Many Tribes

28: American Deaf and Haiti (Updated with Video)

2010-01-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

As a Deaf man and a concerned American, it's probably normal for me to feel concern for those Deaf, Deaf-blind and hard-of-hearing Haitians who survived the earthquake. While the Deaf community has its tightness and connectivity to support it in times of stress, often we lose out during emergencies due to lack of communication about supplies and services. Examples where Deaf people received limited information due to a lack of captioned emergency broadcasts are everywhere in the U.S., for example.

So it was with trepidation and excitement that I spoke with my senior class about beginning a project with which we could somehow do our part, or at least a little, to help this particular disadvantaged group. I began watching aggregators such as Deafvillage and Deafread and other places on the internet. I wanted to identify links and organizations established to help such groups. I also began to watch major Deaf organizations on the internet, such as the NAD and the WFD.

In general, there hasn't been a lot of blogging on this issue. The best has come from Deaf Anthology (videos provided) and Deaf Haitians - more on the latter later.

The World Federation for the Deaf (WFD) and American National Assiociation of the Deaf (NAD) both have issued letters of sympathy to the country in question. The WFD claims to be investigating connections and avenues. The NAD has said it does not have the resources to set up its own specific fund, but that leaves open the avenue of it connecting with international agencies and providing links, as well as other, future forms of aid. So it seems a lot of our national and international agencies are wondering what to do and who, specifically, to help.

Gallaudet University, however, has already organized fundraisers and activities (including, most notably, a Spin-4-Haiti event on February 5th and 6th) designed to raise money specifically for the Instituit Montfort, a school for the Deaf and Deaf-blind in Haiti which currently boasts some 600+ students. Montfort, which has sent many students to American Deaf colleges, reports that it has lost a school building in Port-au-Prince, and that students and faculty at the residential institution are currently unsheltered. Gallaudet departments and faculty members are also engaged in action and instruction targeted towards aiding the survivors of the earthquake, and specifically the Deaf community. They've partnered with organizations such as Global Reach Out, Inc. which works to enable Deaf youth to create change internationally. The Rochester National Technical Institute of the Deaf, another major Deaf institution in America, has yet to report on actions being taken in its college. Given, however, that it has many successful students and graduates from Haiti, such action is probably already underway. Colleges, of course, have the benefit of unlimited resources of energy: the passion of young adults.

Nationally and internationally, Deaf organizations such as Deaf Welcome are mobilizing to provide various resources. Deaf Welcome, for example, is providing laptops and sign language interpreters so that local survivors can use international relay services to contact family members and loved ones worldwide. It's as well to recall they're also drumming up business; such larger organizations have financial resources to make these products directly available to survivors. Personally, given that Haiti is a third world country, I'm not sure how beneficial providing videophone services is going to be right now, but they're also providing solar cells and (it seems) wireless devices, so it's possible this could be very beneficial for the people of Haiti.

But what about the rest of us? Who do we donate to, we who do not have either unlimited energy or resources? I discussed this with my students. How do we know that aid organizations will not waste our money, or spend it the wrong way? More importantly, knowing what we do about Deaf history, what concerns do we need to address before we can start giving? After a decade of stories and shocking revelations about abuses of Deaf children at schools, one might be concerned about donating directly to schools in Haiti - although as far as anyone has been able to tell, the two most hurt by the quakes (St. Vincent's and Instituit Montfort) have operated in an aboveboard manner, with respect both for the education of their students and their self-image. Evidence of this is how many successful graduates have gone on to higher education and are now returning to their schools in times of need. But questions like these, and the existence of a variety of local organizations in the country, make taking that extra step of choosing who is trustworthy almost a harder job than helping itself can be. This tangled web is examined by the website Deaf Haitians, where Deaf students who come from the shaken country are working to gather support for survivors. Deaf Haitians points out, for example, that CAPPA Haiti is the only secular (non-religious) organization serving the Deaf/HOH/Deaf-blind population in Haiti. Local perceptions like this are important to informed, sensitive giving. I look forward to reading more blogs from this site.

(Recently added)
Faithful Readers are getting in touch. Two sent in a link to the PAZAPA video embedded below. PAZAPA is a Haitian agency serving the disabled population, including the deaf and hard of hearing population. The video below shows some of their services.

Right now I'm with Gallaudet, and either of the institutes in question - and many of the agencies - look like great places to begin if you want to make sure your money is directed at helping deaf, hard of hearing, and deaf-blind survivors. What's your school or organization doing to help survivors? Can you provide links to places I've missed? Only one thing is sure: our best comes out when we help each other.

Many Tribes Episode 3: American Deaf Exposition

2009-08-30T16:54:00.001-07:00

Click to Play

Today we visit a New York landmark - the annual Deaf Exposition - at another landmark, the South Street Seaport in downtown Manhattan. We take time to meet local organizations.

Many Tribes Episode 2: Internet Captioning and HR 3101

2009-08-30T03:56:00.000-07:00

The impact of limited captioning on the internet and the importance of H.R. 3101 is discussed in this vlog.

27: What do we want the future of Deaf schools to look like?

2009-03-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

I think this is an important question which the Deaf community doesn't want to answer because such an answer would be extremely difficult. We complain about schools closing, but there is little proactive thought, based in historical analysis, on what would be a practical future for Deaf schools, and why.

First we have to admit that there is little doubt that the old model of Deaf school is not capable of surviving in the current environment. More importantly, I am not sure we want it to. There are many reasons, some of them to do with both of these factors. Financial reasons are one; there simply aren't the funds available to support two Deaf populations, and this country has made a decision, without Deaf people's involvement, that mainstreaming is the way to go. On a deeper level, we as a community have rejected the old formulation of Deafness as a functional disability, preferring to view it, at most, as a socio-cultural disability, choosing to believe follow the pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuing to accept funds based on the old formulation of Deaf people as disabled charity cases poisons this more hopeful formulation of the future.

But the rejection of such funding forces us to face a horrible truth: that there is a prevalent disability among Deaf people. This disability is called language deficiency. It poisons Deaf peoples' ability to communicate in any language, whether it be A.S.L. or English or Swahili. It is a disease caused by lack of coherent, organized exposure to language. (One has, after all, to be able to discern a system within language, to recognize it as language, in order to use it as language.)

One of the reasons, poorly articulated, why the Deaf community harbors a smoldering resentment against cochlear implants, is because those who work in the core of the Deaf community, are the ones who work most often with the victims of such a disability. Ranging from mild (difficulty comprehending organized language and producing coherent sentences) to severe (bordering on heavy aphasia), these victims often work with Certified Deaf Interpreters, social workers, case managers, and volunteers.

What does this have to do with cochlear implants? The answer comes from the aforementioned historical perspective. We came from such a linguistically deficient position. (Think: the wild boy of Aveyron.) Once population numbers rose enough to develop our own languages, a distinct grammar, structure, and tradition arose. (Look at what researchers are discovering today in villages and towns in Nicaragua, for example, and Israel.) The rise of manual education, education using signed languages, minimized this condition by ensuring Deaf children had exposure to a language. The subsequent success of Deaf people led to the development of oral education. Deaf people, obviously, could be intelligent. Perhaps if one simply prevented them from using signed languages, they would begin to speak. This led to a rise in language deficiency, and a subsequent return to manual education.

The pattern has continued throughout history; the cochlear implantation situation is the latest such iteration. I will not go into all the arguments for or against here. I think what has not been said is that, at minimum, the Deaf community can be said to desire a guarantee that the children involved will not face linguistic deprivation. Since there is no guarantee of a cochlear implant's effectiveness, the only way to ensure such a thing is to use a bilingual form of education. This is the only way we can guarantee a child will not suffer from this terrible disability. And teaching A.S.L. is the only way we can guarantee independence for the individual in case of device failure.

It is hard to explain this to hearing parents because they do not see the distinction, often, until it is too late, and they meet signing Deaf adults - sometimes the very adults who wind up helping take care of their child.

Deaf schools have been trying for such a form of education. Bi/Bi education is one result of such efforts. In my own research, I've criticized such attempts, comparing them with attempts by other cultures. Schools which teach French and Spanish, for example, involve students from both cultures. Shouldn't a successful model of bilingual education for Deaf students also involve students from the hearing "world," who use English as their primary language?

"But that's mainstreaming!" people gasp.

Except for the fact that we are still involving Deaf adults in the process - yes. A bilingual program only succeeds if it is bilingual at all levels. A mainstream school has no adult models for the Deaf child. In New York, a program called Hearing Education Services sends Deaf or signing adults to different programs with mainstreamed Deaf students. They see a Deaf adult once a month. The hearing students in the school never do, and learn and have no respect for the Deaf child's primary language and culture. (Meanwhile, they celebrate as many as they can think of, and conveniently ignore our stripe in the multicultural rainbow.)

Equally true is that a truly bilingual program requires commitment from all participants, which means Deaf adults in the program, as well as being skilled in A.S.L., must show and maintain their skill in the second language, whether it's English or Spanish or what have you. Just as we demand excellence from hearing staff, we all need to demand excellence from ourselves.

And having a population with students from both groups has many obvious advantages - not least that, by asking Deaf students to compete with hearing kids, we're telling them we believe they can. (In my school, which is slowly studying bilingualism and deciding what's best for our program, we still separate Deaf and hearing kids during state tests, because I.E.P.'s demand it. The Deaf kids are continually comparing themselves to the hearing kids, and often do as well if not better. I imagine the kind of subconscious psychological boost this offers is extremely powerful.) Deaf and hearing kids have role models for Deaf and hearing behavior and interaction.

But without dealing with that horrific disability - the disability which hearing parents cannot see - we cannot reach this stage, and we cannot begin to remake not only how we see ourselves, but how the world sees us. I hope this offering has given people some idea of how future Deaf schools might look. I intended only to give people some thoughts...

26: Why Bother Saving Deaf Schools?

2009-02-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

One of the questions buzzing around on blogs recently is this: why bother saving Deaf schools? To me the answers have become obvious after two years of working in the public school system, and many years as a mainstreamed student in the public school system. I ask people to please consider these reasons. They are drawn from personal experience.

