Sociology 3701: Outline--Week 4
I. Groups
II. Deaf Education: Culture, language, and self. What happens if someone of normal abilities is prevented from mastery of language, not by cruelty, but by good intentions?
A. Some key definitions relating to deaf education
1. Oralism: speech and speech-reading, with signing forbidden (and punished)
2. ASL (American Sign Language), with written English as a second language
3. Manualism: combination of speech and speech-reading with signing, often involving signing systems keyed to English language or alphabet
B. Major turning points in deaf education
1. Late 1700s: First formal education of the deaf
2. 1817: First deaf school in the U.S., with a teacher from France. American Sign Language (ASL) a blend of the French signing system and the signing already being done by American students... NOT A VERSION OF ENGLISH... as different from English as Chinese
3. 1864: Founding of Gallaudet College, Washington, D.C. with a manualist philosophy
4. 1880: International Congress of Educators of the Deaf (notice, not deaf educators and certainly not Deaf educators) in Milan, Italy, overwhelmingly endorsed oralism, which became the major official mode of deaf education in most western countries
5. 1960s: disabled rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s began to promote a manualist philosophy
6. 1970s-present. Deaf Culture Movement
Research by Bill Stokoe, Gallaudet College, making the argument that ASL is a full-featured language in every way the equivalent of English or Russian (in fact, many different native sign languages worldwide, all of them full languages)... at first even his deaf students at Gallaudet skeptical of this claim
C. What's wrong with oralism, from a symbolic interactionist perspective?
1. The difficulty of speech-reading
a: 60% of English sounds duplicated in lip movement by other English sounds (e.g., b and p... "where's the baby?" "in the wastebasket" "baby" = "paper"
b. After years of training in oralism, skilled speech-readers catch only 25-50% of words
c. Less than 10% of those born profoundly deaf learn to speak in such a way that they can be readily understood by those who can hear
2. By age 5, a normal hearing child knows perhaps 5000 words; a deaf oralist, perhaps 50... what consequences does this have for the development of thought? what about identity? One of the observations that spurred Stokoe's research was his observation that most of the instructors at Gallaudet had low expectations of their students... What are the consequences of learning many important things rapidly and well, which is the normal experience of childhood, versus learning way more slowly than other children?
3. In what may be crucial early years (how much resilience we have to make up for these deficits later is still being investigated), it is almost as if the deaf child being raised in the oralist tradition has no language at all.
4. Imagine two profoundly deaf people trying to understand each other via speech reading
D. The rise of a Deaf culture movement
1. Stokoe again: the anthropological linguists told him that you can't study language without studying the culture. "...when I had been at Gallaudet a short time, I realized that deaf people had a culture of their own." Presented his findings to the faculty at Gallaudet and was "bombarded by hostility." Yet he'd seen that in their non-classroom lives, most of the students used a different system of signing than the one used by their mostly hearing teachers in the classroom.
2. ASL permeates Deaf world. Deaf people dream in sign, deaf babies of deaf parents "babble" in sign
3. Social movement by Deaf people promoting Deaf schools (not manualist but ASL), Deaf clubs Deaf society. .... episode at our church, with Deaf girl leaving Duluth to live in a more fully Deaf community
4. From this perspective, Deafness is not a disability... The Deaf constitute a linguistic and cultural minority. "Would you want a cochlear implant if it held out the promise of joining the hearing world?"
4. Relations of Deaf and hearing: Implications of "Children of a Lesser God" to the contrary, 4 of 5 Deaf people marry other Deaf people
5. Theatre and dance. ASL involves facial and body expression to a much greater extent than English and lends itself to the expressive arts.
E. Issues and implications
1. Parents and children: unlike other minorities, 90% of profoundly deaf children born to hearing parents... how should parents and their Deaf children relate to each other? What would you do if your daughter were born deaf? (See poem)
2. Linguistic relativity again... English very linear, ASL more simultaneous... not a word thing, but a mind thing... what new insights into culture and language come from a language that is not a flow of words but gestures
Articles in 2005 about the invention of two new sign languages, one in a Bedouin village in southern Israel, one in Nicaragua. About the research in Nicaragua, Steven Pinker (formerly a faculty member at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, now in the Psychology Department at Harvard) says: "This research has made some of the most interesting discoveries in language acquisition in decades."
II. Language and culture: the Anishinabe Experience