Literacy and Deaf People
Cultural and Contextual Perspectives
Publication Year: 2004
Published by: Gallaudet University Press
Introduction: Reframing Deaf People’s Literacy
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Deaf people’s literacy: This is no new subject. Typically approached as a problem or even a paradox in much of the long-stretching literature, literacy and deaf people have never danced smoothly together. Perhaps because literacy itself is usually defined as (and by) the dominant culture’s literacy, bound to standard spoken and written forms of a language and...
Part I: “Modernizing” Deaf Selves and Deaf Education: Histories and Habits
The Modern Deaf Self: Indigenous Practices and Educational Imperatives
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Traditionally, the cultural practices of Deaf people and their children have had a covert, unappreciated, and unfulfilled impact on methods of educating Deaf children. Whatever influence on education practice Deaf people may have had was from their limited presence as teachers and counselors in schools. In more recent times, as ideas and ideologies have...
What Does Culture Have to Do with the Education of Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing?
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In everyday discourse, we expect culture to point to a particular group and its features (e.g., Mexican culture, Russian culture, clothing, cuisine, and kinship patterns). However, the narrowness of everyday definitions of culture has become especially apparent in education (Sleeter 2001; Kalyanpur and Harry 1999) since some children’s “cultural” backgrounds are...
Double Jeopardy: Women, Deafness, and Deaf Education
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Scholars of Deaf culture locate the birth of this linguistic minority group in schools; the schools are also where intense battles over identity and autonomy developed. Founding the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817, initiated the campaign for permanent, state-sponsored residential schools for the deaf. ASD co-founder...
Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s Autobiography
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I became interested in deaf women’s autobiography as a literacy site for several reasons. From one angle, my interest came from seeing a fair amount of it as the editor for the new Deaf Lives series from Gallaudet University Press, which was initiated in 2003 and which will focus on deaf autobiographies, memoirs, personal essays. Four out of the first six...
Part II: Multicultural and Bilingual Perspectives
The Relationship between Language Experience and Language Development: A Report from Norway
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This study is part of a larger project titled “Bilingualism and Literacy in Deaf Children,” which was developed to gather data on the linguistic status of deaf children in Norway in 1997. Norway has a long history of “education for all” as a basic precept. The Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs established, by law, the right of all citizens to be educated...
Deaf Immigrant and Refugee Children: Institutional and Cultural Clash
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This chapter focuses on immigrant and refugee children who are deaf. In this sense, deafness acts as a complicating, rather than an explanatory, factor in how these children are to be taught. It is essential that the professionals serving these children and their families be sensitive to and account for the cultural interpretations concerning...
Cultural and Linguistic Voice in the Deaf Bilingual Experience
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Within the last decade, there has been an increasing dialogue and sharing between two previously disparate groups: those interested in bilingualism and those interested in raising and educating deaf individuals (Baker 2000). There is a growing conviction that “much of what has been written about bilinguals also applies to deaf...
Struggling for a Voice: An Interactionist View of Language and Literacy in Deaf Education
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We can understand deafness in two ways: as a disabling condition, or as a unique way of perceiving and understanding the world. According to the first view, the essential feature of deafness is the physical condition of not being able to hear. Deaf students are disabled compared to “normal” students—they are hearing-impaired. Under this pathological...
English Literacy in the Life Stories of Deaf College Undergraduates
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There are as many literacy identities as there are students studying the ways of being literate in the various languages and cultures they study. This paper is a discussion of how Deaf undergraduate English majors portray literate identities outside of the cultural identities promoted in school, or more exactly, in the Deaf Education English Literacy System...
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Page Count: 228
Illustrations: 7 tables, 3 figures, 3 photos
Publication Year: 2004