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Deaf Teachers This situation is both helped and hindered by the presence or absence of deaf teaching staff. In many countries deaf people are disallowed from becoming teachers by law or by the system of training which is offered. Many systems insist that deaf staff in school use their voice at all times. Deaf people who are able to work through the obstacles of the education system are often those who have succeeded in an oral system and may have had to deny their own language. This can work both for bilingualism (in a determinism to ensure that other deaf children do not endure the oppression) or work against bilingualism (if the deaf person feels that all children can be successes like themselves). Deaf Hearing Relations and the position of the deaf member of staff The alternative scenario is the introduction of deaf people without qualifications as helpers or part-time workers. These arrive because hearing people have shown sufficient insight to see the need for language models. However, their status is questionable because of the control retained by hearing teachers. The bilingual model which results means that sign language is associated with the lower status deaf helper and the spoken/written language is linked with the power of the hearing person. Deaf staff need to feel that there is a true commitment to bilingualism and will need to have a priority of sign language in many contexts for them to believe that bilingualism is a true commitment. Staff meetings, leisure time, in-service courses all need to be signed. Hearing staff will need to be bilingual to create the correct language environment. In order to understand the situation, we need to consider its origins and then how it has progressed. Deaf schools were traditionally (and sometimes still are) places where hearing people try to encourage deaf people to learn about the hearing world. Based on a assumption that the curriculum of hearing children is suitable for all in our society, deaf children’s deviance and difficulty is pronounced. The education of the deaf Industry was set up to deal with this perceived problems. It is mean to be remedial - ie to fix the problems if deaf children. To lead a “normal life “ the deaf child is meant to acquire all the skills of a hearing child and in the language of the hearing child. This last point has always been the stumbling block and the whole of deaf education in the UK has focused on the perceived weakness of deaf children in the language of the community as a whole. When this view began to change, teachers realised the need to bring deaf people back into education. As a result, deaf people who had previously been punished for their use of sign language were told that it was now OK and so they should come back to work in the school - sometimes alongside the teachers who punished them.. Not surprisingly this provoked hesitation on the part of the deaf person, which was offset by their success in engaging with the children. In reality, they discovered that the change among teachers was only partial and did not really mean an acceptance of deaf people’s sign language but more an attempt at soft assimilation - the idea was to gradually drop sign language so that deaf people could enter the world of hearing. So the commitment to use sign language is focused entirely on the classroom and not outside - it has become a teaching tool and not a language which is valid for all transactions. Because of a range of other attitudes, the language is and was difficult to learn and so the situation occurs that deaf people work alongside bilinguals who are hardly fluent in the language and certainly have not been trained in deaf culture. The result is more frequent culture clashes and broken expectations. Schools tend to be bilingual in the class only and the teachers seldom have bilinguality. The net result is that the curriculum remains a written or spoken one and is discussed and developed in a hearing context. Deaf workers in school remain isolated. When this situation alters in a later stage of development there are still differences. Deaf people see the issues in terms of language use which hearing people think of competence (their own) and the management of the school. As soon as the official language of the school becomes sign language then there is a major shift in the balance of power and a major possibility for deaf self realization. But there remains the difficulty of qualification. Deaf people are not entitled to be teachers as they do not possess the certificate to prove that they can teach. The problem is that this creates a situation which is ludicrous where deaf people who are not allowed to be teachers are the only ones who understand the children. The nature of the bilingualism is then unsatisfactory with deaf and hearing people working in different ways. |
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