A critical sociocultural turn in deaf education: operationalizing the Enduring Principles of Learning within the bright triad

The field of deaf education has long been characterized by conflict between those who view deafness as a disability and those who view it as a cultural and linguistic difference, but two recent developments are adding fuel to the fire on both sides: 1) the dramatically increased quality and availability of cochlear implants, widely interpreted as a ‘cure’ for deafness; and 2) mounting research evidence that the human brain has no preference for language modality and that fluency in a signed language supports, rather than impedes, acquisition of a spoken language. These two developments, set against each other, have created a viciously divided landscape in deaf education that only harms the children it is intended to serve. In this essay, we work toward resolving what we see as an unnecessary and misplaced tension between sign bilingualism and oralism. Borrowing from Skyer’s (2020) recent interpretation of Vygotskian theory, we conceptualize deaf education as a fundamentally critical sociocultural enterprise, one that requires us to push back against ableist mindsets and compels us to acknowledge the strengths and assets that each child, who is first and foremost a social being, brings to the learning environment.

We are far too familiar with the language of what deaf children can’t do: They can’t hear articles or suffixes; they can’t read at grade level; they can’t compose a grammatical sentence. Most positive language about deaf children’s abilities is reserved for those who appear most like hearing children, who can speak clearly or decode unknown words using auditory-oral skills. The perceived deficits of deaf children are not inherent to deafness, however, but to an oppressive educational system constructed by non-disabled people. The deficits we perceive, and the language we use to describe them, are imposed by an ableist hearing majority. Hearing people have created a world, a set of languages, and a pedagogy explicitly built for the biosocial make-up of hearing people; it is no surprise that deaf children appear disordered within this system (see Henner and Robinson 2021).

In illuminating Vygotsky’s thinking on deafness and the education of deaf people, Skyer (2020) implores us to see and understand deaf children differently through what he refers to as Vygotsky’s bright triad: positive differentiation, creative adaptation, and dynamic development. Taken together, Skyer argues, this trio of principles captures ‘the optimistic spirit of Vygotsky’s deaf pedagogy’ (582), which centers strength over deficit, gain over loss, creative alternatives over barriers. Each of the three elements of the trio will be explained in more depth in the sections of this essay that bear their names as headings.

We have long had Vygotskian pedagogy operationalized for classroom practice (Tharp et al. 2000; Tharp 2006), in what is called the Enduring Principles of Learning (EPL) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Enduring principles of learning.

This essay addresses the question: How might the Enduring Principles of Learning (EPL) be operationalized within the bright triad of Vygotsky’s optimistic deaf pedagogy (Skyer 2020) to contribute to a critical sociocultural turn in deaf education, even beyond the previously posited psycholinguistic turn (Howerton-Fox and Falk 2019). By integrating the EPL and bright triad frameworks, we offer an innovative path forward that is transformative, relational, courageous, and culturally sustaining (Teemant et al. 2021). It is organized around the bright triad in three parts: positive differentiation, creative adaptation, and dynamic development.

Positive differentiation

Skyer (2020) defines positive differentiations as ‘biosocial mechanisms used by deaf persons in social contexts that recognize differences as assets to deaf educational development’ (581). He argues that these positive differentiations are ‘natural expressions of deaf learning’, which parents and educators should seek to expand rather than reject (581). Vygotsky (1993) explains, ‘along with a physical [disability] come strengths and attempts both to overcome and to equalize the [disability] […]; these tendencies give uniqueness to the development of the [child]; they foster creative, unendingly diverse, sometimes profoundly eccentric forms of development, which we do not observe in typical development’ (33).

Framed within the Enduring Principles of Learning (EPL), recognizing and expanding deaf children’s positive differentiations requires teachers to act as full partners in their students’ learning through shared experiences and conversations that enable teachers to understand how their students see the world and interact with it. Enacting positive differentiations means teachers collaborate with their students on shared products (Joint Productive Activity, JPA) contextualized within the students’ lived experiences (Contextualization, CTX). Through ongoing Instructional Conversations (IC), the teacher intentionally works within the student’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (i.e. on tasks the child can achieve with minimal support) to support learning through Challenging Activities (CA). Further, through such in-depth collaboration and dialogic inquiry, students and teachers can explore multiple perspectives regarding topics and issues and co-construct solutions to locally relevant problems, thus taking a Critical Stance (CS) to transform problems of inequity. This kind of differentiation also supports teachers in using deaf students’ existing communication strengths in language and literacy in various learning contexts to grow them. Through positive differentiation, teachers may more accurately assess their deaf students’ learning. Stiggins (1999) argues that teachers play a critically important role in their ongoing assessment of children, which is much more relevant to daily instruction than any yearly summative assessment. Teachers’ moment-to-moment analyses of children’s knowledge, understanding, and abilities determine how to scaffold learning to meet desired learning goals. When teachers work with small groups of students, they can individualize assistance responsively.

