Disabiling Pedagogy: Power, Politics, and Deaf Education

4. Bilingual Education

51 C H A P T E R 4 ! Bilingual Education Educational justice is complex, and requires attention not only to . . . concerns of access and equity—but also to issues of the culture of schooling; that is, the way things are named and represented, the manner in which difference is treated and the ways in which the values, significations and norms which govern life in schools are negotiated and established. — Rizvi and Lingard 1996, 25 IN THE ANTITHESIS to curricular fundamentalism, bilingual educators reject the “curriculum of the hearing”—a take on Ball’s (1993) “curriculum of the dead”—and exploit, rather than ignore, the cultural capital and linguistic resources that Deaf students and teachers bring to the classroom . The decision to instruct deaf children through speech, contrived sign systems, native sign language, or (more recently) “sign-supported speech” (the use of Auslan with English word order) continues to be a highly contested issue among Australian educators. The high incidence of childhood cochlear implantation has only served to fuel this debate. It took quite some time before Australian educators accepted the findings of research that recognized the linguistic legitimacy of American Sign Language (ASL) (Stokoe 1960) or suggested the importance of instruction through native sign language (Cicourel and Boese 1972a, 1972b). At first they refused to generalize the results of these U.S. studies 52 Bilingual Education to the Australian context, given the different origins of ASL and Australian sign language (MacDougall 1988). However, during the 1980s the recognition of native sign language was growing both nationally and internationally, and Australian educators were becoming aware of the movement that was challenging the approach traditionally taken in deaf education. In 1987 Auslan gained formal recognition as a community language and was included in the National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco 1987). Two years later the first Auslan dictionary was published by Australian linguist Trevor Johnston (1989), and in 1991 the Deaf community was recognized as a cultural and linguistic minority in the government publication Australia’s Language: The Australian Language and Literacy Policy (Department of Employment, Education, and Training [DEET] 1991). The DEET document described the use of Auslan for instruction in schools as controversial because most deaf children come from Englishspeaking families. In my view, the controversy arises more from the fact that most teachers of deaf children are English speakers. Some educators responded enthusiastically to the calls for native sign language and Deaf culture to be positioned as central to the educational system. They were influenced by the emerging literature in the field (such as Lane 1984; Cummins 1984; Johnson, Liddell, and Erting 1989; Hansen 1990; Davies 1991a, 1991b; Grosjean 1992; Israelite, Hoffmeister , and Ewoldt 1992; Svartholm 1993; Ahlgren and Hyltenstam 1994; Mahshie 1995), visiting scholars, and visits to overseas bilingual programs such as those in Sweden and the United States. In 1987 the first bilingual pilot program was introduced in Tasmania, where a full-fledged program began running in 1991 (F. Gifford, personal communication, May 14, 1998). This was followed by two programs in New South Wales. By the end of the 1990s bilingual programs were operational in five of Australia’s seven states or territories (although the intransigence of some educators and state systems would later become the basis of legal complaints by parents of deaf children; see chapter 5). The first bilingual programs in Australia adopted the principles common to most international bilingual programs for deaf students at the time (see North 1993; Gifford 1997; Paterson and O’Reilly 1997). A large body of research and commentary supported the use of native sign language, and the Ontario Ministry of Education had commissioned a Bilingual Education 53 comprehensive literature review of the effects of native sign language on majority language acquisition (Israelite, Ewoldt, and Hoffmeister 1992). Israelite et al. identified four characteristics of bilingual programs for Deaf children: Native sign language is used as the first language and the language • of instruction. The majority language is introduced when students begin to • acquire native sign language. Deaf culture and Deaf role models are an important part of the • educational program. Parents are introduced to the culture and community of Deaf peo- • ple and supported in their learning of the native sign language. The introduction of bilingual programs in Australia was largely attributable to the efforts of small groups of teachers, parents, and Deaf people. The initial project in Tasmania arose because those involved...