47 pages • 1-hour read
Deaf Like Me
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Background
Cultural Context: ASL and Deaf Culture
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes ableist language and references to anti-d/Deaf bias.
The term “deaf” refers broadly to any people with hearing loss, either from birth or acquired later in life. The term “hard of hearing” is often used to describe people with mild or moderate hearing loss. The term “Deaf” is used to refer to people who participate in Deaf culture, which usually means that they speak ASL as a first or second language. In some cases, “d/Deaf” is used to encompass the overlap between deaf and Deaf individuals. The Deaf community in North America (as in other parts of the world) has its own cultural norms, values, and history.
American Sign Language, or ASL, is the most commonly spoken sign language in the US and Canada. It is also used in some other parts of the world, including some parts of West Africa, Asia, and South America. ASL was originally developed in the early 1800s at the American School for the Deaf. It developed naturally out of Old French Sign Language and some students’ personal or village sign languages. Like all sign languages, ASL is produced using hand shapes, body posture, and facial expressions. It is a crucial element of Deaf culture. Like spoken languages, sign languages have their own grammatical rules and structures. They have dialect variation between different regions.
ASL is commonly spoken by Deaf people, their families, and their friends. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents; those parents may or may not choose to learn ASL. Hearing children born to Deaf parents often speak ASL as their native language and become bilingual in English and ASL. In contemporary Deaf culture, there is a big emphasis on the importance of ASL as the most natural native language of d/Deaf people. Many Deaf activists consider it extremely important for d/Deaf children to be exposed to ASL from as young an age as possible to allow them to communicate effectively and connect to their culture.
Philosophical Context: Manualism vs. Oralism
Starting in the late 1800s and extending to the present day, there has been a major debate about the best way to educate deaf children. Historically, the two major schools of thought were manualism and oralism. Manualism posited that it was best for d/Deaf children to learn ASL and written English so that they could communicate effectively. Oralism suggested that sign languages should be avoided at all costs, and that instead, deaf students should be taught to lip read and to speak English as intelligibly as possible. For decades, many people (including some linguists, physicians, and teachers) did not believe that ASL was a complete language. They believed that it was a crude gesture system that was inferior to spoken languages.
The point of the oralist philosophy was to help deaf children integrate as completely as possible with a hearing society. Many of the strong proponents of oralism, including Alexander Graham Bell, were influenced by eugenicist ideas about disability. They hoped to discourage deaf people from intermarrying and thereby reduce the odds of more deaf people being born in the future. Although some deaf students were able to learn to lip read and speak intelligibly, the process was highly inconsistent. Students who had been profoundly deaf since birth were extremely unlikely to be able to learn to speak intelligibly. Those who did learn to communicate in spoken English still experienced language deprivation, meaning that they were not exposed to a complete language during a critical period of their childhood development. Language deprivation in childhood can make it virtually impossible for an individual to ever develop full linguistic fluency, and it can have serious effects on academics and day-to-day functioning.
Over time, oralism fell out of favor thanks to the work of many Deaf activists. In the second half of the 20th century, ASL, which had long been banned in schools, made a major comeback. Today, most d/Deaf education programs rely on a mix of ASL, written English, lip-reading skills, and speech therapy. There are still a few purely oral preschools for deaf children in the United States. ASL has been recognized as a fully complex language, and Deaf activists have pushed for deafness to be seen as a natural human variation that does not need to be cured or altered. Instead of pushing deaf children to make their disability invisible in a hearing world, contemporary d/Deaf education aims to provide students with accessible learning environments that allow them to thrive.
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