Creative adaptation

For Skyer (2020), creative adaptations are ‘innovative interactions between deaf students and their sociocultural-educational milieu’. Skyer argues that salient abilities, or ‘deaf gains’, are inherent to deaf children but that ‘they must be stimulated and developed from within by purposeful action’ (581). Vygotsky (1993) emphasizes the role of the teacher in assisting each child in charting their unique developmental course: ‘If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a [non-disabled] child, then the child with a [disability] achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means. And for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course, along which the child must be led’ (34). Citing Vygotsky (1993), Skyer (2020) argues that ‘deaf pedagogies must acknowledge ‘the necessity of creating special cultural tools’—built for and with deaf learners’ (581). Both Skyer and Vygotsky, in other words, are calling for culturally sustaining pedagogies for deaf children (Alim and Paris 2017), in which the starting point of learning is the deaf child’s world. The Enduring Principles of Learning (EPL) offer pedagogical practices that can help make instruction culturally sustaining for deaf children.

Teemant et al. (2020) observe that ‘learning can only become culturally sustaining when content and practices value and build on students’ sociocultural resources, knowledge, experiences, histories, languages, and social identities in ways that honor and affirm students’ (4). Environmental, process, and product differentiation is not only possible, but easily achieved through the EPL instructional model: use of simultaneous, and differentiated small group instruction. The teacher decides how to group students (homogeneously or heterogeneously) based on learner needs. The level of desired student interaction can be tailored to tasks, leading to limited interaction, extended peer interaction, or differentiated levels of assistance in the process of learning. In the EPL classroom, a teacher enacting a Joint Productive Activity (JPA) and Instructional Conversation (IC) would be providing the highest level of assistance when collaborating with a small group of homogeneously grouped students. By meaningfully grouping students, the teacher offers equitable assistance based on ongoing assessment and response to students’ learning development.

Dynamic development

Skyer (2020) centers the principle of dynamic development on the assumption that ‘deaf students’ developmental arcs unfold similarly to those of nondeaf students, but with important differences that must be acknowledged’, and that ‘key changes to social ordering and educational discourses must occur, including adaptations to the design of physical settings and to modes of knowledge, communication, and language used in them’ (581). Vygotsky (1993) compels us to grapple with the notion that it is not the child’s physical difference that needs to be addressed by educators, but rather the difficulties deriving from that difference, which are fully socially constructed.

Teachers must go beyond creating space to notice and enhance deaf children’s positive differentiations through shared projects (Joint Productive Activities, JPA) and sustained conversations (Instructional Conversations, IC) to achieve dynamic development. They must also adopt a Critical Stance (CS). That is, teachers must begin to question how to reorder the world so that deaf children are no longer cast as deficient adaptors. The expertise and contributions of deaf people have been made invisible in the content and culture of schooling mirroring wider society. There is no doubt that deaf ontology differs in difficult, if not impossible, ways for hearing people to comprehend fully. Nevertheless, for those who intend to teach deaf children, dynamic development requires those teachers to be armed with a genuine ethic of inquiry and care. To be transformative, teachers must be serious about understanding the lived experiences and social contexts of their deaf students, which will likely involve stepping into spaces that make them uncomfortable from their positionalities as hearing people.

Concluding thoughts

As educators, we have a moral obligation to expose the inequities in the system that continue to oppress the very children we are called to liberate. The Enduring Principles of Learning provide ways for teachers to operationalize principles of equity and pedagogy in their work with deaf students, creating the optimal conditions for learning. Such learning environments also provide the ‘dialogical spaces where all the lived experiences and worldviews can be heard’ (Leistyna 2009, 52), which is particularly important for deaf students and their teachers. When teachers reliably create such learning spaces in deaf education, we might begin, as Vygotsky (1993) argues, ‘to shift from a clinical-therapeutic approach to a positive, creative pedagogy’ (50) and ‘develop the enormous deposits and deep layers of psychological health’ (72) within deaf children. Then, we must proceed until the normal continuum of human ability is a cultural norm, and every child is seen for what they uniquely bring instead of what they lack.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).