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Contributed by Roger Carver (rcarver@unixg.bc.ca)
The
Challenge: Access, Literacy and the Deaf Child
Plenary
Address by Roger J. Carver, M.Ed. 12th Biennial Convention
of American Society of Deaf Children Vancouver, British Columbia,
June 30, 1990
As
we approach the end of the International Decade of the Disabled
Person, we all have gained a new understanding of the access
needs of disabled persons throughout the world. We all have
learned that we need to eliminate or reduce the barriers to
successful functioning in the general society in order to
lessen the handicaps experienced by disabled persons. For
example, more and more facilities are becoming accessible
to wheelchair users, more and more "talking books"
for the visually impaired, and so on. For many years, the
traditional view that speech is the crucial access tool for
the deaf held sway over this field. However, it has been resoundingly
discredited in recent times. It could be pointed out that
interpreting is now the new access tool for the deaf. It may
be so, but I believe that there is a better access tool that
has been easily and readily available to the deaf for many
years but ignored in favor of other "access tools"
of dubious value. What is this tool? Literacy.
Let
me elaborate. Access does not simply mean being physically
there and able to use such and such facilities. Access does
not simply mean being able to function to a certain degree
in an employment situation. Access does not simply mean technology.
Then just what is access?
For me, access means being alive and spiritually a part of
the society as a whole. Access means being able to function
and participate independently in human affairs on one's own
terms and within one's means and abilities. Access means being
able to fulfill one's own individual potential. In short,
access means being able to participate and function as an
accepted and fulfilled human being.
For me, access means drifting down the Mississippi River on
a raft with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It means creating
a succulent devil's food cake from scratch. It means retreating
from Moscow across the frozen Russian steppes with Napoleon's
exhausted troops. It means understanding how the brilliantly
beautiful butterfly could be magically transformed from an
ugly caterpillar. It means rejoicing in Christ's marvelous
victory over Death. It means disagreeing with Aristotle's
perspective of human nature. It means discovering that Halley's
Comet is actually a dirty, frozen snowball rather than a fireball.
It means being able to write a letter in German to a penpal
in Hamburg. It means fulfilling one's own dreams. All these
and infinitely much more are quickly and easily available
at any time through books, magazines, newspapers, and telecaptioning.
Yet
- all these are inaccessible to a vast majority of the Deaf.
Why?
For
many years, through no fault of theirs, millions of Deaf persons,
regardless of their communication background, have been trapped
in a literacy ghetto from which there was little hope of escape.
Their poor literacy status ensured that they would remain
within a vicious cycle of powerlessness, dependence and marginality,
robbing them of their dignity and their rightful place in
the society. It places an enormous strain on public resources
in terms of expensive educational and academic upgrading programs,
employment preparation, social assistance, and so on. It deprives
them of the opportunity of their own choice. It diminishes
their role in citizenship and political processes. Various
studies over thirty years overwhelmingly show that deaf students
fall far short of their hearing peers in literacy skills and
that there has been little improvement during that time. As
a result, most of them are unable to access post-secondary
education and training. Illiteracy in deaf persons is a universal
phenomenon and reaches all across the communication spectrum.
Is this what we want for deaf children in the 21st century?
Interestingly enough, this poor literacy performance seems
to be accepted by many educators and professionals as being
the norm. If hearing students leave school with an average
of Grade 3 reading skills and if this school considers it
acceptable, you can bet that their parents will form a lynch
mob and march on this school with torches. Yet in deaf education,
parents seem to accept it or are resigned to it. Why aren't
parents of deaf children marching on their schools and demanding
better results?
What
is even more disturbing is that this deaf illiteracy need
not have happened all along. Evidence is mounting in that
full literacy is neither a difficult nor an impossible goal
for deaf individuals and that they can attain a literacy status
at least equal to that of the hearing population, provided
that they have the appropriate tools and a conductive learning
and developmental environment. Many prelingually deaf individuals
have already demonstrated that it can be done. The Canadian
Association of the Deaf, in its position paper on deaf literacy,
believes that the means to such a goal exist and are within
reach but have been consistently ignored. The C.A.D. unequivocally
and utterly rejects the traditional explanation for deaf illiteracy:
deafness and lack of access to spoken language. If that were
the case, there wouldn't be so many illiterate hearing persons.
