Language, Power, and Resistance

Mainstreaming Deaf Education

Elizabeth S. Mathews

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781944838058
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The current policy ofeducating d/Deaf and h/Hard of hearing (DHH) students in a mainstream setting, rather than inthe segregated environments of deaf schools, has been portrayed as a positive step forward in creating greater equality for DHH students. In Language, Power, and Resistance, Elizabeth S. Mathews explores this claim through qualitative research with DHH children in the Republic of Ireland, their families, their teachers, and their experiences of the education system. While sensitive to the historical context of deaf education, Mathews focuses on the contemporary education system and the ways in which the mainstreaming agenda fits into larger discussions about the classification, treatment, and normalization of DHH children.
The research upon which this book is based examined the implications that mainstreaming has for the tensions between the hegemonic medical model of deafness and the social model of Deafness. This volume explores how different types of power are used in the deaf education system to establish, maintain, and also resist medical views of deafness.Mathews frames this discussion as one of power relations across parents, children, and professionals working within the system. She looks at how various forms of power are used to influence decisions, to resist decisions, and to shape the structure and delivery of deaf education. The author's findings are a significant contribution to the debates on inclusive education for DHH students and will resonate in myriad social and geographic contexts.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

SOME CHILDREN do not hear. This can be due to a number of reasons: variation on a chromosome carried by both parents, an obstruction in the middle ear, a nonfunctioning auditory nerve, birth trauma, medication that harms the aural faculties, or a viral or bacterial infection that damages the inner ear. As a result, these children are often marked as different from their peers who can hear.

Language, Power, and Resistance: Mainstreaming Deaf Education is about these children. More precisely, it is about deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children in Ireland, their families and teachers, and their experiences in the education system.1 Readers from Ireland will be particularly interested in this book, because little research has been done on DHH children’s lives in that context. However, international readers will also find the subject matter of interest for a number of reasons. First, this book examines the phenomenon of mainstreaming deaf education, moving away from a traditional model of segregated education in schools for the deaf. Rather than examining the academic or social outcomes of that movement, this book looks at why and how DHH children are mainstreamed. In particular, it examines the impact that mainstreaming has on language use for families and subsequently, as we will see, the prevailing discourses surrounding d/Deafness. Second, it places this discussion in the context of deaf education history, both international and Irish, and covers the debates over DHH people’s language use through the centuries. The history of deaf education in Ireland is particularly interesting in this regard, because, unlike in the United States, Ireland’s largest schools for the deaf continued using sign language as the dominant method of instructing DHH children up until the late 1940s. Finally, Language, Power, and Resistance frames this discussion as one of power relations across parents, children, and professionals working within the system. It looks at how various forms of power are used to influence decisions, resist decisions, and shape the structure and delivery of deaf education nationally in Ireland. Although the book uses Ireland as an example to illustrate these themes, international readers are likely to find some resonance based on their own experiences.

Across different times and places, children who do not hear have been called deaf or Deaf, deaf and dumb, mute, hearing impaired, and hard of hearing; however, the most noticeable aspect of their difference from others is the difficulty they experience in acquiring spoken language. This presents a number of subsequent difficulties, namely in communicating through spoken language, acquiring literacy in the written versions of spoken languages, and subsequently, in accessing conventional education systems. As a result, over the last couple of centuries, there has been a growing preoccupation within the education field with the “best” means of eradicating the complications of deafness and improving the social and academic outcomes of these children. For a long time, the primary pedagogical approach was to adapt the medium of teaching by using sign language, a visual means of communication that was accessible to DHH children, and following a philosophy known as manualism. However, over time, this ideology was challenged by a philosophy known as oralism, whereby DHH children would learn how to communicate and subsequently be educated through spoken language and listening, with the goal of integrating them into hearing society. Oralism was often (although not always) accompanied by an opposition to the use of sign language, which was viewed as a barrier to acquiring speech. Although the debate between manualism and oralism may seem a linguistic or pedagogical one, it goes far beyond the reaches of language—and indeed education—to incorporate the social, the economic, and the political.

The manual/oral debate in deaf education has gone on almost since the field was established. This debate “was not, for [teachers of the deaf] or for most deaf people, whether oral communication should be taught. The fight was over sign language” (Baynton 1996, 14). These debates reflect the contrasting desires for DHH children to be normalized, integrated, and assimilated within mainstream society, where they could live and work among hearing people, versus being inducted into Deaf culture through the use of sign language, where they could live alongside, but perhaps not truly within, hearing society. As such, the debate has deep ideological roots based on contrasting models (namely medical and social models) of what it means to be a child who does not hear.

On the one hand, the medical model of deafness views hearing impairment as a pathological condition, caused by neurological or structural anomalies in either the ear or the auditory center in the brain. Because the medical model equates deafness with an inability to hear, overcoming deafness involves rehabilitating the hearing organs. Often, this comes in the form of amplification (using hearing aids) or surgery (e.g., cochlear implantation). This rehabilitation is accompanied by intensive therapy to assist the development of listening and speaking skills. As such, the medical model is aligned with the oralist philosophy.

On the other hand, over time, recognition that Deaf people comprise a Deaf community, which shares a common language, sign language, with its own grammar and syntax, cultural norms, values, and history, has highlighted the need for a new social perspective on Deafness that breaks away from the traditional medical view of hearing impairment (Lane 1989; Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996; Sacks 1989; Van Cleve and Crouch 1989;Woll and Ladd 2005; Groce 1985; Bienvenu 1989; Mow 2001; Stokoe, 1960). This rise of the social model of Deafness, sometimes known as Big-D Deaf, is signified by the capitalization of the word Deaf, indicating membership to a cultural and linguistic minority group, as opposed to lowercase deaf, which signifies an audiological deficiency. Although those identifying with the social model of Deafness do not identify as disabled (Lane 2002), the progress made in establishing a social model must be situated within a general shift away from viewing disabilities as inherently personal obstacles, toward one that examines the role of the physical, social, economic, or political environment in creating disability (Oliver 1990). Although the social model of Deafness is a phenomenon of the late 20th century, many of its key features (the congregation of Deaf people in communities, the use of sign language) are much older and were part of the historic debates over how DHH children should be educated.

Until the 1970s, the dominance of one viewpoint over the other was played out in schools for the deaf. Particular schools favored manualism or oralism, and shifts occurred in response to changing social conditions. One consistent feature of this educational system, however, was that DHH children had the opportunity to interact with their DHH peers, supporting the development of the Deaf community and the intergenerational transfer of a social model of Deafness. This fostered the growth of sign languages, often regardless of the philosophy of the particular school. Adults in the Deaf community lobbied for their rights and the rights of DHH children. As a result, regardless of whether or not the education system promoted a medical view of deafness, the congregation of DHH children and the subsequent rise of Deaf communities secured the continued alternative, social model of Deafness. From the 1970s onwards, however, deaf education changed with the arrival of what became known as mainstream education. At the time, the integration, or mainstreaming, of select DHH children into public schools relied largely on the good will of teachers in those schools and the success of individual children in acquiring speech. Those children unable to acquire speech would be candidates for schools for the deaf and for sign language use. Thus, it remained the case that there were identifiable candidates for one system or the other. However, in the 1970s, pioneered by the United States, a new philosophy would emerge whereby nearly all DHH children were deemed potential candidates for mainstreaming into public schools, with only the very few remaining children seen as suitable pupils for schools for the deaf. This philosophy, spurred on by the gains made during the American Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Moores 1992), was supported by a number of legislative moves, beginning with Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in the United States in 1975. As a result, the intergenerational transfer of the social model of Deafness was no longer guaranteed, because generations of DHH children simply did not meet in schools. At this point, the medical model started to emerge as the dominant or hegemonic way of understanding what meant to be DHH.

