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Who are these deaf people in the workplace?In 1990, in order to try to
understand the working of research teams and after considerable discussion, I published a
paper with an American linguist, on the issues in work with deaf people (Baker-Shenk and
Kyle, 1990). In it we identified a number of
types - a set of descriptors of those who work with deaf people. Some of these descriptions we will consider in the
next section but it is also worthwhile to consider the characteristics of deaf people. It
is easy to repeat the well known points about deafness - that deaf people form a
community, that they have a language and that the relation between the two can best be
described as culture. In this sense, deaf
people are a linguistic minority. But we have
defined deafness often as an absence of hearing and deaf people often describe themselves
in terms of their difference from hearingness. There
is also considerable variation as one would expect in any community. Deaf people may be members
of the cultural group or they may not. Deaf people are active in the deaf community or
not. Their use of sign language may be to a
greater or lesser extent. This fluency and
familiarity with sign language is not simply a function of hearing loss and so it is hard
to predict with any certainty whether the deaf person in a team is deeply involved in
community life. Deaf education has
traditionally had problems in reaching its goals. Taking
the medical model in part, it has tried to remediate problems in spoken language
performance and has succeeded only in excluding literacy
from the range of skills which deaf people might call upon.
Deaf people gain fewer qualifications -
and as a result gain less extensive work experiences. Deaf people entering any work setting are seldom
as well prepared as hearing people are. This
is a point made strongly by Gibson (1994) in suggesting that deaf people do not naturally
and spontaneously pick up the competitive communication skills which hearing people use,
to obtain jobs or attend conferences. From
this point of view deaf people brought in to work with professionals in any team may not
bring with them the personal resources to function effectively on their own. And this is often the crunch, work situations for
deaf people however, enlightened, frequently, for economic reasons, offer an uncertain
contract for a single person. Deaf people
work as individuals within professional teams. Identifying,
the lack of preparedness and training, one solution is to find the most appropriate
training course for the deaf person. However,
this is frequently delivered in settings with other hearing people who may be in need of a
different level of information and skill from the deaf person. The deaf person attends with an interpreter. Professionalisation of roles however, has often
meant a shift to hearingness. In order to be
equal to hearing peers you have to be like them. Deafness
has to be given up or at least held in suspension in order to be accepted either within
the course or within the team itself. The principal types which
result from this situation are superficially independent of the training received at least
at the beginning. In setting out these types,
at this stage, I am not passing a judgement or trying to place a value on any one of these
but they are offered as a part of the discussion leading towards a better understanding of
deaf-hearing relations. Most deaf people join
a team of hearing professionals because of the insight of the group leader and/or other
members of the team. However, other factors
come into play as the post unfolds. These
factors shape the type of response and the person. |
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