced by the deaf self.

(p. 33)

What it means to be deaf refers to the relationship a person can have with his/her identity (Young, chapter 3) as a multilayered, dynamic, and complex entity or with one or more aspects of it (De Clerck & Pinxten, 2012). It is in this relationship that subjectivity is expressed:

More broadly in respect to others who might be deaf but not sign language users, the overarching point is that there are many ways to be deaf or Deaf (Taylor & Darby, 2003). This is not just about how much one might hear or what language(s) one uses. It is also about the host of other characteristics unrelated to being d/Deaf that might constitute diversity, such as culture, ethnicity, faith, class, sexual orientation, gender, and so forth. Being d/Deaf is about the whole person that may include her or his relationship with her or his...