1. Deaf children in mainstreamed programs are not - cannot - be given full access through an A.S.L. interpreter, except in lucky circumstances. Even NYC public schools, which have their own interpreting organization, cannot fill all available jobs. Should students want to join many extracurricular activities the problem would be far worse but I believe they are jaded and do not try. Parents! If your child becomes mainstreamed, find them programs they can be involved in. Better: find programs which have some Deaf children and maybe one or two Deaf adults. Give your child role models and don't let them feel alone as they grow!

2. Interpreters in education systems have a different role than regular interpreters which is highly important, often ignored and still not fully understood, especially when it comes to language development. The R.I.D., an organization which certifies interpreters and has done a magnificent job of raising standards, only began exploring this rich field a few years ago.

3. More confusingly, Deaf students need education in A.S.L. to develop their command of that language, especially if they are to use it to learn other languages!

4. Mainstreamed programs rarely have many other Deaf children, Deaf adults, or Deaf staff/faculty/administrator. This is important because students need models in how to communicate with each other. Not every student winds up with Invisibility Disease - some students are happy in mainstreamed programs (girls tend to do better than boys, possibly fitting more easily into gender roles. Boys tend to develop symptoms of frustration, especially if not given an outlet.)

5. This is also important because you have nobody checking that a) your child has appropriate access b) your child is being given appropriate expectations and c) your child has a good environmental setup that aids them in learning and even d) that your child's teachers have access to resources and materials to make all this happen on a regular basis. All of these things happen naturally in a Deaf school. An aggressive student in a mainstreamed program can force these things to become accessible, but the fight is draining and discouraging- especially without a Deaf adult in the school to stand by you and say yes, he's not exaggerating, he can't just teach another kid fingerspelling and have them walk with him all day every day at school! (Principals have actually suggested this before.)

6. This is also important because not having Deaf adults at the school your child goes to means that standards and challenges may not be as high for your child as it would be for "normal" children. Teachers have attitudes about Deafness as do other people.

Just some thoughts. I realize these may be difficult for people to accept but wanted to offer some observations.

25: Speaking to me

2009-02-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wonder why all the effort in Deaf education is spent towards getting Deaf children to speak. It often doesn't matter. Your voice can be a rich patina of textured sound. As long as you are a Deaf person, that takes precedence... I have spoken to people who understand me perfectly until they are made to understand that I am Deaf. After that, no matter what I do, I am incomprehensible, and we must write to communicate. Other Deaf people have reported the same experience. Based on these casual observations, we can form the hypothesis that people's opinions and prejudices about Deaf people have much more power than any one individual's ability to learn to speak or hear better. The power of the stereotype, with all its opinions and prejudices, is deadly. It is those opinions and prejudices, in the end, which cost us more and keep us further away from success.

It almost does not matter whether or not you believe Deaf people are an individual people with their own culture and experiences and language. No matter what you believe, Deaf people will experience many of the same things such minorities do, including, as I've explained above, stereotyping. Reality is subject to the power of the stereotype. Just as there were once African Americans who, despite repeated evidence that they could produce remarkable calligraphy, were proclaimed illiterate, there are still unconscious prejudices which make people see Deaf people as terra incommunicado.

I experience this on a daily basis in my classroom. Some of the hearing kids I teach "get it" quickly, signing to me or speaking to me or otherwise trying to communicate with me. These are the kids I respect the most. Other kids have a hard time getting past their built-in audism. They ask their friends to talk or sign to me, or they don't even bother, or they look around for a substitute adult (in our school, we are lucky, since such adults are likely to reinforce my authority in the classroom and direct the child to talk to me. In a normal school, another adult would be more likely to take away from my authority, and take charge of the answer.) If there is an interpreter available, they whisper to him or her to ask him, ask him... Sometimes I feel rather like an ancient Greek oracle, accessible only to a chosen few.

I teach English, so communication becomes of even more importance. Rather than seeing my Deaf nature as a disadvantage, I see it as a huge advantage. Establishing protocols for effective communication and teaching children to learn how to use those protocols is highly beneficial. Teaching hearing children that very Deaf skill, the skill of being able to try communication method no. 1, then no. 2, then no. 3, until every possible method has been tried - teaching that could be very beneficial!

But getting kids over that communication barrier - the barriers they bring with them - is a very difficult job, and I haven't found a complete and easy solution yet. Take things one by one, I guess.

24: Deaf Education and Interpreters: A Rant

2009-02-10T04:01:00.000-08:00

You can't split up the two. A Deaf child cannot get an education in a public school without an A.S.L. interpreter of some sort.

The shame is that the Deaf child's interpreting needs are attacked on all sides!

The school which enrolls the Deaf child often dislikes the expidenture of a trained, certified interpreter. They look for the cheapest agency, the cheapest provision. Even colleges, right now, look for ways to save money by hiring one interpreter instead of two (A.S.L. interpreting is a pretty tough profession physically and the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) requires two for a job longer than an hour) or looking for unqualified subsitutes, who I will call 'signers.' Currently, for example, City University colleges are attempting to subvert these rules, and local groups are attempting to assess the seriousness of the problem. The situation is far more dire in public schools.

The teacher is often uncomfortable with the presence of another adult, another authority in the classroom. They do not like that there exists a bubble of communication that the teacher cannot penetrate, that the interpreter can break the rules by 'talking' at the same time the teacher does. They certainly cannot judge the quality of the 'signer' and make sure that the child is receiving the class information in an educational way. (I recall a story about a girl who took a spelling quiz. Her signer, unqualified of course, fingerspelled every word - not much of a challenge for the girl!) I do not see any resources available on RID for other organizations for teaching professionals, Deaf or hearing. I have been able to find this document, Teaching the Teachers, from the ISLR projects at the Ohio School for the Deaf.

The interpreting profession itself dislikes classroom work, calling it mean and low-quality, and so educated professionals look down on the people who need them most. RID has finally asked for A.S.L. interpreting to require a B.A. degree, but this still does not put them on a level with teachers - or give teachers a good model for how to use A.S.L. interpreters. (RID finally accepted educational interpreters as a group in approximately 2006, changing their rules to accept the results of the Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment. Their website states that "Educational Interpreters have always been an important part of the mission and programs of RID; however, it has not been until recent that we have really embraced this population of interpreters into the organization... we have taken great strides to become more inclusive to the educational interpreter and wholeheartedly welcome you into RID’s membership." (RID, 2006) Accepting the results of this test seems to be the only 'great stride' they have taken!

The 'signers' often chosen in public schools have little A.S.L. education, but they hold on to their jobs with tenacity! Usually only the student is 'qualified' (I use the word loosely) to judge the A.S.L. interpreter, but since the teacher often brings up new subjects, the 'signer' could fart three times into a hat and tell the student believably that this is the sign for cardiovascular. They would then get a round of applause from their admiring audience; 'signers' are never far from admiration for their 'abilities'!

If the 'signers' ARE qualified, they can be called interpreters. But then there's a host of other problems for the student - dealing with the Overbearing Interpreter, whose parents are deaf and who Just Wants To Take Care of Everything for You; the In Charge interpreter, who sets up the situation, chooses your partner in labs and in class based on their ease and preferences; the Glib Interpreter, who just missed that important fact in class but is too embarrassed to admit they can make a mistake and so just hide their mistake and continue on...

The pressures of adolescence, also - to not be different, to satisfy their parents, their friends - all prevent the Deaf child from fully engaging with their interpreting needs. With all these pressures, it's no wonder the highly-qualified interpreter prefers board meetings or the clinical coldness of the Video Relay Interpreting booth.

And as long as the situation is ignored, schools have no right to complain about the third- to fourth-grade reading level of Deaf students - they're contributing to the situation!

Anything to add?

2009-01-21T13:08:00.001-08:00

23: testing season

So if the goal is to design a full K-12 curriculum that provides equal amounts of Education (as if Education were sugar, measured by spoons) to all children, we need standardized tests to prove that such is what is being done, and give us some sort of idea as to whether we ARE serving all children equally.

I understand that. It's reasonable. But then it is also reasonable to adjust the test to fit the child, because who the child is and where they are from affect what they can do at this point in time.

Read that sentence again. I think it's true, but it should also make you very nervous.

Let me explain why.

You can check out examples of the current state test in New York at the website. There's a lot to learn, but for now just note that eighth grade has a so-called listening part of the test (I insist on doing both ear-listen and eye-listen in the classroom, just to normalize things.) During this part of the test students are to pay attention and take notes while the teacher reads an approximately 300-400 word piece (say a page and a half.) They then answer questions about that piece using their notes to form essays. They have, variously, one to two hours, depending on their individual needs.

Now hearing children can passively listen while actively writing. The two activities don't contradict. But looking is an active activity. It's possible to both look and write simultaneously, but very difficult, and frustrating. So Deaf children, who have to look at an A.S.L. interpreter, who often has to struggle to keep up with the voice of an unfamiliar hearing person while translating, on the spot, a piece they probably haven't had access to prior to the test (as a teacher, I certainly didn't)–Deaf children in this position are at a serious disadvantage.

This year, we added a small modification to the test, as an experimental equalizer. What if we permitted students to take notes by adding a few seconds' pause between paragraphs?

A simple modification, but one with impressive results. Students reported taking notes for the first time. Freed from being tied to the high-speed signs of a struggling interpreter, and able to look down and take notes thanks to the pause, many students reported feeling able to compete on a more equivalent playing field to that of their hearing peers.

It seems really simple, and it's surprising nobody's thought of it before. The passage has to be read two or three times, depending on the student; simply doing this at least one of those times gives students far more confidence.

So in that case, adjusting the test? A good idea.

But what about other ways? What about providing the test questions and pieces in A.S.L.? This is an option on many students' I.E.P.'s. I feel it's a necessary evil, but it's an option that only works with a system in place to evaluate the student's use of language. The goal is to test the student's comprehension - of English! It's a useless test if the teacher's support is provided in a way that takes away from an accurate measurement of that comprehension. There are, however, a huge range of students, ages, backgrounds, and linguistic competency. It doesn't make sense to hold back a trilingual student because their knowledge of three languages is going to affect them in a different way from a kid who grows up with one. As an English teacher, I want my kids to do well on these tests, but I also want them to be honest. I want the test to be honest, too.

