Deaf culture and inclusion

DISCLAIMER #1: I will try not to use too much education/special education jargon, but as I am writing this post as a means for me to think about this issue, I may slip into jargon at times, if I do please note it in comments and I will try to explain.
DISCLAIMER #2: This post is a bit long and rambling, it took two days to do and now I need to move on to other topics.

This is a follow-up to the review of Train Go Sorry I did here. In this book, the author, Leah Hager Cohen, discusses how much of the deaf community does not see the idea of having children who are deaf in a regular eduction classroom as a good idea or at least when she was writing this 15 years ago they did not. Cohen discusses how this is viewed as a threat to the deaf community and the deaf culture. That if children who are deaf are placed in regular education classrooms, they will lose parts of themselves and this will destroy the deaf culture. They are afraid that taking children from deaf only schools and placing them in inclusion or regular education classroom de-emphasizes deaf culture.

There is a valid point here. If the deaf culture is defined by the fact that its inhabitants speak another language, ASL. Also this is not a culture that your parents will necessarily pass down to you by the fact that deafness is not a hereditary trait so many children who are deaf are born to hearing parents. Deaf culture is also not like being Jewish or Muslim or African-American or Latino where your parents are in that culture so by you being their offspring you are also ensconced in that culture. Deaf culture grows out of the fact that an individual cannot hear and so being with other individuals who cannot hear provides you with a bond that may not exist otherwise. Deafness extends beyond religious and ethnic barriers, it is not defined by where you grow up or who your parents are, it is a part of you. You are deaf.

This fear by the deaf community also grows out of ignorance by those outside the deaf world. As Cohen points out, up until the mid-1960s ASL was not viewed as a valid communication tool. It may have been used in the home, but it would never have been acceptable in the educational world. ASL was viewed as proof that individuals who are deaf were inferior to their hearing brethren by the fact that ASL meant that the individual who was deaf did not have to speak. It made the individual who was deaf different than their hearing brethren. So many of the schools, including the Lexington School for the Deaf, that Cohen highlights was an oral school. They taught their students to lip read and to to speak English. Even when Cohen wrote the book in 1994, the Lexington School was just beginning to use ASL in the classroom and move to a more shared model of teaching both oral and manual communication. There has been a rise in deaf pride and the desire of many more individuals who are deaf to be able to not be treated as second class citizens and not have to be the same as the rest of the hearing world. With the Deaf President Now movement leading to the installation of the first Deaf president at Galludet University, the largest and best known liberal arts deaf university, there has also been a push by the deaf community to install more administrators who are deaf to schools around the county.

So what does this all have to do with how the practice of inclusion in the public school system affects the deaf community, a lot. In 1975 when Public Law 94-142 was enacted, it provided for the education of many individuals with disabilities to be educated in the public school system. This law has been renamed and is now known as Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). PL 94-142 and now IDEA provide funding and support to state governments to provide public education for children with disabilities. At the same time over the past 20 or so years there has been a push to move away from the separate schools and separate classrooms for children with disabilities to a model of inclusion. This is where children with special needs are placed into the schools that they would attend if they did not have a disability and in many cases into the classrooms that they would attend if they did not have a disability. The idea is that the separate schools and separate classrooms were supposed to be separate but equal, but in many cases were not equal. There is also a lot of research that looks at the fact that inclusion benefits both the students with and without disabilities. (I am not going to go into specifics here, but there is a lot of evidence.) But what happens in the case of students who are deaf, where the teachers probably do not sign and these children now have no role models of successful individuals who are deaf? The deaf community argues children who are deaf need to be around other deaf people to learn ASL: and to be able to see that in a hearing world, even though you are deaf you can still be successful. The whole deaf pride movement also encourages those who are deaf to be around and involved with deaf causes and how are children who are not involved in the deaf schools to know about deaf pride.

The language acquisition of ASL and the need to be around other individuals who are fluent in ASL seems to make a lot of sense to me. I equate it to the language acquisition of other children. We know that children whose parents talk to them and interact with them and who hear a lot of different vocabulary and conversations are more likely to have better expressive and receptive language skills. So why can't the same be said for children who are deaf, why would putting them in a hearing school where they do not have the constant input of ASL language as a means of communication not hinder their language development in ASL over a child who goes to a school for the deaf and is surrounded by peers and teachers who use ASL constantly. I know there are some (many?) who would argue that by placing children who are deaf in regular education classrooms, we give the same opportunities for language development, but it is spoken language rather than manual language. But is that what is in the best interest of the children or is that just our own prejudices that everyone should communicate like us prevailing? Isn't this like the whole if you live in America you should speak English argument? Just because you live in a hearing world, should children have to be able to orally communicate?

