Partners in Education: Issues and Trends from the 21st International Congress on the Education of the Deaf

The View from the Periphery

159 Strand7:SignLanguageandDeafCulture TheViewfromthePeriphery Breda Carty I attended my first Deaf culture workshop way back in 1983, which probably qualifies me as an elder in Deaf studies. Since that time Deaf studies has been growing and diversifying around the world, but its core message has remained consistent. It seems that however far back we go, we see Deaf people struggling to find an acceptable and persuasive way to say that we have something rather than that we lack something. As early as 1779, deaf Frenchman Pierre Desloges wrote, “Nature has not been as cruel to us as is commonly assumed.” This, in essence, is what we are still trying to say, though we now have many more areas of theory, scientific information, and cultural expression to support our claims. The first generation of people who debated, wrote, and taught about “Deaf culture” or “Deaf studies” in the 1980s have seen many changes. We are somewhat anxious about what is being lost: The type of cultural knowledge that accumulated when Deaf people were educated together and had relatively limited employment opportunities and less social acceptance (the “oppositional” communities described by Woll & Ladd, 2003) was also rich with folklore, local associations, and intergenerational contact. We looked to anthropologyforatheoreticalframeworkandanalyzedthemostobvioussites of cultural transmission—Deaf schools and Deaf clubs—even as they were 160 Breda Carty declining in most Western countries. However, the anxiety and nostalgia are more than balanced by excitement at the new branches and shoots emanating from the Deaf studies tree. When we trawl the websites and publications of Deaf studies research centers around the world nowadays, we find new areas of study and new alliances. Deaf studies researchers are now fraternizing with neuroscientists, philosophers, architects, and filmmakers, as well as the linguists, historians, and anthropologists favored by the first generation of Deaf studies scholars. Many of the sociological and cultural changes in Deaf communities are the result of educational practices. Although we may be ambivalent about these changes, we have an opportunity to observe which aspects of our lives are the most susceptible to change, which are the most resistant, and which are the most variable. It is becoming a little clearer that some behaviors and responses that we have labeled “cultural” may not be so after all but may instead be precipitated by our environment or our biology. Acknowledging this helps us to identify what is genuinely cultural in Deaf people’s lives. These observations are giving rise to new ways of describing ourselves and our multifaceted journeys through life. Bechter (2008) called for Deaf studies to be “a producer of theory, rather than a consumer of it” (60), and we are seeing some interesting moves in this direction, especially in the recent work on Deafhood (Ladd 2003) and “Deaf gain” (Bauman & Murray 2009). This chapter discusses several of the strands of Deaf studies and the many ways they intersect with the education of deaf children. It does not describe recent work in sign linguistics, but the cultural value placed on sign languages is central to all of the areas I describe. Deaf History The study of Deaf history is one of the oldest branches of Deaf studies and is still one of the most productive. However, I suggest that our uses of Deaf history have changed over the last 25 years. Early work in Deaf history focused on the history of schools and other institutions and on Deaf pioneers who could serve as role models for young deaf children. One of the ways in which we received and interpreted some of the early historical research (e.g., Lane, 1984; Groce, 1985) could perhaps be seen as a process of forging “collective The View from the Periphery 161 memory” for ourselves. Most of this history was new to us—indeed, Deaf people knew very little of their history before the 1980s. Collective memory is more than just a shared body of historical knowledge—it can also be a way to affirm group cohesion and provide us with agreed-upon “explanations” for our contemporary situation: Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single committed perspective ; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes. . . . Typically a collective memory, at least a significant collective memory, is understood to express some eternal or essential truth about the group—usually tragic. A memory, once established, comes to define that eternal truth and, along with it, an eternal identity for the...