Deaf people are angry. This is a common stereotype among speech therapists and audiologists who work with Deaf children. The truth is that Deaf people strive to be seen and are tired of being marginalized, like many other minority communities in the U.S. It’s exhausting trying to excel in a system that considers you inferior. Many of the administrators of newborn hearing screening systems, directors of special education, pediatric audiologists, and speech therapists believe they know what is best for Deaf children.
It takes an enormous amount of perseverance, resilience and determination to improve the experiences of the next generation of Deaf children and their families while experiencing the absurdities and paternalism that abound in daily interactions, as a Deaf person, with the medical and education system that is supposedly “for” Deaf children and people.
Right now the US is having a reckoning with its historically white majority based policies and systems. People are waking up to the fact that what white people thought was best, was not best for all Americans. What have been considered best practices, actually propagate marginalization. Capitalist businesses discriminate. Equal opportunity is often not equal. Bias abounds.
Karl White, whose entire career has been built on the lives of Deaf babies as the the founding Director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management (NCHAM), recently publicly applauded the Meinzen-Derr et al research as an “important study” in the education of Deaf children. This Meinzen-Derr et al research was recently published in the January 30, 2021 edition of the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Karl’s response article was published in the same journal on February 2, 2021. This research found that the implementation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) which is the incorporation of visuals, such as gestures, manual signs (aka sign language) and aided communication via an iPad, greatly improved Deaf children’s speech skills. This is no surprise to the small segment of Deaf education that is built upon the wisdom, experiences and cultural wealth of Deaf people. Deaf children tend to be visual learners. It has been proven that Deaf children, while reading, see more of the words at a time than hearing children. There is a wealth of research by Deaf professionals that proves the use of sign languages, visual languages, statistically improves not only language outcomes but academic performance as well as spoken language measures in Deaf children.
Karl White’s article, “Progress in Helping Children Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing Achieve Their Potential”, is yet another example of research by hearing professionals being lauded by other hearing professionals as advancing Deaf education while dismissing the wealth of research by Deaf professionals and the experiences of Deaf people. They are patting themselves on the back for what is already known amongst those who have suffered under the current widespread Deaf education and medical system which actively marginalizes sign language and those who use it.
Karl mentions the ongoing active debate about methods to educate Deaf children and the historical Milan Congress of 1880 which banned the use of sign language in the education of Deaf children. This devastating ban imposed by those in power, white hearing people, is directly linked to the current low academic results prevalent in Deaf children and the loss of numerous jobs for Deaf educators. Karl considers the article in this issue of Pediatrics by Meinzen-Derr et al, “refreshing and encouraging” in regards to the “best way” (note singular) to educate Deaf children. I would argue it is only “refreshing” because it’s results are blindly focused on the spoken language outcomes that come with use of “manual signs” and visual aids. Karl’s bias allows him to dismiss the “systematic, well-implemented research” conducted by Deaf professionals. Their results have shown time and time again a positive correlation between academic outcomes and the use of “manual signs”, otherwise known as sign language. He somehow categorizes these published research studies as “emotional arguments.” These researchers note that spoken language improvement often parallels general language development gains, however their research primarily focuses on developing Deaf children’s brains rather than speech. (Caselli N, Pyers J, Lieberman AM, Deaf Children of Hearing Parents Have Age-Level Vocabulary Growth; 2021, Matthew L. Hall, Wyatte C. Hall, Naomi K. Caselli, Deaf children need language, not (just) speech 2019 https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723719834102