Literacy and Deaf People: Cultural and Contextual Perspectives

Introduction: Reframing Deaf People’s Literacy

Gallaudet University Press Washington, DC 20002 http://gupress.gallaudet.edu© 2004 by Gallaudet University All rights reserved Published in 2004 Printed in the United States of America Interior page design by Stephen Tiano Page Design & Production Cover design by Gary Gore Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Literacy and deaf people : cultural and contextual perspectives / Brenda Brueggemann, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56368-271-0 (alk. paper) 1. Deaf--Education. 2. Deaf children--Education. 3. Literacy. 4. Deafness--Social aspects. 5. English language--Study and teaching. 6. Education, Bilingual. I. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, 1958HV2430L58 2004 371.91⬘2--dc22 2004045154 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. v Contents Introduction: Reframing Deaf People’s Literacy 1 Brenda Jo Brueggemann Part I “Modernizing” Deaf Selves and Deaf Education: Histories and Habits The Modern Deaf Self: Indigenous Practices 29 and Educational Imperatives Tom Humphries What Does Culture Have to Do with the Education 47 of Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing? Claire Ramsey Double Jeopardy: Women, Deafness, 59 and Deaf Education Susan Burch Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s 73 Autobiography Brenda Jo Brueggemann Part II: Multicultural and Bilingual Perspectives The Relationship between Language Experience 91 and Language Development: A Report from Norway Elizabeth Engen and Trygg Engen Deaf Immigrant and Refugee Children: 110 Institutional and Cultural Clash C. Tane Akamatsu and Ester Cole Cultural and Linguistic Voice in the Deaf 139 Bilingual Experience Lillian Buffalo Tompkins Struggling for a Voice: An Interactionist View 157 of Language and Literacy in Deaf Education Sherman Wilcox English Literacy in the Life Stories of Deaf College 192 Undergraduates Kathleen M. Wood Contributors 209 Index 211 vi Contents Literacy and Deaf People 1 Introduction: Reframing Deaf People’s Literacy Brenda Jo Brueggemann The way that children are trained and schooled is a crucial demonstration of the way that they are perceived and treated in a given society. . . . Discovering who was taught, and when and how, is related far more to the social, political, legislative , economic, and religious forces at work in a society than it is to the unique social and educational needs of disabled persons. At the same time, this history mirrors our progress toward appreciating the basic humanity of all people. Margret Winzer, A History of Special Education Although it is conventional to focus on the disability of deaf children, their inability to hear, an alternative perspective is needed. Claire Ramsey, Deaf Children in Public Schools Deaf people’s literacy: This is no new subject. Typically approached as a problem or even a paradox in much of the long-stretching literature, literacy and deaf people have never danced smoothly together. Perhaps because literacy itself is usually defined as (and by) the dominant culture’s literacy, bound to standard spoken and written forms of a language and certain skill levels at those standard forms (see Goody 1968; Goody and Watt 1988; Kintgen, Kroll, and Rose 1988), literacy studies have most often defined deaf people as lacking. Yet in the past, deaf studies scholars such as Timothy Reagan (1990) and Donald F. Moores and Kathryn P. MeadowOrlans (1990) have been concerned about the pathological definitions of deafness that are inherent in the English language itself and embedded in our educational systems. They have sought to explore literacy and deafness from contextual and cultural models that look beyond a sometimes simplistic deficit model that leaves deaf people only and always lacking.1 1. The debates—and confusion—over when, where, and how to use “Deaf” or “deaf” have been considerable. Some scholars argue that the use of “Deaf” (capitalized) emphasizes Responding to the context of this deficit model, for example, college writing teacher Lisa Bednar has written of “literacy and the deaf” as a “problematic topic,” particularly when it comes to writing. She sees literacy as the “source of difficulty” for deaf students in her college writing classrooms, however, not so much because of their deficits but because of the context in which they are asked to acquire literacy. In spite of the fact that literacy is not a synonym for the English language, our (hearing) American culture tends to view it as such, ignoring other critical kinds of literacy—in the case...