Areas of growth and change

Interestingly, the media are much more interested in deaf people than ever before and as a consequence, opportunities in Higher Education have increased; more interpreters are being trained than in the past.  At the same time, the north-south divide in Europe is highlighted by these factors.  Although Scandinavian initiatives in education and social provision have grown, Mediterranean Europe lags behind.  It would seem that there remain gross imbalances throughout Europe.

Nevertheless, on a positive note, we can see that deaf people have the same level of intelligence as hearing people.  There is considerable evidence that deaf people perform in cognitive non-verbal tasks just as well as hearing people.  In certain visual tasks they perform better.

Also sign language is to some extent recognised and researched by linguists and psychologists.  In many European countries there are teams of researchers studying and documenting aspects of sign language and its grammar.  Usually, these teams include deaf people;  significantly there are no teams led by deaf people - at least none in Universities or in Public Laboratories or Institutions.   In some places, the deaf staff are not fully recognised staff.  Hearing people unable or unwilling to challenge the establishment, appoint deaf people as anything other than academic research staff.  Deaf people rarely achieve the status which would widen the horizons of others.  Even when the job involves study of their own language, deaf people occupy lower status jobs.

This is often recognised in some ways and a caring society tries to integrate its disabled groups.  When society tries to include deaf people, sometimes the results are exclusion.  Although civil rights are invoked as a stimulus to inclusive education and as a means of informing society of its disabled members, the reality for many deaf children is that integration highlights isolation by making the contrast between themselves and hearing children more obvious.  When education is competitive, deaf children appear to do less well than their hearing peers.

Often the cause of the problem is located in the condition of deafness itself.  Deaf people may suffer from continued medical intervention.  The search for an elusive cure for deafness continues.  As long as Medicine treats deafness as an illness, there will exist the right of intervention for medical practitioners.  Parents will be convinced of the need to cure the illness.  New operations on their own children will be accepted and embraced by parents.  However, there is often no clear guidance from deaf people themselves, when they are parents.

Although in the last twenty years, researchers have re-discovered sign language (there were excellent descriptions available in the 19th century e.g. Tyler, 1864), it is often the case that deaf people are not aware of their own language’s rules.  They have had little access to the research findings of the teams mentioned earlier.

Access to information is commonly seen as a priority but it is problematic for deaf people.  The reason is simple:  there is as yet no good means of disseminating information in a  sign language form other than in live presentation.  In order to obtain information deaf people have to attend lectures.  Videotapes with instructional material are not effective or convenient as they are wholly serial in overall structure - the viewer has to play the tape from the beginning to the end and in the correct sequence.  This makes it more time-consuming to extract information from fixed sources.  Compared to hearing people’s access to books, deaf people are much worse off in their use of video.

For hearing people, the explosion in knowledge which came from the invention of printing was in having available a non-serial means of information gathering.  A book can be opened on any page and the reader can move around almost at will.  Books are also readable anywhere.  On the other hand, signed videos are often translations of spoken text or are insertions of interpreted text in programmes made for hearing people.  It would seem that other than in Denmark where there has been a stronger tradition of use of this medium, the videotapes which are currently in circulation are having a rather limited impact.

Such a lack of dissemination has a further knock-on effect.  The discoveries of researchers are not presented to deaf people in a meaningful form; deaf parents are not convinced of the status of their own language and are likely to adopt a majority position in trying to implement a speech policy at home - in order to prepare their hearing children for the hearing majority world.  Significantly, we have also come across deaf parents speaking to deaf children, rather than signing.  This language insecurity leads to distorted communication at home and limited development of the natural language.

The course is copyright
to the Centre for Deaf Studies and the Lecturers named above
and should not be used for any other purpose than personal study.
© 2000

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This page was last modified January 25, 2000
jim.kyle@bris.ac.uk