My partner spends her work week corralling 3-year-olds and exposing them to school for the first time in their very young lives. Some of them are not potty-trained, most of them enter the year crying for their parents and all of them have a hearing loss of some degree or another. The challenging part of all of this, as if there needed to be more complication, is the children (because of their hearing losses) generally come in to the classroom with very little language and quite often none at all. Her job is to teach them to speak; sometimes with their voices, sometimes with their hands. I think what she does is nothing short of miraculous, a fact she would never admit.
The other side of the world in which she exists professionally revolves around heated debate over auditory-oral and total communication modes of education. It's a debate that is nuanced on many levels and far too complex to adequately explain in a single blog post and yet, here is a ludicrously brief synopsis of each:
The auditory-oral methodology uses techniques for teaching communication by working with residual hearing (whatever hearing an individual still has) and speech in order to equip the individual with the ability to communicate self-sufficiently. Essentially, they want an individual who is deaf/hard of hearing to be able to speak and hear as accurately as an individual who is hearing.
The total communication philosophy attempts to maximize an individual's ability to communicate by using whatever works best for them. This may include but is not limited to various types of sign language, body language and natural gestures, visual cues and auditory/speech training. The aim is to provide each individual with the most suitable avenue to effective communication (which will look different from person to person).
The two "camps" are divergent initially in that one is a methodology and the other a philosophy and become more convoluted when expanding the debate beyond the education system. Questions emerge over the tension between a majority hearing culture and minority deaf culture, the influence of money from cochlear implant and hearing aid companies behind the push for auditory-oral teaching and even the very definition of disability. It all illustrates nicely some of the more telling pieces behind our reactions and interactions with difference.
I don't think that deafness and deaf culture would be so problematic for a hearing society if they weren't so adamant about remaining happily and productively deaf. To many who live within deaf culture, deafness isn't a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured, something that we hearing people either don't want to hear or don't understand how to hear. For the rest of us (those who communicate by voice and ear) this kind of difference is inconvenient. It might require us to exist (if only for a moment) in a world where we're not entirely at ease. It would mean having to grapple with a culture we're not comfortable around and have very little knowledge. It might, in fact, feel something like a deaf person interacting with a hearing culture on a day-to-day basis. It's horribly privileged to think we need to fix what someone else doesn't identify as a problem simply because it's an inconvenience for us.
My partner recently shared a story with me about a friend who works in a school system where there is a student whose primary care-taker is a deaf grandfather. No one wants to deal with the grandfather because it's difficult and the school has all but stopped trying to communicate with this individual because he is "stupid" and "illiterate". He'll sometimes be waiting in the parking lot for hours before dismissal to everyone's concern and school officials have actually been close to calling the police because he "touched" a student. The problem with all of these characterizations is that they're completely a product of the school's ignorance and unwillingness to learn. He's neither stupid nor illiterate. He uses American Sign Language (ASL). ASL does not use English grammar and sentence structure so when this man uses English to respond to notes written home by teachers you'll generally find that nouns and verbs aren't in the expected place because ASL follows a French grammar and sentence structure. He waits in the parking lot for hours at a time because no one has been able to effectively communicate to him the days that are early dismissals and the days that aren't. His concern is that he won't be there in time to pick up his grandchild so he errs on the side of caution (which I think makes him a good parent). And the "touching" of the student business? The student had dropped something and the grandfather noticed and attempted to get the student's attention. In deaf culture, one doesn't yell at the other person, because, well, obviously. What people who are deaf usually do is tap each other on the shoulder, which is exactly what he did to this student. And for all of this man's troubles he is treated as unintelligent, weird, creepy and a security risk. God forbid. The heartbreaking piece for me? These are daily things most deaf people run into, mostly because the rest of us hearing people are too busy or too lazy to care.
Sometimes I can't help but hear comments made by people screaming about homosexuality ruining marriage or how black people need to get jobs and illegals need to go back home. They ring in my head long after they're said as if I'd just heard them, like those things tend to do when you're disgusted by hate and frustrated by misunderstanding. It's hard to reach for compassion and empathy when I hear those things and it's rarely ever the first thing I want to do. If nothing else, we could all be better teachers and listeners. PBS has a wonderful documentary, Through Deaf Eyes, that gives a good look at 200 years of deaf history. I recommend a watch if only for the history lesson.
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