In Ireland, this move to mainstreaming in policy would happen considerably later, with the Education Act of 1998 (Government of Ireland 1998) and the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act (EPSEN) of 2004 (Government of Ireland 2004), although in practice, children had already begun to move into that educational environment. Approximately 78 percent of DHH children in the Ireland are now educated in mainstream settings (National Council for Special Education 2011), reflecting broader international trends to mainstreaming. Enrollment in schools for the deaf has been in significant decline during the same time period. As a result, the spatial organization, or geography, of deaf education has changed. Once centrally organized in schools for the deaf, DHH children are now spatially dispersed from each other for the first time since systematic deaf education began. This change has come despite concern that mainstreaming may be particularly unsuitable for DHH children (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization 1994). Although mainstreaming has certainly produced some positive outcomes, particular concerns have been raised (and will be further discussed in chapter 2) over educational attainment, social isolation, ideological foundations, the lack of appropriate services, and the lack of specialist training among staff in mainstream settings. This book examines how and why, despite this, DHH children are mainstreamed.

Terminology

Terms used to refer to DHH people are not neutral, but rather are laden with political meaning. In recent years, there has been a distinction between deaf (spelled with a lower-case d ) and Deaf (upper-case D) to clarify between medical and social discourses of d/Deafness, respectively. As such, when used in this book, the term deaf refers to an audiological deficiency, whereas Deaf refers to membership in a minority community, the Deaf community, and the use of sign language for communication. Although the terms hearing impairment or hearing loss are still commonly used by many hearing people, including a number of parents involved in this research, they can be seen as offensive to the Deaf community, because they refer to the medical model of deafness, which views deaf people as deficient. The Deaf community highlights this by juxtaposing the term hearing loss with the term Deaf gain (Bauman and Murray 2009). As such, the terms hearing loss and hearing impairment are only used in this book when appearing in direct quotations from interviews or where used specifically in relation to the medical model of deafness. I use the term discourse to refer to “clusters of assumptions and meanings” (Harris 1991, 672).

Although the vast majority of the children involved in this research were profoundly deaf, the term deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) is used throughout the book to give due weight to the continuum of identification along which these children are placed by others and/or themselves. This term also respects the fact that “hard of hearing,” as an identity, is distinct from d/Deaf (Israelite, Ower, and Goldstein 2002). This process of self-identification, or of naming by others, is multifaceted and complex. I acknowledge that collapsing the continuum of possible identities and the fluidity of such identities over time and space into a simple and somewhat binary “DHH” is problematic. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to unpack these complexities, I have attempted to reflect this continuum through DHH, using all capital letters, allowing for the fact that this identification may be cultural, although its use does not indicate that all participants are culturally Deaf. When it is particularly important to distinguish between the medical and social models of d/Deafness, individual terms with the appropriate capitalization of letters will be used.

The term sign language is capitalized when referring to languages of a given nation (e.g., Irish Sign Language, American Sign Language, with respective abbreviations, such as ISL and ASL). These are not simply visual representations of spoken languages but are all languages in their own right with their own linguistic structure. They are distinct from each other; sign language is not universal. Signed English, on the other hand, refers to a manual system that places signs (often borrowed from sign language) in English word order.

The usage of the term inclusion in the deaf education setting has become more common than the use of integration in recent years, reflecting a shift from a needs-based to a rights-based agenda. However, in practice, the distinction between these two terms is not always clear (Lindsay 2007). For some, the distinction is one of placeme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mainstreaming Deaf Education
• 3. Power in Deaf Education
• 4. Establishing a Hegemonic Medical Discourse of Deafness: A History of Deaf Education
• 5. Reproducing a Hegemonic Medical Discourse in the Irish Deaf Education System
• 6. Resisting a Hegemonic Medical Discourse of Deafness: Collective Resistance and Dispersed Transgressions
• 7. Conclusion: Power, Language, and the Ideology of Mainstreaming Deaf Education
• Appendix
• References
• Index