More importantly, who is really qualified to assess any of this? A sensitive hearing person could perform some of the observations that lead to these thoughts, but unless the person is deaf themselves - or maybe has been on both sides of the fence - to think of everything is impossible. This is one reason I believe in the kind of school we are building. On the one hand the Deaf population is currently shrinking. On the other, Deaf kids still need Deaf adults teaching in schools and in the administration of the school. Solve the problem by aiming for a 50-50 ratio - and you not only satisfy the Deaf students' needs, you also give the hearing student the benefits of a much wider world... and both kinds of students enrich each other.

2008-07-22T06:18:00.000-07:00

22: Deafhood and Reflection: My Experiences as an ELA Student

My earliest memory of an English teacher is Ms. Finley, from 6th grade. I remember some other teachers before this, but vaguely. When you're a Deaf student you look at an interpreter most of the time. The teacher is a vague voice lurking static-filled in the background. Ms. Finley was one of those small but powerful Italian women; she taught English Language Arts, and I was infatuated with her and her energy. One day at the end of class I tried to go up to her and share poetry I'd written. Instead of looking her response was "You shouldn't write that in front of other people."

Oh well. I tried to connect. My interpreter thought the poem was nice.

I'd always done exceptionally well as a reader and writer. In Elementary School I was mainstreamed, on the strength of my native intelligence, with no interpreter in the classroom. I had the natural ability to put sentences together without thinking too much about it. My writing flowed cleanly and clearly, and I was able to well reproduce tone and rhythm. I expect my teachers thought this was enough, especially when I was compared to other, more troublesome students; I was often left alone and unchallenged in the classroom. I'd be given assignments that were simple for me; I wrote quickly and neatly, read speedily, finished whatever, and spent the rest of my class with a book hidden beneath the desk, in my own world.

In Middle School the state was finally kind enough to give me a "resource room" period and an interpreter. I was unique; the only student both in Advanced classes and Special Education. The school had to invent a new code just for me. The interpreter, Denise was, unfortunately, terrible. The state has much more stringent standards for interpreters now, with all types of certificates and experience required, but back then the only requirement was that you breathe - the first interpreter they'd hired, if you can believe it, was actually Italian, and translated my French class into Italian at me. (I am, to this day, grateful for the wide lenses of my glasses; his moustache blocked NADA. Nothing's fair in sixth grade.) Denise at least knew some American Sign Language, but her interpretation consisted of listening then saying, "Okay, you know, he's saying something about writing an essay, it's not important." Then she'd tell me stories about her children, which I found more interesting than a class I couldn't understand.

During this time my grades and motivation slipped severely. I understood nothing that was going on in class, the material was getting more complicated in every class and, as another teacher later told me, it was starting to reach the level where modelling was required, and when the student is looking at the interpreter, not the teacher, modelling doesn't work. I could no longer rely on my reading skills to catch me up, because I had to look at an interpreter ALL THE TIME instead of just reading the textbook, and nobody had taken into account the exhausting nature of staring at a single person eight hours a day. It was all new to me, and so was sign language, and I was learning several things at once, from a woman barely competent in the language. I had to unlearn several linguistic skills from that time, years later.

My fellow 6th, 7th and 8th grade students began exploring the concept of writing as a process. Reading as a process I certainly understood; I'd come to enjoy the concept of re-reading. But re-writing? Remember, my responses up till now had been hurriedly written, facile answers to facile questions. The questions were more complicated now. I do not think, in retrospect, that I did very well; as I said, my grades slipped somewhat, although I continued to do work. (Now, being a teacher, I know that simply getting students to finish work is a challenge, and I wonder how much of my good grades were due simply to compliance, or even pity.)

As a result my challenge in life has been developing the skills to meet challenge. When I want to write a story, my struggle isn't coming up with things to say; I have plenty. My struggle is obtaining stick-to-itiveness, in following a process where I have to do things step by step, after a life where all the assignments have been clear and the answers have been relatively easy. It's difficult to Get Things Done. This became exceptionally clear in 9th grade, when I had Ms. Rae Johnson in AP English. I'd made the conscious decision to attend a school for Deaf people in Washington, D.C. I left my family in the process, but I think the exchange was fair, if somewhat depressing.

Like Ms. Finley, Rae Johnson was a small woman, but Irish and English where Ms. Finley was Italian, calm where she was energetic, considering and private when others were public and thoughtless. I'd been put into the Senior AP English class, on the strength of my excellent test scores. I was emotionally unready for the class material, but intellectually I could deal with it - a weird combination. Now I go back and read texts I'd read at that time and see all the sexual innuendo I missed. Life experience is a big part of reading. Numbers make it easy to forget that.

Anyway, Rae (she bade us call her by her first name, the first teacher in my life to do so) challenged me on every level. She was a Deaf woman, with high competence in both languages, and criticized my ASL skills as well as my English skills, and was the first person in my life to ever offer me constructive criticism on signing. I may have learned the bones of writing from public schools in New York: I learned the meat and flesh of it from Rae. Everything after that class was just icing. The continual writing - being forced to achieve certain levels of work and maintain certain levels of communication - I was challenged in a way I'd never been challenged before. As I said I didn't understand everything. I didn't understand King Lear, or insanity. But writing as a process, the firming of my reading skills, exposure to challenging literature - yes. I learned.

And (he says, wryly, returning to the beginning, as all good essays are supposed to) it was the first time in my life I'd had a teacher who spoke directly to me, in her own words, and saw mine. She was still my friend at graduation, and I saw her a few years later when I returned to the school for a visit. I do not know where she is now, though I wish I did. When you're young you're flippant about such things. Only after you've grown enough to see a bit do you realize how rare such connections are, after years and years of not seeing and not being seen.

2008-07-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

21: Summative Assessment, Part II: Lessons and What To Do With Them

I have learned a lot this year as a teacher. I expect every year to be somewhat similar. For this blog I'm focusing on the stuff I've learned that's related somehow to bilingual education and development. These are goals I hope to implement in the coming year.

1. Establish more stringent and clear rules for communication. When I showed up at my school last year, I assumed the school would take the time and trouble to work with the students at establishing communication rules. I didn't think it would differ from classroom to classroom, but it does, and students become confused and frustrated. Even in terms of interpreters, there's disparity - Deaf teachers work without interpreters while hearing teachers have them.

2. Achieve a target level of 10% inclusion in my English classes. By this I mean including stories and poetry by Deaf writers, comparative works in ASL, films about Deaf people, and maybe finding ways to include signs for vocabulary words. I want 10% of my class to show support for the bilingual goals of the school. I did some of that this year, but it was hard to get students to 'buy in' to the concept without having more support from the school overall.

3. Create a suggested reading list for each of my classes with ASL or Deaf related topics. I could also connect these books with works about other minority groups, women, etc. I want students to get the idea that discussions about identity and means of empowerment go on at all levels.

4. Discuss comparative literary elements. I won't test my students on these, but I want them to become aware of, say, the concept that metaphor exists in all languages. I wish I knew of good examples in Spanish too, and a few other languages. It strikes me that it would be ever so powerful, especially for a diverse classroom, to give an example of a metaphor and show all languages have them, then ask the class the question, "Why do we use metaphors?" and conduct an investigation for four weeks.

5. Behavior issues do come up with a bilingual classroom. I'm very concerned about cursing. It was hard for me at first because I believed my deafness was responsible for the surfeit of cursing in my room. I caught some of it, but not all of it. Later I had the opportunity to observe hearing teachers, and they also had to deal with cursing in the classroom. I have to find my own solutions in my own way, but it does feel good to know that... cursing is the ground state... of the ten year old... I don't like the way the sentence is going, but you get the idea. I think a modified Curse Jar concept could work, so I'm going to try that.

See how well I do at achieving these goals. At least I have a plan...

2008-06-25T16:24:00.001-07:00

20: summative assessment

Today we handed out awards in a classroom finally chilled to perfection. In one of the perpetual ironies of the system in which I am blessed to work, they totally missed the hot months of April and May and installed an airconditioner on the 25th of June.

The day before the last day of school. *rim shot*

I'm in class right now. I've gone ahead and submitted my final paper, not because it's in any sense done - I plan to keep working with this, it's just the bare bones of the curriculum for next year. I plan to teach a full year's curriculum on "Literacy for Empowerment." This is based somewhat on the half-assed news unit I taught to seventh grade this year. I've expanded it and revised it to include writing essays - so the reading component has a writing component. My co-teachers might scream, but I'd love to have seventh grade for double periods next year. Or eighth. The specific unit I'm focusing on designing for this class revolves around learning to construct arguments and deconstruct the arguments of others. Not fights in any traditional sense, but arguments in the philosophical sense - logical constructions. IF is an exception to the rule - but I notice many of my Deaf students have a problem with logical constructions and arguments. My work with this group has mostly centered on forcing them to make such logical connections. I have a tentative hypothesis as to why, but it's not a pretty one. I suspect many of the students with such problems come from hearing families and grow up used to the concept that they are not going to get an explanation for why things happen. The communication difficulties in such families often mean that the connections between cause and effect are inherently invisible. As a result, the kids don't ask questions. To make it worse, the lowered standards of the hearingfolk (with respect to the abilities of Deaf children) make them take the docile, accepting expression as the natural state of the poor deaf child (this type of audism is more unconscious than conscious.) When I gave them a space to ask questions, they blossomed.

Not that the hearing students are any better with logic. But they have been taught that they don't have to do anything they don't want to. So with hearing students, it takes a lot of convincing to get them to buy in to something. With Deaf students - they can be very willing - but because of their background, often they don't really invest themselves because their natural curiosity has been stunted.... just like the students I used to go to school with in mainstreaming programs.

I'm starting to let my mind wander. I wanted this to be a simple summative assessment, and all I'm doing is sharing impressions. One more thing, though.

Up til now I've always said that, ideally, the best place for the Deaf student is in the Deaf school where incidents like that I've just described rarely happen. Deaf people see the look for what it is - confusion - and, remembering their own times lost in the clouds, try to clear it up. Unfortunately, my experience is that Deaf schools are often insular and therefore unable to access and incorporate the latest research. Moreover, there are a variety of political and sociocultural imperatives which affect their acceptance of the implications and demands of using such research in the classroom - big words for saying they'll be tired, or burned out, or the research isn't adapted for use with Deaf kids, or the Deaf staff need to have some concepts bridged into their own language for full comprehension, or the hearing staff are looking for an "easy" job...

I was wrong about the Deaf school. It's too insular, and it runs the risk of stagnation. I am starting to believe that the type of bilingual, combined school - a type of which I have only dreamed - is the only place where both students can achieve full development. Not just because of research and people seeing whether you're confused or not, but those are definitely parts of it....

I guess this summative assessment will continue on for another couple blogs. For now, adieu.

2008-06-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

19: A Peek Inside My Classroom
(at the end of the year)

We're working on final projects now. The classroom is not hushed, but wild yet focused; we're working on our final project, a newsletter to rival the newsletter of the other sixth grade. Teachers drop in and out to contribute prizes; the winner will be announced next week. Everyone's intent on proving themselves better than the others, if not, in themselves, the best.

FS and CD are working on horoscopes together; I see this as an improvement for CD, who usually works alone, the better to escape and hide in his newest fantasy novel. FS is frustrated, since she prefers to work with girls, but she's trying.

TR and SA have been identified class artists. They're comfortable in the role and enjoy it. JR is the class photographer, and also my technology assistant. The boys - KR and AL - are interviewing teachers and staff at the school. MJ and MC are interviewing each other.

I'm sneaky. I've made the requirements reflect what we have discussed over the year. If you write a review, it has to be in essay form, with paragraphs, and a main idea and supporting points. Advice columns and horoscopes must have a theme. I differentiate by selecting jobs for some students. This is the end of the year; let them finish on a high note if they can. More importantly let them get excited about the coming end-of-year while still remaining focused.

I will miss my kids over the summer.

2008-06-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

18: Helen Keller - more than just W-A-T-E-R

One thing that's always bothered me is how both Deaf and hearing people view Helen Keller. I see her as a victim of crab theory. Deaf people see her as a traitor. She apparently disdained Deaf people and made efforts to speak, and was friendly with Alexander Graham Bell, who tried to eradicate the Deaf population in America and fought with Edward Miner Gallaudet about how to educate Deaf people.

Hearing people see her these days as a pathetic figure who somehow learned... something. We are often not sure what, because usually they stop talking about her life at the point where she learns to spell W-A-T-E-R. Yet she wrote 13 books; she campaigned extensively on behalf of the poor; she saw blindness as a social issue which could be prevented instead of a moral issue which was decided by God; and she made ties to socialist organizations in America which persisted until her death. To hearing folk, however, she's still just a disabled person who learned to spell.

To my sorrow, most of the 13 are impossible to get and read. But the miracle of Google Books now gives us texts we can even download - not only the ubiquitous "Story of My Life" but "Optimism: An Essay," a poem called "The Song of the Stone Wall" (how closely is this connected to another book titled "No Walls of Stone?",) "The World I Live In" and "Out of the Dark: Essays, Lectures and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision." I hope people read these texts and gain a better picture, a more whole picture, of Helen Keller. She deserves more than just crabbiness.

2008-06-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

17: Learning English, Insularity, the Deaf World, and the metaphysics of reality and language

There seems to be a truism among Deaf people that learning English well is not something Deaf people need to do, that it is okay to just be skilled with ASL or another signed language. I am here to tell you nothing could be further from the truth, and in fact Deaf people should become familiar with as many languages as possible. Life isn't worth living until you can say "audism" in 300 languages. Trust me.

I bring this up for two reasons. Last week we read a screenplay in class. Struggling to experiment with ways to read aloud to an entire classroom with Deaf and hearing students at once, I experimented with using a Smartboard to display the text next to me while I signed commentary. It was an interesting experiment, but what struck me was that even though it was English class and we were studying an English text and the point was learning to read in a more skillful way, one of my Deaf students raised her hand and asked me to interpret the text without even bothering to read it. It's easy to tell: ask them to explain their confusion and they can't, because they have none yet: they've just jumped right into expecting the ASL translation. This bothered me.

The second thing is this: I got an e-mail from my old website/blog address - a website called change.org which specialized in social issues. It invited me to join the website. When I did so, I naturally looked right away, using the very handy search tool, for anything related to Deaf people.

I got zero results.

A little broadening of my search terms brought me to a group for deaf-blind people. But other than that, nothing. No drive to subtitle or caption all televised material. No drive to protect the rights of Deaf people and Deaf children. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

This isn't a new experience. I often see little written by Deaf people in the English media. Helen Keller was unusual in that she wrote 13 books; her like has not again been seen. (Sadly, most of these books are out of print; I'd love a set.)

Sometimes I see the Deaf world as a black hole. You go in and you don't come out. Even ideas don't come out. There's this old line audiologists used to use to describe the signing Deaf world to grieving hearing parents. They'd tell them, "Your child won't socialize with hearing people. They won't have hearing friends. They won't talk to their neighbors." It's true. We don't. But when you pull this line out to us Deafies, we tend to be pretty speechless. In our minds we talk to hearing people quite enough. We can talk to the neighbors just fine. It's not that we can't talk to our neighbors. Often, we just don't seem to want to, with the same intensity that we talk to Deaf friends.

Politics is maybe the area most sorely effected by this cultural difference. As a community, we tend not to go "outside." I write this blog at least in part to counter this tendency. I write occasionally on dailykos.com to counter this tendency. But I keep wondering why it's so. Other linguistically different groups aren't like this, not groups as culturally and technologically well-versed as we are. They study hard, learn good English, and fight really hard to get their message out in the wider community and garner support. They don't abandon their culture - they see these things as additions, not distractions. In our community, it's the exception instead of the rule for a blogger or writer to be successful in the mainstream, and when they do they rarely do under "hearing" rules.

Part of this is because of our fine understanding of the effects of linguistic deprivation. I'm beginning to understand, through my teaching, just how much of it is problems with how people teach Deaf students English - my kids have no problem fixing their grammar errors, and they keep telling me "nobody's ever explained this like this to me before," so I think it's just a matter of teaching people to see things from a deaf person's perspective. (Which makes me think: maybe I've always had my own kind of Deafhood, and I've been spending my whole life realizing that, and learning to trust myself instead of depend on other people's perception of me. Which in itself is scary.)

Part of it, also, is that when you don't speak the same language as the other person, they seem less real to you. I see this difference in my students. I saw it a long time ago with my parents when I was diagnosed as Deaf. I wrote a poem once:

it was easy for them to fall into
the habit of ignoring their deafchild
(one shared by so many hearing parents of deafchildren)
of speaking of him and to him rather than with him.
I had become a ghost,
Still walking in their rooms
Singing in tones too low for them to hear
"This is me, this is who I am, this-"
-from Anomie, copyright 2005 Joseph Santini

At the time, as all kids do, I assumed it was myself who had become less of a person. Little did I know the pain and self-diminishment that was happening on the other end. We all do that - ignore how our ignorance affects others. And maybe I'm right about this whole language thing. Maybe it really is responsible for our not opening our borders more readily. Or maybe it's something else. But we should not ignore how our ignorance affects others. We as a group need to take responsibility for going out there and being part of a larger world.

I said once, writing on Deaf in the City, that there was no Deaf world and no Hearing world, that both of these were illusions, that there was one world and we both had equal claim to ownership. The statement is true and it cuts two ways. It is a hard lesson but it is a lesson which true Deafhood (not the feel-good American plan version) teaches us and if we ever want to understand the whole of who we are and what we can do before we're wiped off this weeping ball of stone, we'd better get it together. (Even the FDP in England has changed its name to the Signing Community. You have to open yourself up if you want the world to open to you, especially if you want, like the website change.org promises, to create change in your world.)

But how I can teach this understanding to my student, when she is sitting in front of me looking at me expectantly for a translation, and 19 other students are sitting there, some not even understanding I've been asked a question, waiting for me to continue? She can't even say audism in one language yet.

2008-06-08T04:13:00.000-07:00

16: Understanding By Design: liveblogging the reading

The following is part of an ongoing reflection during the reading of Understanding by Design, a textbook on curriculum design. This is an extremely useful textbook, and this reflection documents the attempt to devise a curriculum which is at once accessible and bilingual, for deaf and hearing kids.

My immediate thoughts following the first chapter of Understanding by Design were that I had been following a system sketchily like that which is outlined in these two sections; more importantly, it filled in and organized some things I had been guessing at, but now made sense with a remarkable clarity.

The templates used in the first chapter will be highly beneficial to us as we plan units together for a team-taught course next year. I will be working with my co-teacher at school, also a Fellow, to work with our school’s standards to create “curriculum maps” for the year identifying the goals, assessments and individual skills/understandings we will be achieving, at least for the school’s English classes.

I feel very comfortable with the concept of backwards planning, maybe because it feels similar to my outlining process for fiction writing – start with the major “scenes,” then work your way downwards into the things you need to write to make those scenes work. As a teacher I’m creating a narrative for my students to follow, and if my narrative isn’t logical they won’t understand the story I’m trying to tell. Fair enough.

One disagreement I had with the text was when it states on p. 15 that it’s a mistake to just “throw some content and activities against the wall and hope some of it sticks.” Sometimes I find teaching English literature at this age is a combination of teaching the structure of language and exposing kids to sharp, brilliant pieces so that they get interested for life. For example, during our Valentine’s Day celebration (a long and interminably pink and sticky week,) I held a very simple poetry reading in my 7th grade English class as part of an assessment of their familiarity and skill with reading poetry. The aim of the lesson was, ostensibly, to learn how to read aloud – pacing; what seeing a comma on the page suggested we do while reading aloud, or with ASL; suggested phrasings on the wall, etc. The kids were intrigued by the concept that punctuation had more than one meaning. Then I passed out envelopes randomly; each envelope contained a poem with a different perspective on love. Dorothy Parker had her say and so did Ms. Millay; we even read Annabel Lee.