How
could have this happened? The answer lies in the deficit-model
based traditional approaches in early intervention programs,
education programs, professional training programs and so
on. The deficit model would have us believe that the problem
lies within the deaf individual. The reality is that the problem
lies within the environment by its failure to provide readily
accessible communication and lingustic tools that can be quickly
and easily used by the deaf individual. Traditional intervention
and instructional strategies tended to utilize the deaf individiual's
weaknesses for his/her educational development: audition/speech
and the spoken language of the hearing society. One example
is the Ling Method which actually advocated a delay of reading
instruction for deaf children until the age of twelve on the
grounds that any visual lingustic input would interfere with
their oral skill development1. In short, the deficit model,
rather than making available as much information as possible
in the most accessible way to the deaf child, withholds and
limits it, thereby stunting his/her cognitive ability which
is crucial to language and literacy development.
More
often than not, the deficit model imposes on the deaf child
is a choice not of his/her own choosing, depriving him/her
of self-determination, leading to a feeling of powerlessness.
Many early intervention and teacher training programs tend
to instill in parents and teachers the expectation that deaf
children will have problems mastering language, especially
its written form. This expectation can and does exacerbate
the deaf child's handicap.
What
is the better substitute for the deficit model? The answer
is the difference model. The difference model is based on
the principle that the key to successful educational development
and literary functioning is through child's strengths by using
all his/her functional physical and sensory abilities. The
difference model provides the deaf child the freedom to choose
and employ any tool or technique for lingustic and cognitive
development, giving him/her a sense of control over his/her
own life. In contrast to the deficit model, the difference
model entails the adapting of the environment to the child's
needs rather than the other way around. The bottom line is
to remove as many obstacles from the path of the deaf child's
course of development rather than creating or adding them.
Again, the C.A.D. believes: "The differencce model should
be the guiding principle in the overall development of the
deaf individual in which all his/her intact faculties and
strengths are fully utilized rather than his/her defective
or inadequate faculties."
Deaf
children are endowed with natural abilities; they possess
the same ability to acquire language as hearing children albeit
in a different fashion. Deaf children of Deaf parents tend
to be well-educated and well-adjusted, mostly because they
had a normal and natural development. The visual channel should
never be discounted as a powerful and viable means for cognition
and enculturation. The deaf child can and does learn all about
the world and culture around him chiefly through his eyes.
It
bring us to print language which is perfect for this visual
ability. Many people have been saying that we all need to
make English as visible as possible to the deaf child. I agree.
It was the primary reason why manually coded English systems
were developed: SEE 1, SEE 2, Signed English, and so on. Yet
such sign systems aren't accurate representations of English.
Print English does portray English consistently and accurately
nearly 100% of the time. According to Holdaway, an American
linguistic, the four "bonuses" of print language
are: 1) its permanence; 2) its perceptual stability, availability,
and accessibility at any time - unlike signed forms of English,
it does not vary from teacher to teacher; 3) its feeling of
"comforting concreteness" - eg. books; and 4) its
openness to the interactive and manipulative style of early
developmental learning. Holdaway adds that print overcomes
the major limitations of auditory language.
Realization
is dawning on more and more educators and professionals that
literacy, more than anything else, is the crucial factor that
determines the successful education of the deaf student. The
Canadian Association of the Deaf has declared that literacy
is the key access point to successful functioning in the hearing
world for deaf persons. Employers are more interested in how
well their deaf employees can read and write than hear and
speak. I've worked with deaf adolescents who were mainstreamed
and possessed outstanding speech and lipreading skills. Unfortunately,
these were about the only skills they possessed - most were
illiterate and unmotivated. Many of my deaf colleagues have
told me that they would have gladly traded in their speech
and hearing skills for literacy and practical education.
