Deaf education practices vary significantly around the
world, wildly. One of the significant disagreements is whether or not a
different method of teaching deaf students should be used. Determining if deaf
people should use sign language or the pure oral method of education is an
ethical question.
Maintaining effective communication with your Deaf child
and involving them in all activities is especially important during these hectic
family celebrations. The majority of your hearing children pick up on general
conversations, phone calls, and overheard conversations. What they hear impacts
their understanding of what is going on and the plans that are being made. It's
painful to realize afterward that your Deaf child doesn't even know the names
of their relatives. A little planning ahead of time may reduce your stress as
well as your child's stress.
Sign language was wholly banned from classrooms and playgrounds in schools that employed the pure oral method of teaching deaf students. To me, it's not clear how this method is of any benefit to anyone, and I can't imagine how frustrating it must have been to try to earn points and views. Many deaf people had claimed that the inability to use signing when they were younger is one of the reasons that so many deaf people suffer from mental health issues.
Here is one more interesting fact. Several former
students became teachers in other deaf schools because many of the schools that
allowed sign language as an additional communication method accepted applicants
who were deaf. As we could not find any information, we could not compare this
to schools' banned signing. We assumed that there were no teachers from these
schools because that lends even more credence to the concept of signing being
an essential component of deaf education.
Sign language is not a truly global language, and, like
spoken language, it has many different regional dialects. This lesser-known
fact is that the British government has accepted British Sign Language (BSL) as
a language in its own right in 2003.
Schools for the deaf that do not use sign language are
less and less prevalent each year, and as a result, the level of education
within the deaf community is increasing. This is excellent news. Additionally,
there is an increasing number of organizations and charities that work to
spread awareness of these issues and provide assistance to deaf students.
Looking at things with a cool head The argument for using
this method, because you wish to keep your child in the hearing world by learning
for deaf children, is that by doing so, you
allow your child to learn techniques that will assist them more in the hearing
world by talking instead of relying on sign language. Signing and speech might
be around forever, as you've just read, and there are arguments on both sides.
