Villains, Fools and Heroes: Social types in the context of Swedish deaf education

ABSTRACT

During the last two decades, the teaching of deaf students in Sweden has been characterised by a change of ideology. The aim of this study is to elucidate the consequences of this alteration on teachers of deaf students. Teachers whose training took place a good many years ago and is now held to be 'wrong' are working alongside younger colleagues, who were trained according to an instruction method rooted in the ideology now considered to be 'right'. The attitudes which have evolved between the two categories of teachers are similar to those that prevail between the conformist and the deviant. The study was based on semi-structured interviews and, to a lesser extent, on document analysis. Its analytic points of departure were inspired by a version of Klapp's conceptual triad, 'heroes, villains, and fools'.