The kids came forward and read what was in their envelopes and wrote an exit slip with one thing they learned or enjoyed before they left the classroom; that was pretty much the end of it. It was the day of the Valentine dance, so it kept them from exploding: an important consideration in middle school teaching. (Any single event can set off the hormonal insanity.) I found this lesson to be one of the most valuable in the year. It forced students to slow down and think about what they were reading, almost everyone asked if they could keep their copy of the poem they read, and I got some further information about what kind of poetry would be appropriate for this grade level at the beginning of a pretty successful poetry unit. I grant it’s not something you should do every single lesson, but it’s fun.

Remembering this lesson brings up a question. One problem I had with that lesson came when I included the deaf students. We’re a bilingual school, but the rules of ASL/English in school aren’t yet clear: I’m part of a committee set up to help develop these rules. Even so, sometimes we come up against these frustrating SHOULDAREALIZED moments... I had one during this lesson. I have bicultural, bilingual classes. This means that I gave all my students a poem in English to read – but since some of these students don’t speak, they were effectively asked to provide a translation in ASL on the spot. That certainly wasn’t a part of my goal!

Of course, we ask the same miracle from sign language interpreters on a daily basis, but it was an unfair burden to put on these kids. How to resolve it, and still introduce the kids to the wonder of poetry? Next year I’ll give them the envelopes the day before, or a week before, and swear them to secrecy. It’ll make a big difference, and I can differentiate if necessary by choosing specifically the type of poem, and provide video suggestion for the signing too (thank god for MacBooks!) If I do it right, I can give the Deaf kids some pointers about how to use metaphor in ASL poetry, give the hearing kids some exposure to it. If they started in kindergarten like the lovely hypothetical models say they should, it would be the perfect age to expose them to comparative metaphor. (Of course this requires a lot of extra work from the teacher – maybe even a committee of teachers.)

It seems to me, though, that there needs to be a place for this kind of thinking in the structure for planning which Understanding by Design proposes, and I can’t for the life of me decide where it should be placed in my mental “chart.” After all, you need to consider the appropriateness of assessments, goals, lessons, projects… it affects almost everything you do. Having a diverse classroom – in all senses of the word - can be a crazy experience… It’s more than accessibility – for either the Deaf or hearing students - when you’re forced to consider the requirements of bilingual education, far more.

2008-05-15T02:58:00.001-07:00

15: Models and Finals

End of the year is approaching. As a NYC Teaching Fellow I'm going to college as well as teaching during the day, so things are fairly busy.

Still, practical theory finds time to be part of my life. Right now we're discussing what models, if any, work for a bilingual Deaf school. And some of this discussion is cutting me to the quick.

Before I go on with the why, let me ask you this question: Are Deaf people disabled?

You'll get thousands of different answers, from people all over the world, from the people who view Deaf people, yes, as totally disabled, to those who see us as a discrete cultural and social group, to those who see us just as... defective.

But I don't have time for opinions. I'm teaching students. I need to figure out a model for education. My studies have led me this far. I'm confident that a dual-population, dual-language school is the only place where bilingual education can truly work for deaf and hearing students. The problem is that we, as a school, are pioneering. We don't have a specific model to work with yet. There aren't many desegregated deaf schools. What model do we work with for education? How do we structure our school?

Other bilingual schools have it easy. They identify specific classes as either English or Spanish, or what have you. They post signs outside the door. Today we have class in Spanish. Today we have class in French. All I can think of with such a model is "what about the Deaf students?" How do we include Deaf students and still say: "Today class is in English?" How do we involve them without ASL interpreters? And without the ability to figure out how to get the Deaf students involved in English only classes, we're not providing truly bilingual education. And if there is NO way, then we're admitting, yes, Deaf people are functionally disabled.

Some studies suggest segregating populations for a few years, teaching Pop 1 with ASL as a foreign language, Pop 2 with English Language Learners. Problem is - I've really come to believe, in the case of Deaf students, that separate is never equal. Cut off teachers from other teachers - cut off students from other student populations - and you may have a Deaf school, but you also have a school increasingly deficient in terms of changing standards and models. One of my favorite Deaf-school teachers was successful, I believe, because she made a conscious effort to be part of a science-teacher community around the world. She maintained very high standards and her students achieved. This is unusual. Most of the time when Deaf people are segregated, they receive substandard educations. We put up with it because of all the other things we can get through segregation - autonomy, independence, the development of an inquiring mind.

Perhaps some integrated classes? Some segregated?

In our school this wouldn't be very practical. The Deaf student population has dwindled, was dwindling before we accepted hearing students. In large part this was because of, ironically, higher standards at our school - a local Deaf-only school attracts far more Deaf students, but only provides IEP high school diplomas, which are essentially worthless in terms of getting a job. (Our school is a NYC Public School, and we provide a full diploma.) Right now maybe 10-15% of our population is Deaf. But that segregation-isn't-equal thing is really visible all over. We have students in special education whose only claim for being there is their need for ASL. And we have hearing students in the mainstream whose only claim for being there is the fact that the special education classes have been identified for Deaf students.

Complicating the matter is that we get Deaf students without former ASL knowledge or instruction who simply don't have the skills to survive in such a segregated class. What do we do, put them in the hearing classes with an interpreter which they can't use? Jesus.

Teaching is crazy.

2008-04-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

14: asl interpreters and bilingual education

So you have a school with Deaf and hearing children (who may or may not be in the process of becoming one of those many tribes.) At some point, because of necessary interactions with the outside world, it will become necessary to use ASL interpreters. But is the usual code of professional conduct sufficient in the case of education? More, is it sufficient in the sort of school I am spending this time blogging about, a bilingual school in ASL and English for both Deaf and hearing children?

I feel it's an excellent start, but that the situational differences warrant a re-evaluation of the code. For example: what does it mean to be an interpreter in an educational situation? What, exactly, is being required of the interpreter? Do they truly limit themselves to production and reception? Or does the fact that behavior, absorbtion of knowledge, and continual assessment of comprehension are taking place at the same time as communication in any way affect the conception of best practices for classroom interpreting?

A lot of interpreters hate working in classrooms, and often, I think, it's because boundaries and needs aren't clear. Some experiences I've had in this experiment I'm trying are forcing me to think and rethink the role and purpose of interpreters in the classroom. Here are some thoughts:

1. Interpreters as language models for all developing students. If we are working in a bilingual school for students both hearing and Deaf who have varying levels of ASL - as well as from highly multiple cultural and ethnic backgrounds - then the interpreter is no longer merely interpreting for the Deaf child or for the strong ASL user. They become a language model for all students. They become an educational tool for Deaf students who come from hearing backgrounds and are just beginning to define themselves. They become mentors for students who are considering the interpreting or ASL-related career track. They can also be models for "group relations," because they understand the communication rules for both cultures.

2. Interpreters functioning on varying levels. An ASL interpreter in the classroom can gauge comprehension far more effectively than a teacher can. They can also gauge the effectiveness of an activity in reaching all students in ways some teachers might not be able to. Teachers who are just learning ASL, and are language development models for younger learners, may not recognize all aspects of communication - and Deaf teachers could partner with an ASL interpreter in a likewise manner.

Just some ideas. I'm sure I'll have more later on.

2008-03-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

13: deafhood and the process of education

Parent-teacher night brings interesting experiences. You meet parents the twin of their child; parents nothing like their child; parents you wish didn't have a child; parents you envy. Sometimes experiences echo your own. Here's one:

Hilda became Deaf as a child, like I did. Because (like I did) there was a period in which she could hear (however brief) doctors and advisors insisted to her mother that she be kept from signed languages (ASL, in this case, although the well-intentioned have paved similar stones in other countries.)

She reminds me very much of myself at that age. She enjoys the written word, and just finished reading the fourth Harry Potter book. She has a personality, but she is ultimately withdrawn, always uncertain in communication, still struggling to figure out the rules for interacting with the world. She has a few friends, but most of them are domineering loners who don't mind her lack of comprehension and just rattle on about their own issues. She's developing her grammar skills in English, although she shows several errors, particularly with subject/verb agreement. However, my sense is that many of these mistakes are careless ones, made because she has something else - a book, a project, or the pleasure of someone's company - to which she must return.

I've tested her in a few ways. When she is sitting with other Deaf people in small groups, such as during tutoring, she feels more comfortable and becomes more animated. This is to be expected - for her entire childhood she's gone to school in similar segregated groups of children, some of whom probably signed. When sitting in the regular classroom, she sits alone, looks isolated, hunted by the support staff assigned to work with her, ashamed to look at interpreters, and not sure that doing so would help, in any case.

The thing which sucks is that she's only taking ASL class one day a week. I'm going to work at amplifying her exposure. But it isn't easy, even in a school with two languages, to give everyone what they need: especially when you consider the topic of my next post: How Do You Teach Them To Learn It For Themselves?

But what is she? (What was I?) Deaf or deaf or hard of hearing? After much thought I still call her Deaf, with a capital D. I suppose some people will take notice, or umbrage. I suppose even she might. But Deaf, to me, is an umbrella term covering a huge variety of people (look at the diversity under the term American, or Jewish, if this perspective makes you protest.) Which counts, the experience or the person? Once you turn away from a medical view of Deafness to a sociocultural view, the answer becomes less obvious.

I was not culturally Deaf when I was a child. But I was a Deaf person going through my own process of Deafhood. My experiences were like Hilda's. We both went through a period where we had to define our identity as Deaf people. In our case, we did it in the New York Public School system, measuring ourselves always against the actions and words (those we could perceive) of others. In the case of other Deaf people, they did it in Deaf schools. (She is now; I did, a few years older than she.) Some Deaf people who are culturally Deaf now, performed the exploration which formed their own Deafhood in oral schools, and would not countenance being told that they are not Deaf. (Culture is part of Deaf people, not the other way around. It could not be otherwise: all people have more than one culture.)

I believe in this definition while, simultaneously, believing that all Deaf people should have the opportunity to learn their national signed language as well as the spoken language they will no doubt be rigorously exposed to, in an almost-tyrannical way, for their entire educational life. I believe these things with all my heart. Is that too sentimental a construction for an academic paper? It is based on my conviction of the human need for independence and the challenges that independence brings. Languages and the ability to use them are what give human beings the freedom to grow and change - to be human, in short.

