Cash In on ASL Education Now!

Today it is difficult to recapture the feeling of the vast theoretical shift that seemed to be taking place in Deaf education in the 1970s. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD), for example, took the liberty to distribute the book Signing Exact English (SEE), an act which suggested that a Deaf individual's hierarchy of values might be substantively distinct from a hearing individual's in such a way that previous ways of understanding might be seriously biased in favor of the English language and against American Sign Language (ASL)--an issue that came to the fore after the publication of William C. Stokoe's "Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles." The NAD has yet to apologize in public about this bizzare behavior in the 1970s.

In many ways, we the Deaf have been typically excluded from the "conversation" of which the field of the education of the Deaf is constituted. There are three aspects to that exclusion. First, there has been very little written and researched on the topic of ASL for Deaf babies. Either it is assumed that what is said about the English language for the Deaf is sufficient enough to cover all substantive language issues related to Deaf education and, hence, there is no real need to talk about ASL in education, or it is assumed that issues surrounding ASL for Deaf babies are simply not pertinent, or pertinent enough.

Secondly, what little writing and researching that has been done regarding ASL for Deaf babies has been largely ignored, consigned, in effect, to the theoretical margins. Plato's writing about signing in his book Cratylus published 2,400 years ago, for example, has not been at the center of philosophical discourse, yet it would help in delineating that Deaf babies would benefit from ASL.

Finally, when the topic of ASL is laid on the educational table, it typically becomes pushed to the edges of scholarship, where it can be safely ignored. By a curious stroke of logic, the argument goes something like this: Important educators of the Deaf do not cash in on ASL, something that could have been done under as part of the former Bilingual Education Act (BEA) of 1968. There is no position paper from the NAD calling for the restoration of the BEA, which was nullified in 2002 as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet calling for the BEA's restoration is now long overdue. As a result of all this, when talking about ASL for Deaf babies, Deaf educators remain in the professionally dangerous position of being ignored, dismissed, or even mocked.

Cast in that light, the seriousness of the subject of the necessity of using ASL with Deaf babies is obvious. If the conversation, this discourse stretching back to Plato's Cratylus, is where deaf personhood (yes, DEAF PERSONHOOD) is defined, then to exclude ASL from the conversation is to deny the personhood of all Deaf people. (See footnote)

Cash in on ASL education now! Let's create a tidal wave of history which will finally bring some semblance of sanity to the situation.



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Footnote: See the following paper for a discussion of the term "deaf personhood":

Johnson, R.: 2006, ‘Cultural constructs that impede discussions about variability in speech‐based educational models for deaf children with cochlear implants’, Perspectiva, 24, n. Especial (July/December), Florianopolis, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, 29–80. Quoting the paper: "Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of ASL/ESL programs is that they focus on and take advantage of what deaf children are rather than what they are not. In this regard, they attempt to recognize and respect the integrity and vitality of what we might call deaf personhood, which begins with the notion, alien to medicalized approaches to deafness, that being deaf is inherently neither a problem nor a tragedy, either for the person who is deaf or for society, and that the set of linguistic and social facts surrounding deafness actually present an effective avenue to providing deaf children with a first language, with access to the things that schools can teach, and with a means to becoming literate in English."