Disabiling Pedagogy: Power, Politics, and Deaf Education

2. Politically Active Research

11 C H A P T E R 2 ! Politically Active Research Those of us working in this arena need to understand that the politics of language is always about more than language. We need to understand ourselves and the internalized oppression that tells us English and hearing people are superior to ASL [American Sign Language] and Deaf people. We need to understand how this is at work in us and change ourselves and our attitudes while we struggle to change the system. —Kannapell 1990 THE THEMES OF POWER, politics, and the struggle for self-determination among Deaf people thread through this book. Despite recognition of the linguistic legitimacy of Auslan in the late 1980s, the language and culture of Deaf people are still routinely denied to most deaf children through educational policy, language practices, and, more recently, medical intervention. Attention to the political nature of language practices in deaf education is critical if changes are to be made to the power relations between deaf people and hearing people. From my own research (Komesaroff 1998), I have found that Australian teachers of deaf students, policymakers , Deaf leaders, and parents of deaf children hold competing beliefs and attitudes about language practices in deaf education. Furthermore , hearing teachers and a “hearing perspective” of deafness have long 12 Politically Active Research dominated deaf education in Australia. Before we examine current practices, a review of the history of deaf education in Australia is in order. Formal education for deaf people in Australia began in 1860, when the first schools for deaf students were established in Sydney and Melbourne (Crickmore 1995). Until 1879 teachers instructed by means of the “manual method”—sign language and fingerspelling (Stevens, Smitt, Thomas, and Wilson 1995). In 1876 the “pure oral method” (speech and lipreading) was tried with a small number of students, although the management committee for the Victorian institution did not favor this approach. The events at the Milan Congress in 1880, however, were to change the education of deaf children in Australia, as well as in other countries around the world. At the international meeting in Milan, teachers of deaf students had voted for the use of the pure oral method over the “combined method” (the use of speech and signs together) in their belief that the use of signs would have the “disadvantage of injuring articulation and lip-reading and the precision of ideas” (Tarra 1880, 64). It was widely believed that signs represented a limited range of ideas and hindered the development of thought and reasoning (Ewing and Ewing 1938). When delegates voted to ban sign language from deaf education and proclaimed the superiority of speech over sign, the outcome was ensured by the general exclusion of deaf people from the vote (only one of the 164 delegates was deaf; see Lane 1984). Efforts to teach Deaf people to speak have persisted throughout history, but after the Milan Congress, Deaf teachers were removed from schools, and sign language was generally outlawed. The dominance of oralism persisted well into the twentieth century. By 1881 the Victorian school had introduced the combined method. Although the use of this method continued throughout the early 1900s (MacDougall 1988), in 1905 the headmaster reported that speech and lipreading dominated classroom communication and that signs and fingerspelling were used sparingly (Crickmore 1995). In the 1930s (and perhaps earlier), the “Rochester method” (in which every word is fingerspelled ; see Johnston 1989) was also used. In 1950 a visit from British oralists Irene Ewing and Alex Ewing sparked the fervor for oral education in Australia. Highly critical of the Australian schools they visited, Politically Active Research 13 the Ewings called for the establishment of oral-only institutions. A year after the publication of their report to the Commonwealth Office of Education, an oral school for deaf children was founded in Victoria. The same year, Queensland, which had previously made use of the combined or Rochester methods, instituted a purely oral system (Burch and Hyde 1984). At the Fifth Triennial Conference of the Australian Association of Teachers of the Deaf in 1953, Australian teachers rejected sign language in favor of oral methods and declared that fingerspelling and gestures were outmoded (Branson and Miller 1989). In the 1970s Signed English was developed in Australia. This system grew out of the combined method and the Australian Sign Language Development Project, the first attempt by educators to standardize and direct sign language use in...