What
can we all do about this situation? For starters, I'm not
suggesting that we form lynch mobs and torch schools (although
that may be our last resort). Rather I am suggesting that
parents and Deaf adults team up to become vigorous and vigilant
advocates of young deaf children by expecting and demanding
the best from professionals and educators. Half-measures are
no longer acceptable. We can insist that a high priority be
placed on development of literacy in deaf children from the
earliest possible age. We can demand that such programs employ
at least as many writing specialists as speech therapists.
A major goal of education of the deaf should be to instill
in deaf students a sense of independence and a value of reading
and writing by encouraging them to rely on print language
as their major source of knowledge in all subject areas. A
number of deaf persons who acquired their education on their
own in this manner indicate that this is indeed possible.
I bear living testimony to it, as I am one of those self-educated
and highly literate deaf persons.
I
am not about to put the entire burden of literacy development
on professionals and educators. Parents have a very significant
role to play in this too. Dr. I. King Jordan, in his opening
address, is absolutely correct in saying that parents should
not sit back and allow the system to teach their children.
In fact, parents can and do determine the eventual literacy
status of their deaf children, no matter how good the child's
educational programming may be. After all, parents are the
child's first teachers. In my own case, I have my parents
to thank for my own literacy status, which I can without any
false modesty claim is superior to that of most hearing persons.
I was raised in a highly literate environment in which books
and magazines were in abundance and reading was a normal activity.
They showered, in addition to love, children's and comic books
on me. They read books with me every night. Word games such
as "Scrabble", "Password", and "Hangman"
were a favorite and frequent family activity. They took me
to the public library frequently and showed me how to borrow
books. I learned a great deal about the world from four decades'
worth of subscriptions to the National Geographic. They encouraged
me to communicate and carry on conversations with other hearing
people through writing. Through their role modelling, I was
taught to value reading and writing as a necessary, rewarding
and enjoyable activity. Dr. Mark Greenberg said this morning
that parents have to models for their deaf children. He is
right!
If
many of you here are already doing the same for your deaf
children, then more power to you! Your children will thank
you for it. However, for those who do not place much value
on reading as a regular family activity, then I challenge
them to start doing so for their deaf children's sakes. Challenge,
after all, is the theme of this Convention. Deaf children
need to be challenged as well. With challenge comes stimulation
and with stimulation comes motivation, and with motivation
comes a thirst for new knowledge.
Dr.
Jerome D. Schein, a distinguished international deafness scholar,
pointed out during his keynote address at the National Literacy
and Deaf Conference held in Edmonton last winter: Literacy
is not merely a "gift bestowed upon a few by a charitable
body; it, too is a right of all citizens in this democracy.
Since we equate literacy with education, and since the government
provides education for its citizens, it must do so equally
for deaf citizens." He also adds: "The government
makes elementary and secondary education available to all
citizens. If its manner of presenting education to deaf children
does not provide them with equal opportunity to learn, then
the system must be changed. It must be changed, because it
violates the citizenship rights of deaf children." All
I can say is "Amen" to that - to allow the deaf
student to leave with Grade 3 reading skills is a fundamental
violation of his/her human rights.
The
written word is among the most potent tools mankind has ever
devised or possessed; you know how the expression goes: "The
pen is mighter than the sword." Without it, the entire
human civilization will come to a screeching halt. Without
it, millions of people would never have attained higher standards
of living. Never forget this when guiding a deaf child through
the crucial developmental stages.
In
closing, I am not saying that we should focus exclusively
on literacy and make it the only access tool for the deaf.
There are other means that are just as viable I am only asking
that it be assigned a high priority in the development of
the deaf child. For many years, we have been told over and
over again that we have to learn how to live in a hearing
world. I have no problems with it. I agree with Dr. Jordon
that it was important for deaf children to learn about Hearing
culture. What I am saying that literacy is probably the surest
way to learn how to live in a hearing world and about Hearing
culture.
I
challenge all of you here to set a goal for the 21st century:
the attainment of a literacy status for the deaf child equal
to that of the hearing. It is not an impossible goal, and
only through a parternship of parents, professionals, and
the Deaf communities throughout the world, it can be done.
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It Takes a Village to Raise a Deaf Child