Was I human, before I learned language? Caliban learned language and his only profit on't was that he learned to curse. Perhaps one day I shall also: I look at Hilda and am split. Half of me wants to cradle her, teach her all the lessons I've learned about being a Deaf person and a human being, share what I can so she can avoid or deal with the frustrations I had with more aplomb than I did. The other half of me thinks that would only make it worse, and the best thing I could do would be to let her find her own way, and take what she will of me.

And maybe help get her a few more ASL classes a week. (It's far too easy to forget the best solutions are practical ones.)

2008-03-26T14:58:00.001-07:00

12: Reflecting on Sameness and Difference

I'm lucky. As a teacher in a school with both deaf and hearing children in a bilingual environment, I get to begin my career with a damned clear picture of what 'problems' are really Deaf peoples'-and what problems are visible in ALL children.

Case in point. I'm now co-teaching a 'special-ed' class, a self-contained classroom of Deaf kids who've been put there because of either behavior or academic problems. I'm not sure I agree with this placement. It seems to me that the school's made a commitment to integration and special classes like these should either include hearing kids (they don't) or be restructured into the general population. When I gave these opinions to the teachers in question, they were adamant that the kids couldn't function in a regular classroom. It's true their English skills are far below grade level. But... They CAN read and write, and so many of my 'regular' students are CODAs or ELL's. The writing these 'special' students produce is arguably comparable in some cases to the hearing kids.

I showed examples of this writing to the teachers. They were astounded. Separated from the general population, they weren't able to make this comparison. I got the feeling they'd developed this view of Deaf students as inferior to the hearing, and saw every mistake as confirmation of the fact. Whereas I came into it with, honestly, very little idea of what to expect.

Perhaps my 'dangerous idea' has more to it than even I suspected. Maybe we need integrated classrooms to help get rid of these ingrained prejudices. But, given that these prejudices exist, how do you separate those who really need help-from those laboring under the limits of false expectations? And is this even harder than usual, in a bilingual environment?

Teaching raises far more questions than it answers.

2008-03-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

11: what is my dangerous idea?

The good folks at Edge in 2006 asked scientists all over the world to identify and write about their dangerous idea. This concept was turned into a book, which you can now purchase on Amazon, and being the product of scientists, is sometimes wildly insane, sometimes coolly prophetic.

So what is my dangerous idea? In the interests of progress for the Deaf community, I'll share it.

Imagine a school five years in the future. From the outside the school looks like any other.
On the inside, however, it's a technological marvel. Gleaming, wafer-thin silver screens cover the walls. These screens display videos, obviously made by children but with a certain level of sophistication which speaks more of commitment than skill. It's on these screens that you notice a difference, whether you are hearing or Deaf: for not only are these children signing, they are speaking, and though you may at first believe the signers Deaf and the speakers hearing, it will soon become clear that this is not necessarily the case.

Walking through the hallways reveals more differences. The communication methods in each classroom differ, although they always revolve around the two poles of English and American Sign Language. In some, the teacher signs than speaks; in another, she speaks, then uses an ASL interpreter; in a third, he speaks, but asks the interpreter to stop so he can use his limited ASL skills to express directly to the students the concept he is trying to explain.

Signs adorn the walls. "The goal is fluency in ASL and in English for all students. The road is what we are walking." Projects in ASL and English adorn the walls. Smaller television screens, protected behind plastic encasements, showcase video projects.

The future promises the Deaf community nothing but change. This is a difficult concept for both Deaf and hearing people to deal with. Deaf people get frustrated with change, because change is usually accompanied by the continual process of re-education. "Yes, I'm Deaf. No, I can't hear. Yes, I can read, drive, and dance. No, I don't miss music, tweeting birds, or the screaming wails of distempered infants." I do not believe we are necessarily disabled, but we do have something in common with the blind: we like to have our world ordered for ease of passage. (A friend pointed out that oppressed minorities often choose similar paths, preferring the ease of communities, even devalued, impoverished communities, than the continual struggle associated with the loneliness and stress of traditional forms of Success.) Hearing people dislike the concept of change associated with deaf people because perceive that group often as something to be protected, helped and served. Taken care of, like fragile china dolls; they Deaf people in closets and keep the door shut and because they look so nice, so clean, behind the golden locks, they let appearances deceive. When two such self-serving desires come together, the result is often disastrous. These artificial islands of existence come out. They look like safe places, but they are, equally, cages...

If we are to confirm that claim of ours that we are not disabled, we need to resist these seductive attempts to create these artificial worlds for us. We need to create coalitions. And the foundation for these coalitions is staring us in the face:

ASL, and bilingual education in general, has been proven to have beneficial effects on developing minds.
Deaf school populations are (for now) shrinking, but the schools and faculty need to be kept in place because history shows us that the Deaf population shrinks and grows with time, as new causes of deafness in the general human population appear or re-appear.
There is a huge national interest in learning ASL.
There are a large number of careers in television, media, education, science, etc. etc. which involve signed languages and Deaf people.

Put these four facts together, and what kind of future do you see for Deaf school environments? What is a reasonable solution for keeping open schools for Deaf children, filling these roles nationwide, utilizing the results of three decades of research into ASL, and preserving the heritage of the people?

Integrate the schools. But do it artificially. And do it in such a way that students are equal, that the languages of instruction have equality.

This is the 'dangerous' part of the idea, the one neither Deaf nor hearing people entirely like. This discomfort, however, encourages rather than discourages me. Bernice Johnson Reagon says again and again that coalition building is not going to work if you feel too safe. Her advice has always struck me as sound. Deaf people will have to give up the "safeness" of their spaces. Teachers and administrators may have to adjust to different standards and methods of instruction. Hearing parents might have to adjust to having their child in a boarding-school environment. But the potential results of having two living languages - in what would be essentially an artificial Martha's Vinyard - would be beneficial for the whole population of this dangerous idea. Alone, Deaf people do not see English as a living language, and embrace ASL with the fervor that musicians embrace notes. Alone, Hearing people do not see ASL as a living language, and preserve their misperception that it is somehow inferior to English. Together, they can develop mutual trust and respect for both cultures.

What are some practical applications of such a concept? Some other dangerous inferences?

Language fluency. It is almost a truism in concepts of Deaf education that all staff must be fluent in ASL. In this model, staff could be at various levels of ASL fluency, but must adhere to a universal model of instruction. To clarify: a hearing child with no ASL should be able to come to the school and see an adult at a similar stage of learning. A Deaf child with perfect ASL who needed work on English should be able to come to school and see a comparable model. Various in-between stages - which are much more numerous - should also be represented.
Environmental visibility of both languages. Resources and visible decorations involving both languages in all core subjects should be present.
Model should be to learn ASL/English for fluency, not "for Deaf people" or "for the Hearing world." This will be the quickest way to destroy a students' natural love of learning language. Excellence in both languages should be respected and recognized.

These are just some elements of my "dangerous idea." Perhaps it isn't really dangerous at all, just new. But I do seriously feel that if we as a community want to improve our lives we need to look to the future.

2008-03-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

10: notes from the holistic bilingual classroom

...and what's amazing is that out of 17 kids the two who refuse to sign are the deaf ones!

It seems contrary at first. The concept of Deafhood helped me understand the implications. They still leave me bemused, but pleased. I'm proud to say that in some aspects I think I've achieved a fully multicultural classroom. I type these notes unobtrusively on my Blackberry in the back of the classroom while watching my students act in an anger management and conflict resolution program run by ENACT. Their goal is to act out common school behavior problems - What To Do About The Annoying Kid, for example - and help students realize better ways to resolve those concerns than the usual (death and dismemberment.)

For today's activities we have two interpreters present in the room, both for my students and myself as well as the actors. I've got two Deaf students, fifteen who hear, in this bilingual English classroom which utilizes both English and ASL as languages of instruction, in keeping with our school philosophy. The Deaf students in my classroom are new to ASL. They've had a mostly oral background, with the support of hearing aids and special staff. I'm probably the first adult they've seen signing regularly, though one came to school knowing some sign language. Their background has been one of being picked on for being different. Here in our school, with Deaf teachers and administrators visible, these students have begun to have pride in themselves, but there are still barriers, and the obvious use of interpreters is one of them. (In a discussion with my Principal we realized these students probably had never been trained or instructed in how best to use interpreters, information all students probably could use.) Instead of paying close attention, they glance at the terps out of the corners of their eyes and (which action showing me they are at least paying attention) sometimes absentmindedly imitate signs; the hearing students try to sign with them but get frustrated at their embarrassment and instead REFUSE TO SPEAK for the visiting team leaders! Instead, several of my hearing students have become true members of the signing community. They feel comfortable, apparently, using ASL interpreters to communicate.

After the class the interpreters came up to me. "That girl, short, Deaf-" "She's not Deaf!" "What! She signs so well!" The fact that the interpreters could not identify who was hearing and who was deaf is such a fascinating little fact to me. The fact that students had become more willing to navigate these pathways of identity and actually act as though they were Deaf was fascinating to me. Even more interesting is that they were surprised afterwards. Their decision to use ASL was just that - a decision. It is a dual language school and they were using both languages. They were completely comfortable with the concept of ASL as a language and felt comfortable - for the activities we enjoyed that day anyway - using ASL to communicate.

The implications of these results, in this type of academic environment, will be interesting. At this stage in my work I feel frustrated by the fact that I am still not totally adept at all the skills I need for assessment and analysis. Some of them I can learn; some must be invented; the need for others, I am sure, exists but has yet to be recognized. Still, it is a powerful phenomenon to witness, and one I'm enjoying.

And the skills will come with time, after all. I just need patience, I think.

2008-02-28T03:48:00.000-08:00

9: thursday morning news & coffee

NOW THIS IS COLONIALISM DEPT: The first cochlear implant patient in Uganda is recovering right now.

A TEAM of American and Ugandan doctors have carried out the first surgery in Africa to implant a device and restore the hearing of a patient at Mulago Hospital.

