Disabiling Pedagogy: Power, Politics, and Deaf Education

1. Power, Politics, and Education

1 C H A P T E R 1 ! Power, Politics, and Education ALTHOUGH A CENTRAL THEME of this book is the politics of language practices in deaf education, in my discussion I look beyond the issue of access to education to an analysis of the group and power relations that exist between Deaf and hearing people in schools, universities, and the broader community. Deaf people have traditionally been positioned, labeled, and constructed as “disabled” by educational and other powerful societal institutions. The level of support they receive is generally contingent on evidence and degree of “impairment”—another constructed term that takes its meaning from society’s view of “ability” or “normality .” In schools and universities, support for deaf students is provided on the basis of their “disability” or “impairment.” The construction of deafness as a disability “has led to programs of the majority that aim to discourage Deaf children from participating in the Deaf World (programs such as oral education and cochlear implant surgery) and that aim to reduce the number of Deaf births, programs that are unethical from an ethnic group perspective” (Lane 2005). Issues of power, control, and legitimacy are central to language practices in education. Deliberately or unwittingly, language practices are political acts that serve the interests of particular groups, often to the detriment of others. The way in which English is legitimized and perpetuated in deaf education is an example of the relationship between 2 Power, Politics, and Education language and power. Hearing educators, who are members of the dominant group, have traditionally established English as the legitimate language for use in education. Doing so maintains the unequal position of deaf people in society and further disempowers them as they struggle to gain access to education. Given the important ties between language and culture, denying students’ native sign language in education devalues Deaf culture. For researchers, poor outcomes in deaf education have fueled the debate over language practices and pedagogy. For decades, the international literature has made reference to the low level of education and poor literacy achievement of most deaf students. In the United States they generally attain the reading level of a fourth-grader. An Australian study of profoundly, prelingually deaf school-leavers in the mid-1990s found that deaf students were reading on average at the level of sixthgraders (Walker 1995). The explanation for their underachievement is debated by researchers and educators who express either of two viewpoints . The first maintains that the failure of deaf children in education is the result of their deafness and contends that the system strives to overcome this barrier as best it can with educational and medical intervention . The other view emphasizes the way in which deaf students have been educated and points to disabling pedagogy, rather than any disability in the child, as the cause of educational failure or underachievement. Supporting this second view is a large body of research and commentary on the benefits of native sign language as the first language and medium of instruction for deaf children (see Komesaroff 1998). Although not the first to promote bilingualism, Grosjean (1992) urged deaf people to realize they are bilingual and to take pride in it; their position as minority language bilinguals in a system that has failed to recognize their needs explains their failure in education. The education of deaf people in Australia reflects a general trend toward mainstreaming in special education (Jenkinson 1997). With more than 80 percent of deaf or hearing-impaired students in Australia integrated into regular schools (Power 1994), the dominant approach has been to teach these students in English, spoken and/or signed. Senior managers in most state education agencies have generally been unwilling to become involved in the issue of language practices in deaf education, Power, Politics, and Education 3 and there is little evidence that policymakers have considered the discrepancy between national policy (which recognizes deaf people as members of a cultural and linguistic minority; see Lo Bianco 1987) and educational policy and practices that directly or indirectly maintain English as the language of instruction. Despite increasing interest in native sign languages and a growing number of bilingual programs for deaf people, the policy and practices that dominate deaf education continue to reflect the values and interests of hearing professionals. Without pro- ficiency in Auslan or knowledge of bilingual pedagogy, most teachers of deaf students have little option other than instructing in...