As a teacher, I have concerns about public policy that are purported to be in the best interest of all children or all people. How can one law or policy be good for everyone? Each of us is an individual and so one mandate cannot cover every single instance. I am beginning to wonder if maybe the policy of inclusion is not as beneficial to children who are deaf as it is to children with other disabilities. But then what is the solution? It seems to be a slippery slope either way. If we allow for children who are deaf to not have to be in inclusion classrooms or even allow for them to be in their own schools for the deaf, what then stops someone from wanting separate schools for children who are blind or who have autism? Do we have to accommodate everyone and their individual needs for each separate population of individuals with a specific disability? But if we force children into inclusion classrooms, where they are not receiving the best instruction and where the needs of the hearing world are placed above the needs of the deaf community, are we being selfish and prejudiced?

I guess I am no the fence about this and many issues for children with special needs. Policies are set from government officials and school administrators that are supposed to be for the best interest of all involved, but no one policy can fit everyone.

Book Review- Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World

I have not always been a fan of nonfiction books. I find them to be boring and tedious and when I read I like to lose myself in the story and fiction does that better, IMHO. But I have recently gotten on a bit of a nonfiction binge, where I will read a nonfiction book or two and then go back to fiction for a while. And since I do not always like nonfiction, I am picky about what I read, so when I see a recommendation somewhere for a nonfiction book, I tend to like having these ideas from others. (I like fiction book recommendations as well, but nonfiction is where I struggle finding books most of the time.) I saw this recommendation, on a big blog that I read, about this nonfiction book, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World and I knew I wanted to read it. First, it sounded like an interesting and easy read and two, I have an interest in deaf culture and I thought this might be a good book to read to get an insiders view of the world of people who are deaf. I was right on both accounts. This is a fascinating story of life inside the Lexington School for the Deaf. The author, Leah Hager Cohen, spent much of her life living in and around the Lexington School. Although she is hearing, Cohen's father was the principal and then the superintendent of the Lexington School which means she was around the deaf community for much of her growing up years.. She mentions at the beginning of the book that for some of her early years she lived on the grounds of the Lexington School and so was, at least marginally, involved in the deaf culture from birth. Cohen goes back to the school as an adult and acts as an observer to be able to tell the story of this school and by extension a part of the deaf community. She highlights two students, James and Sofia, who are both seniors at the Lexington School, each of whom has their own personal struggles. Sofia immigrated with her family from the former Soviet Union to the United States. She had been to a school for the deaf in Russia and so had learned Russian and a form of sign language, so when she was attending the Lexington School she had to learn English and American Sign Language (ASL). She also became interested in having a Bat Mitzvah, even though she was about 5 years older than the traditional age for this coming of age ceremony. Since she was going to have to read from the Torah, Sofia also had to learn Hebrew in addition to ASL and English.

James is a African-American male who lives in a rougher part of New York City and initially struggled with tardiness and absenteeism when he first entered the Lexington School. The Lexington School finally realizes that the best solution to this problem is to allow James to stay in the residential dorms on the school campus that are now rarely used. James' bother was in jail while the book was being written and James said that if he had not been deaf and gone to the Lexington School he also might have ended up in a gang. James struggles with trying to find his way as an individual surrounded by an urban culture that does not value school and learning and also as someone who needs to learn in order for him to be able to make it in a hearing world. Both Sofia and James are success stories in the book, each of them finds their way on to the next chapter of life with both of them going to an institution of higher learning.

Cohen also intercedes with chapters about her paternal grandfather and grandmother, who were both deaf. She discusses what it was like for them to have traveled from the Old Country, both of them were from the former Soviet Union, and their own struggles as individuals who are deaf. She discusses her father and how he went from living in a household parented by two deaf individuals where he learned ASL to the point at which he kind of stumbled upon the job as an administrator at the Lexington School, where his father had attended. Cohen discusses some of the current issues in the deaf community, at least they were current in 1994 when the book was published and some of them still are very much issues, such as what she refers to as mainstreaming and is now called inclusion to cochlear implants to the rise of deaf pride and how these issues affect the deaf community and deaf culture.

Cohen provides the reader an insight into deaf culture that is rarely seen, or at least I have never really seen it before. She presents the issues that currently plague the deaf culture as it struggles to define itself in a hearing world. Although, Cohen is not always unbiased in her opinions about the larger issues, she does a magnificent job presenting the individual stories with no external opinions and allows each individual to present their own thoughts, feelings and ideas for themselves.

Although I got this book from the local library (yay local libraries), this is one book that I may have to buy at some point as it seems as though it would be a valuable book to read and re-read every so often.