David Nuwagaba, 23, from Kiruhura district, suffered a chronic infection that left him deaf almost two years ago. But thanks to Cochlear, a US-based company that manufactures implantable hearing devices, his dream of going to university might come true.

But will they also provide follow-up services? The article makes no mention about whether the implant team, which came from America and donated their services, will also stay three years to train Mr. Nawagaba and give him the full benefit of his "gift."

THE WORLD KEEPS GOING AROUND DEPT: Swarthmore College, brother to my own Haverford College, is hosting a conference on Deaf Studies:

Don’t feel intimidated by the lengthy name; the two-day conference is an exploration of deafness from a linguistic, cultural and artistic perspective and as such, it promises to be fascinating.

I really wish I could go! GO EAST COAST! The Bay Area isn't the only place where Deaf people rock! :)

YET ANOTHER PROTEST DEPT?: North Carolina students at NCSD are protesting because their director can't communicate with them directly:

Linda Lindsey is the director of the school. She and several administrators don't know how to use sign language fluently.

They are unable to communicate with students and many teachers without an interpreter.

Lindsey started leading the school nearly four years ago and has been taking sign classes. Still, she is not fluent.

Family members of students we spoke with think knowing sign language should have been a requirement for the leader of the school.

Some complain the students didn't go through proper channels. My response? Those "proper channels" probably didn't know much sign language either!

2008-02-26T17:49:00.001-08:00

8: unexpected truths i have learned while teaching
NOTE: this is kind of an experimental combination English/ASL poem. If you know English, you will get some meaning; if you know ASL, you will understand other meanings. As I said, it's an experiment, so who knows if it's successful?

your job
is to give them chance after chance
(so many of them
have had no chances(or
(at least) none, yet))

do not look at them as anything other than people(such is hard. The system's designed to reduce them numbers. Pizza. Traces; though you touch their lives but briefly each one's the center of a world	stop look-down point center under around no people 1 that-all(understand hard, set-up analyze, breakdown, here-numbers, here-pizza. Fade; doesnt'matter short slow-pass-each-other themself yourself same center globe
remember the class is Language Arts not English; this gives unexpected flexibility (and you have two languages to work with. Twice the examples)	remember class itself title sentence art English-alone not; means merge-can-spread (plus, show double-language, double-knowledge)
inside-understand yourself pull-from-inside, out, give chance, chance, progress. (too many out-there, nothing, chance, chance, take, take, pull-inside, hide-away)

2008-02-23T05:02:00.001-08:00

7: Saturday Deaf News & Coffee Roundup

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD IT BAD DEPT.: In Uganda, over 40 Deaf people are languishing in prison. Why? Because the government makes no provisions for using sign language interpreters:

Alex Ndeezi, MP for Persons with Disability, said the courts do not provide for sign language.

"The deaf cannot communicate with the Police, magistrates and judges," he said on Wednesday.

The MP raised the issues during a debate on the report of the committee on equal opportunities.

This followed a 2006 petition by the Uganda National Association for the Deaf in which the members complained that they were sometimes denied justice. "They are unlawfully arrested and put in detention without trial," they said.

DEAF SCHOOLS ARE CLOSING ALL OVER DEPT.: In the UK, the Frank Barnes school for the Deaf is reportedly under danger of closing. Many American schools also cite shrinking populations as reasons for closing; however, Deaf Studies shows us that historically the Deaf population comes and goes in "waves" in America, and when services and schools close, the new wave must re-invent the wheel. Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it!

THOSE DEAF KIDS ARE CRAZY DEPT.: In South Africa, Deaf students are protesting:

The principal, Thabo Kgosana, said pupils had been boycotting classes since last Monday.

Spokesman for the Limpopo education department, Ndo Mangala, said the pupils accused the school management of not treating them well and the hostels of being in a state of disrepair.

I CAN'T SEE THE WORDS DEPT.: In other news, Canadian Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are protesting the lack of captioning at their elections. Similarly, Tayler Meyer reports not being able to see closed captioning on large televisions at the studio for So You Think You Can Dance. Of course, in-house closed-circuit television would likely be live and not have been captioned yet - but you'd think they could turn one to ABC, don't you? (They already do enough advertising!) American Deaf people have also been frustrated at the lack of captioning access online; however, with the recently-successful Writer's Guild strike in Los Angeles, maybe other groups will begin to see success in their campaign to make the Internet a truly neutral zone.

2008-02-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

6: What standards should Deaf people use to decide at the polls this Fall?

What issues should Deaf people be concerned about this fall? Here's a roundup of what I think we need to be concerned about:

EDUCATION

I fear the No Child Left Behind Act has been a disaster for the Deaf community which will find its legacy written only after many years have passed. It must be changed. Why do I have this gloomy outlook?

The NCLB Act came around the same time that many children who'd had cochlear implants while young hit schooling age. As a result a huge amount of these have been reassigned into mainstreamed classrooms, and cuts to Education in spending bills have meant less and less for services. The effects of this on the Deaf community will be felt; Deaf students will graduate with little to no understanding of how to advocate for themselves, their educational level may be less than average, or there may be some other problem due to the student not having had support of some kind or another which was never addressed. Also, the focus of NCLB on high-stakes testing - such tests already biased towards those whose first language is English - does a disservice to the true assessment of Deaf students.

I think we also need to come together as a country and build a vision of what the future will look like for the Deaf community and for Deaf children. National Deaf organizations need to create a vision for policy regarding Deaf education for the future. Yes, the Deaf population is currently on the decline - but history shows it waxes and wanes in waves. We can set up a system to handle this cycle and take advantage of most recent research regarding Deaf children and all children's education. I'd love to see Deaf schools around the country become bicultural as well as bilingual and start to admit hearing children with a full ASL and English curriculum.

CIVIL RIGHTS

The ADA will not be a battleground for our politicians this year, but it's already suffering after years of attrition from Bush officials. We need a politician who's going to repair the damage that's been done to it by the current administration with the goal of a country that provides an equal opportunity for all its citizens. I still believe Deaf people belong under the umbrella of the ADA, despite being a discrete community with a culture of its own. We have a social disability seriously affected by social prejudice.

We also need to spread rights like closed captioning and access to new areas such as the Internet. The Writer's Guild of America just fought a protracted, many-months battle to get paid for work shown on the Internet. We must not assume that people will "do the right thing." We, too, should begin advocating that Internet materials be made accessible.

HEALTH CARE

Deaf people have specific health care needs, including ASL interpreters at hospitals, which are not being addressed and which are tearing our community apart. We desperately need leadership and support on this issue, as well as to ensure that health plans are unbiased and allow Deaf people to choose what kind of services they need.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

You can check out NAD's list of advocacy issues for other things we should be thinking about when we go to the polls this fall...

2008-02-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

5: A week in the reading life of a deaf teacher of english

When you teach, your reading life is necessarily a tangled mix of subjects: I read books my students should read at their age so as to build connections and help them find books they will personally like, which requires sometimes reading things I don't normally find interest in (but young teen books are often far more positive than adult books, which is a plus.)

I read the theory-books of education and Deaf Studies that feed what I do in the classroom and shape how I teach reading and how I involve American Deaf culture and ASL (the same way, I imagine, a school which specialized in a bicultural Spanish/English environment would try to involve works by Latino/Latina authors and explore the relationship of Spanish to English.) I also read the books you read because... well, when you're an English teacher, you like reading, and that's reason enough.

THIS WEEK'S PROFESSIONAL READS:

THIS WEEK'S PERSONAL READS:

There's an interesting story behind that last book. It was left to me by my great-Aunt Gloria when she died; I was 13. For some reason I decided there was a reason she left it to me, so I took to reading every short mystery contained in the book. The list is considerable; I think it must comprise most of Christie's Hercule Poirot short stories. It was picked up one day by sticky fingers (or an accidential cleaning lady) in the MSSD cafeteria, and I never saw another copy until I hit the Church rummage sale with MS this past Sunday. Of course I picked it up right away, and it's startling how much of the structure of the stories I still remember, and how much it reminds me of childhood.

Reviews will be forthcoming, as the books get done.

4: blogging while deaf - should we sub?

2008-02-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

There's an argument currently going on among some elements of the Deaf blogosphere about whether or not Deaf people creating video logs (vlogs) in ASL ought to subtitle their films in English. I tried finding one to link to, because the topic was interesting to me, but most of the blogposts online seem like grandstanding without much true, focused, on-point discussion: irrelevant. Most of what you'll see here is personal opinion, but I tried to explain why I have this opinion.

I would like to see all videos in one language be subtitled in every other language, but I know this is not the case and probably will never be the case (unless we get a Babel Fish, or a Universal Translator from Star Trek. One can only dream... and wonder if, with a Babel Fish, a Deaf person would be able to instanteously lipread any individual and continue to be happily Deaf?)

Not too many Spanish T.V. programs have subtitles in English. They have subtitles in written Spanish, which is encouraging, but doesn't advance us much.

Most translation websites don't consider ASL or signed languages at all, only spoken languages. (An exception to the English to ASL translation service was TESSA, an avatar unfortunately limited to the language of the British postal service. Moreover, some T.V. programs don't have captioning or subtitles, a result of mixed efforts at government enforcement and elimination of captioning requirements in the form of "relief." Nearly all online services still don't have subtitling available in English. They claim frustration at the high cost and time involved - although Deaf bloggers themselves have proven the cost is far lower than they claim! (Of course, who knows what they charge in L.A.?) In fact, representatives from our community are begging Presidential candidates to caption their videos! (Interestingly, a look at Project ReadOn shows that while Democratic candidates have set up captioned videos, Republican candidates have yet to do so.)

So, based on this evidence, there is no a priori reason for Deaf people to subtitle their own videos. Why? The people who have the money to do it don't want to spend that cash on us. Who do we owe, exactly? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting? There has been no agreement with hearing people, cool as that might be. ("We here sitting at this treaty make this pledge that every video in this great land of America will hereby be subtitled and made accessible by its people to all peoples in our great American quest for unity as we walk our individual paths to fulfillment...") So, yes, in a way, it's true: forcing Deaf people to do this would be oppression, because nobody else has to.

