Deaf Epistemology, Sign Language and the Education of d/Deaf Children

Abstract

One of the traditional areas of concern in educational foundations has been philosophy of education, and within philosophy of education, a central focus has been epistemology. Defined as the branch of philosophy dealing with the study of knowledge, in the past half-century approaches to the study of epistemology have evolved in significant ways. The rise of ethnoepistemology is perhaps one of the clearest examples of such changes. After a brief overview of the concept of ethnoepistemology, we argue for the existence of a distinctive deaf epistemology. We then offer a discussion of some of the ways in which this deaf epistemology is reflected in American Sign Language (ASL). The article concludes with a discussion of the ramifications of deaf epistemology for deaf education.

Notes

1 The deaf cultural and linguistic community is referred to in many different ways: it is called the “deaf community,” the “deaf culture,” “Deafhood,” and in ASL, it is referred to using the sign DEAF-WORLD. Historically, the term “deaf” was virtually always used to describe individuals with audiologically impaired hearing. As awareness of sign languages grew, so too did an understanding of sign language users as members of a distinctive linguistic and cultural community. In order to indicate the difference between individuals who were audiologically deaf and those who were culturally and linguistically deaf, in the 1960s and 1970s it became common to adopt a distinction between deaf and Deaf: the former referring to deafness solely as an audiological condition, while the latter referring to Deafness as a linguistic and cultural condition. Although this is a valuable distinction, it is also an oversimplification of a very complex reality. More recently, writers have tried to address this problem by using d/Deafness, indicating both groups. It is important to note that even this solution, though, is problematic much of the time, since it reinforces the idea that there is an absolute difference between the DEAF-WORLD and the hearing world. We have therefore chosen simply to use the lowercase deaf here, with the understanding that deafness is not only socially and individually constructed, but that its construction is complex and multilayered. In quotations of other authors’ work, we have accepted whatever the original usage was.

2 Although the arguments presented here apply to deaf people in all countries, the specific case with which this article is concerned is that of the deaf community in the United States; thus, where examples from a sign language are given, the source language is American Sign Language.

3 We have followed the common practice of indicating a particular ASL sign by writing its English equivalent in capital letters (e.g., BOY). When signs require multiple English words to represent a single sign, the English words are joined by hyphens to indicate that although there are several English words used to express the meaning of the sign, there is only a single sign (e.g., I-ASK-YOU, DEAF-WORLD).

4 Audism refers to “the notion that one is superior based on one’s ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears” (quoted in Bauman, 2008, p. 13), and is the equivalent of terms such as racism, sexism, ageism, linguicism, and so on (see Bauman, 2004; Eckert & Rowley, 2013; Stapleton, 2016). The term was first coined by Tom Humphries in an unpublished paper in 1975, but did not come into general use until it was used in Lane (1992).

5 There is no question that ASL plays an important role in the construction of a deaf worldview, and that it is a very significant component of deaf identity (see Baker, 2010), but its position in the DEAF-WORLD is not really as clear as is frequently claimed. In reality, the ASL speaker community varies not only in terms of the degree of fluency of many deaf people, but also with respect to a number of other factors. Not only do the child’s family background and educational experience play a significant role in his or her fluency in ASL and his or her attitude toward and beliefs about ASL. There are also many varieties of ASL used in the United States: for example, there are many geographic variations in ASL, there is Black ASL, there is Lengua de Señas Mexicana-ASL contact signing in border areas between the U.S. and Mexico, and there are various sign languages brought to the U.S. by deaf immigrants from other countries. The result is that the actual ASL proficiency among many deaf people varies considerably, and proficiency alone in ASL is not a sufficient measure for identification with the DEAF-WORLD. Rather, what distinguishes deaf people from hearing people with respect to language is their attitude toward ASL, and their preference for ASL as the most natural and potentially liberating linguistic medium for most of their communicative needs.

6 The question of the native language of the deaf child is both complex and sometimes controversial. For deaf children whose parents are deaf, and who are raised in a home in which ASL (or some other sign language) is used as the vernacular language, then that sign language is without question the child’s native language. However, such children constitute only about 10% of the deaf population. Most deaf children have hearing parents, whose language is a spoken language—and most of whom do not sign, or who are at best only beginning to learn to sign. This means that these children cannot typically be said to speak their parents’ spoken language as a native language, nor, prior to acquisition of a sign language, is a sign language really their native language (though it might well be considered to be their natural language or even L1, in spite of its generally late acquisition).