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9 Growing Up to Become Hearing Dreams of Passing Dreams of Passing in Oral Deaf Education in Oral Deaf Education KRISTEN C. HARMON “Now she is deaf, and it doesn’t seem real; it doesn’t seem like these results are accurate. I just sat there kind of numb and, OK, now I know that my child can’t hear me, can’t hear anything, what do I do? I really didn’t react at that point because I just felt that I needed to get as much information as possible and then I went home and cried my brains out.” Segue to dreamy black and white shot of a breezy meadow, with tall grass swaying in the sun. —Parent of a deaf toddler, in Oberkotter Foundation, Dreams Spoken Here (1998) S OME YEARS AGO, my mother and I were talking about what it meant for us that I had been educated and raised in the “pure oral method.”1 At that time, I was in graduate school at a large Midwestern university and supporting myself through a teaching fellowship . Even when my students—all hearing, all polite—sat in a circle and raised their hands when they wanted to talk, I guessed at what they said and stammered my way through the lesson. When they frowned as though they could not quite trust that I knew what I was doing, I knew I had to stop faking it. They knew I did not “hear well,” but to confess to deafness rather than hearing impairment is to enter a completely different cultural conversation.2 This work was partially supported by National Science Foundation grant SBE-1041725. 168 Î Kristen C. Harmon I consulted with my graduate teaching mentor about how to handle disclosures of “serious” disability, of vulnerability, in the hearing classroom . We discussed the intricacies of the situation and strategized for possible reactions and scenarios. Barely out of school myself, I had reached the end of what was possible with just my hearing aid, my careful speaking and lip-reading abilities, and nothing else. Standing at the chalkboard instead of sitting in a seat at the front of the classroom, I had ended up at the end of the road of almost passing for hearing. Before then, I had been an “oral deaf education success story,” occasionally written up in school and city newspapers when there was a lull in the news. Like many other “oral deaf” adults, I depended on one-onone interactions or carefully controlled small groups for my carefully fenced-in successes. I had parlayed this laborious work—in reading context clues, drawing on a large vocabulary, using prior knowledge and prediction skills, the management of visual and auditory information , careful memorization of my voice’s location in chest and nose, and expert co-dependence on technological devices—into a carefully polished series of achievements. But I was tired and had weirdly real dreams of coasting to a stop in a car that had run out of gas. This “success” also came with constant pressure to “pass” as hearing and to act “as if” hearing , and doing so comes with a social, emotional, psychological, even spiritual price to pay. I knew that I did a pretty good job of conveying myself through my voice, but I had become frustrated by the linearity of this communication. You understood me, but what were you saying? “You make funny squeaky noises when you yawn,” my sister said. “You’re talking through your nose,” my speech therapist said. “Simply don’t tell them you’re deaf,” my career counselor said. “Pretend like you’re singing the songs in church,” my grandmother said. “What country are you from?” German tourists asked. “You look like you don’t really know what’s going on, but you’re being nice about it,” a fellow graduate student said. If the goal of passing is “to be seen as unmarked in one’s class, racial, sexual, or religious identity,”3 then deafness becomes the marked and stigmatized identity, one that must be elided, denied, and suppressed . As much is possible, hearingness is the goal. As a Public Law Growing Up to Become Hearing D 169 94-142 “first-generation” student, I had been told that sign language, such a clearly visible symbol of social stigma,4 was an option only for the “oral failures.” So we persevered, my family and I, along a path that from was bound to wash out sooner or later. “I know...

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