There might, however, be a reason to decide to do this, as a community, for the future. We need to ask ourselves: is that dream a future we want? If so, being the people who see the attractiveness of the destination, we might just have to be the ones to light the way. But if we as a community agree this is a good idea, then those who agree can't just stand around and lambast the rest of the community for not agreeing with their high-minded ideals. We have to provide pathways to help people deal with inevitable problems in language, translation and idiom. I'm sure every blogger posting on the Web wants to reach as wide an audience as possible! But they want to do it while looking good, also, and that requires training and support, much of which is far more easily available to hearing bloggers.

I don't imagine it's going to be easy, but there are solutions and possibilities for intelligent members of the Deaf nation. In fact, in England, many Deaf people were struggling with English captions. But the process of learning how to deal with struggle is how businesses and fields get set up in any community. Spanish-speaking people can go to workers who help them translate into clear English. British Deaf people who were skilled in English offered their services at translation. I imagine the same could be set up for Deaf people here. We could also use interpreters, who, as students, could use the time as credit in their classes and, as professionals, could benefit from learning to understand as many Deaf people as possible - and of course our community benefits from their development in turn!

More importantly, such videos will be very valuable especially for bilingual educational environments. An adequately-captioned video could teach a Deaf child more about constructions in ASL and in English than two or three hours of instruction in a mainstreamed classroom. It could teach a hearing student of ASL more about the depth and richness of our language than six drinks at DPHH in Washington, DC.

Sometimes answers require creativity. Remember, the Internet takes away distance. It should bring us together, not throw us apart. (Of course, so should the education of children, but that's a whole 'nother blog...)

3: Friday Night News Roundup

2008-02-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

Schools being on my mind, I've been looking for news related to Deaf schools and Deaf students - and boy, there's quite a bit. SignOn SanDiego reports that a student at CSD-Riverside threatened his girlfriend with a text message claiming he was armed. There turned out to be no weapons on campus, but these Deaf students in Iraq aren't so lucky.

"It's difficult to attend training sessions when there are gunfights and blasts everywhere. I'm afraid to come out," said Mohammed Jawad Yusif, 20, talking in sign language through his coach. "Sometimes there's no transport because of roadblocks." Yusif said one of his friends, also deaf, was killed when gunmen opened fire on a car he was travelling in.

Much closer to my heart, here in New York, parents are concerned about changes in the Education Department:

The Education Department has floated a plan to place about 30 classes of visually- and hearing-impaired children under the authority of their school's principals, officials familiar with the plan said.
Teachers and parents prefer the current setup, in which the classes are under the umbrella of the city's special education district.
Advocates for the disabled worry that some principals might be less inclined to spend their already limited resources on special equipment or therapy.

Good night. Enjoy Friday...

2: Deafhood and Education

2008-02-15T16:30:00.000-08:00

It's been noted that Deaf people often like to begin with the conclusion, then explain how they got there, a technique used also by Stephen King in the plotting of his book, The Gunslinger. So here, as a matter of experiment, I'll do the same and state this: In order for Deaf people to fully develop in the academic environment, and compete in the workforce, they need some knowledge of English - they don't need to necessarily be completely bilingual, any more than hearing people do, but they should have a reasonable mastery of the vocabulary of their career. How do we achieve this? The concept of Deafhood states that the greatest development of the individual comes when they reach praxis - or a perfect understanding of the relationship between themselves and the world. This, to me, means the Deaf child necessarily must be in a bilingual, bi-cultural cultural school in which numbers of Deaf students and staff are great enough that they be a visible minority, if not the majority - and that hearing children would also greatly benefit from such a linguistic setup.

How do I reach this conclusion? Partly it's intuitive understanding, but even I realize that such a statement's self-deception: all intuition is built of gained or metaphysical (what some might call quantum) knowledge. So either I have some knowledge or sixth sense of knowledge taking me to such a large and dangerous conclusion.

I'll choose knowledge, since what I know of all things metaphysical is earned and no gift. What knowledge do I have? I took several classes in French when I was a child, mainstreamed. In this class our textbooks exhorted us to practice in restaurants with real live French people! (Rather pointlessly, when you think about it: kids from the Italian section of Brooklyn, even in the '80's, were often too poor to do more than grab a bite at McDonald's, or pizza at Frankie's on 3rd Avenue; expensive French bistros were way out of range.) This knowledge was re-discovered years later in graduate school at Bristol, exploring the concepts of Deaf studies, then a new-born discipline delivered from the womb by Dr. Paddy Ladd. There I had the good fortune to take courses in bilingualism, and while comparing various texts it came to me that most "bilingual" texts which focused on Deaf people never discussed techniques for socialization with hearing children which involved both cultures learning the norms and language of the other, while bilingual texts which focused on two hearing cultures with divergent spoken languages always did. Only by fully studying and socializing in both languages could the student be master of both. Only study the new language - and the child remains hampered by its childish understanding of its own language, which is always the stepping stone used to understand the new. Only study its own language - and the child has not maximised its own potential.

So: an environment with students both Deaf and hearing, at least a sizable chunk of the population. But why also the school teachers and staff?

I personally would like if the answers were self-evident, but I understand if they aren't. First, there's evidence a faculty representative of its population often provides a model for that population in its intrapersonal interactions. That in itself is a big statement, so let's give an example: a school with hearing and Deaf children, with no Deaf staff, is not likely to educate children who a) have a healthy respect for Deaf (or hearing) people b) have an understanding of how adult hearing and Deaf people should relate each other c) develop the capacity to anticipate, understand and resolve situations involving both Deaf and hearing people, situations such as the famed "communication breakdowns;" d) become fully fluent at code-switching between both modalities.

That last is most important. I mean, I'm sure there's still some people obsessed with the whole "one language" method. "Oooh, let them be oral! Ooooh, let them learn only ASL!" These are fine, but seem limited to me. Frankly, I'd prefer my kids to know as many languages - spoken AND signed - as possible. More importantly, I'd prefer them to be flexible enough to work in environments containing either languages. That latter requires multiculturalism of sorts - and if the simple fact of establishing such a precedent is all that's required to create an environment with higher levels of language proficiency, why not? Wouldn't that solve the problem of the diminishing problem of Deaf schools, be a totally new attempt to resolve the language-learning issue, create a hearing contingent of the population with greater knowledge of Deaf people and Deaf culture, etcetera, etcetera? And what about the fact that 90% of Deaf children are often born to hearing families, creating a range of variation within each group which has great effects both on identity and language development?

But - does such a curriculum truly lead to bilingual individuals? And where does Deafhood come into it? How and what does the process of identity development of the Deaf person to do with education? I have ideas - ah, but that's yet another post...

2008-01-19T13:27:00.000-08:00

VP and who we are:
or, the effects of the videophone on the deaf world

It takes a lot to make a videophone work. A 20-minute videophone call requires the transmission of roughly half a gigabyte of information, the equivalent of half a DVD: information that once filled rooms of machines operated by punch cards, now reduced to the processing power contained in a machine the size of a hardcover book. A small, expensive miracle.

Which is free, at least to the Deaf community. This little machine which allows Deaf citizens of America to make video telephone calls to each other or through an American Sign Language Interpreter is often called an equalizer; the videophone is provided by a third-party manufacturer, Sorensen, to any qualifying person with a hearing loss, and similar hardware can be purchased from other computer suppliers around the country - and there's always video conferencing. Subsequently the only cost to the individual is the cost of their internet service, and of course the hidden cost of the government taxes assayed to all taxpaying Americans in order to provide the equipment.

And, too, the sign language interpreters provided, free of charge to the users of the videophone. A far greater cost, which is continually assessed. I was a vegan for a long time, and still believe in thinking about and understanding the cost of the things we use to the world around us - and to ourselves. You think about who you are, what that means in relationship to others, the person you want to be. Some people see goodness in religion, or art, or service, and the pursuit of those paths gives them happiness, because they've decided the meaning of their life is embodied by those pursuits. Other people see meaning in independence, from others and from society; still others see freedom from the mundane trappings of life, and attempt a return to nature. This is what humans do to establish that vital little twang in the human song we call ourselves: the wiggling middle finger of humanity.

And I have to wonder, what does it mean to be the recipient of this much charity, and not see the cost? Not just the cost of the interpreters. Our community rarely discusses the physical and environmental cost of this 'free' equipment, the cost to the Deaf community that comes from taking such value for granted. We talk about the benefits, yes, the freedoms, the sharp intake of power which comes from being able to communicate. With all such power, though, should come responsibility; with all such gifts comes price. "The only fair I know is what you pay to ride the bus," a great character once said on Showtime.

What's the fare on this bus? What's the environmental cost of the videophone? Environmental Science and Technology reports on the research of Eric Williams in 2004:

Williams found that manufacturing, using, and disposing of one desktop computer with a Pentium III processor and a 17-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor uses at least 260 kilograms of fossil fuels and 6400 megajoules of energy.

260 kilograms of fossil fuels - for a computer; about six times the weight of a single man. What does it take to send that half-gigabyte of communication leaping across a world in a blazing half-second with a sharpness and clarity the engineers of Star Trek would envy?

What does it cost us to have this removal from humanity? In the writings of Isaac Asimov he describes a world called Solaria, in which people communicate when necessary by the use of screens. I remember an early teacher of mine at MSSD talking about the distancing effect of technology and e-mail, back in 1996. In which direction does this send us?

What is it doing to our use of language? Is it having a standardizing effect on ASL, creating a wider knowledge of language, allowing dialects to spread? What effect does the continual use of interpreters at varying levels of skill have on our community?

And do we have the choice to do things any differently, now we have taken the bait and found it tasty? Are we stuck running down whatever path we've started on? If we decide the ends don't justify these means, will we still be paying the price whether we like it or not? And - perhaps more interestingly - are there ways we can guide the use of this technology for the better development of us all? The innovations created by both Sorensen and Apple (in their standard iChat program) are heartening and fascinating. Yet still I find myself strangely reluctant to use my VP.

I guess I'll always be reminding myself, in the back of my head: there's a cost. One day we may be forced to pay. Or maybe I just don't like looking 10 pounds heavier...