Negotiation of Deaf Culture: Alternative Realities in the Classroom

In a increasingly globalized world, family members of deaf individuals increasingly are faced with a dilemma between identification with Deaf culture or pursuing biomedical intervention in order help deaf children hear sounds artificially. The importance of this dilemma is critical at the earliest age of deaf individuals\u27 lives, not only in early childhood, but in their school career as well. This poster attempts to not only inform about this issue, but argues for the expansion of programs at the school district level to offer equal resources and information about both options for families with deaf individuals. In so doing, it utilizes Deaf cultural media, historical and anthropological perspectives, and new research to challenge how educators view deafness and Deaf individuals

American Sign Language Interpreters and their Influence on the Hearing World

This honors thesis is going to discuss the hearing community’s perception of American Sign Language and by association the hearing community’s perception of the Deaf community. For most of the hearing community their only interaction with American Sign Language is through watching an interpreter perform at their job. They personally have no physical interactions with the language. Even though they have never personally used the language or attempted to interact with the Deaf community they will draw their own conclusions about sign language and the Deaf community. The conclusions that are assumed tend to be incorrect. Early on in the field of interpreting these misunderstandings are encountered. The small nature of the Deaf community makes it hard for these false perceptions to be dismantled because the Deaf community and the hearing population with the misconceptions rarely intersect. This thesis will delve into the extent of these misconceptions and just how much of the hearing world’s perspective they influence. To first understand the potential hazard of the interpreter language model it is important to understand a brief history of American Sign Language and Deaf culture. The paper when then apply these principles to the Deaf community, the interpreter, and the hearing community. The end of the paper will then dispel many of the false perceptions that the hearing community has of Deaf culture. This section is included to show that the misconceptions exist

More than a Match: The Role of Football in Britain’s Deaf Community

The University of Central Lancashire has undertaken a major research project into the role of football within the deaf community in Britain. As well as reconstructing the long history of deaf involvement in football for the first time, the project has also focused on the way in which football has provided deaf people with a means of developing and maintaining social contacts within the community, and of expressing the community’s cultural values. This article will draw on primary data gathered from interviews conducted with people involved in deaf football in a variety of capacities. During the course of these interviews, a number of themes and issues emerged relating to the values and benefits those involved with deaf football place on the game, and it is these which are explored here

Deaf epistemologies as a critique and alternative to the practice of science: an anthropological perspective

IN THE LAST DECADE, and responding to the criticism of orientalism, anthropology has engaged in a self-critical practice, working toward a postcolonial perspective on science and an epistemological stance of partial and situated knowledge (Pinxten, 2006; Pinxten & Note, 2005). In deaf studies, anthropological and sociological studies employing qualitative and ethnographic methods have introduced a paradigm shift. Concepts of deaf culture and deaf identity have been employed as political tools, contributing to the emancipation process of deaf people. However, recent anthropological studies in diverse local contexts indicate the cultural construction of these notions. From this viewpoint, deaf studies faces a challenge to reflect on the notions of culture, emancipation, and education from a nonexclusive, noncolonial perspective. Deaf studies research in a global context needs to deal with cultural and linguistic diversity in human beings and academia. This calls for epistemological reflection and new research methods

Not hearing us: An exploration of the experience of deaf prisoners in English and Welsh prisons

This research explores the experiences of profoundly deaf prisoners in England and Wales. It analyses current provisions for deaf prisoners and uses interviews and case studies to investigate the manner in which provision is delivered in order to make a set of recommendations for improving the treatment of deaf people in prison

Investigating the Availability and Accessibility of Mental Health Services for Deaf Texans

This study explored the availability and accessibility of mental health services for Deaf Texans from the perspective of practicing clinicians. Although the Americans with Disabilities Act mandates that Deaf people have the right to equal access for all medical services, including mental healthcare, not all practitioners do so effectively. In the domains of education, practice, policy, and advocacy, several barriers to providing linguistically and culturally appropriate services were revealed. More specifically, this research project underscored the need for the Social Work profession to recruit and train more Deaf clinicians; build hearing therapists’ competencies in American Sign Language and U.S. Deaf culture; support specialized mental health training for interpreters; urge insurance companies to offset interpreting costs; and provide greater client support when navigating the mental healthcare system.Social Wor

Deafness: Disability or Culture? Best Practices Regarding Controversial Interventions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

Background: Many people in the deaf community view deafness as a distinct culture, with its own unique language and history. They reject the use of assistive technologies which can restore hearing for themselves and their children. However, some members of the medical and legal communities consider it unethical to deprive a child of these interventions. Learn more about this emerging conflict, as well as best practices for working with deaf and hard of hearing students in a school environment. Methods: Peer-reviewed journals and popular publications were consulted to gather information about attitudes towards interventions such as the cochlear implant from members of the deaf community, as well the legal and medical communities. Education journals were consulted to gather information about best practices when working with deaf and hard of hearing students. Results: There are strong opinions on both sides of this issue, with various arguments being made both for and against the use of interventions like the cochlear implant. From the perspective of K-12 educators and school counselors, making sure that students feel safe and supported at school. Conclusions: It is not necessary for K-12 educators and school counselors to have opinions on specific assistive technologies. It is important for them to be aware of best practices for working with deaf and hard of hearing students, and to support and respect the decisions of deaf families with regards to their culture.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1117/thumbnail.jp

Deaf and hearing children's picture naming Impact of age of acquisition and language modality on representational gesture

Stefanini, Bello, Caselli, Iverson, & Volterra (2009) reported that Italian 24-36 month old children use a high proportion of representational gestures to accompany their spoken responses when labelling pictures. The two studies reported here used the same naming task with (1) typically developing 24-46-month-old hearing children acquiring English and (2) 24-63-month-old deaf children of deaf and hearing parents acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English. In Study 1 children scored within the range of correct spoken responses previously reported, but produced very few representational gestures. However, when they did gesture, they expressed the same action meanings as reported in previous research. The action bias was also observed in deaf children of hearing parents in Study 2, who labelled pictures with signs, spoken words and gestures. The deaf group with deaf parents used BSL almost exclusively with few additional gestures. The function of representational gestures in spoken and signed vocabulary development is considered in relation to differences between native and non-native sign language acquisition

Joining hands: developing a sign language machine translation system with and for the deaf community

This paper discusses the development of an automatic machine translation (MT) system for translating spoken language text into signed languages (SLs). The motivation for our work is the improvement of accessibility to airport information announcements for D/deaf and hard of hearing people. This paper demonstrates the involvement of Deaf colleagues and members of the D/deaf community in Ireland in three areas of our research: the choice of a domain for automatic translation that has a practical use for the D/deaf community; the human translation of English text into Irish Sign Language (ISL) as well as advice on ISL grammar and linguistics; and the importance of native ISL signers as manual evaluators of our translated output

Lexical organization in deaf children who use British Sign Language: Evidence from a semantic fluency task

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently