The Bright Triad and Five Propositions: Toward a Vygotskian Framework for Deaf Pedagogy and Research

L.S. Vygotsky’s contributions to social research shifted paradigms by constructing now-foundational theories of teaching, learning, language, and their interactions in education. This manuscript contextualizes and elucidates a nearly-forgotten, century-old component of Vygotskian deaf education research. The Fundamentals of Defectology compiles decades of Vygotsky’s experimental, methodological, and theoretical research about deafness, the psychology of disability, and special methods of pedagogy. Drawing on Defectology, two arguments are developed using the method of dialectics; they first synthesize Vygotsky’s deaf research corpus, then juxtapose it against contemporary theories and evidence. The first argument describes three principles that exemplify Vygotsky’s optimistic framework for deaf pedagogy: positive differentiation, creative adaptation, and dynamic development. The second posits five propositions about deaf development, including: the biosocial proposition, the sensory delimitation-and-consciousness proposition, the adapted tools proposition, the multimodal proposition, and finally the conflict proposition. By leveraging Vygotsky’s characteristic optimism in response to the absorbing and difficult challenges of deaf pedagogy and deaf research methodologies, these arguments constitute a future-oriented call to action for researchers and pedagogues working in deaf education today

Aesthetics, Culture, Power Critical Deaf Pedagogy and ASL Video-publications as Resistance-to-Audism in Deaf Education and Research

From a critical pedagogy standpoint, we examined a bilingual (American Sign Language [ASL] and English) video-publication titled “Seizing Academic Power.” The video-publication explores interactions of power and knowledge in deaf education and research and proposes tools to subvert ableism and deficit ideologies within them. By centralizing multiple visuospatial modalities, the video-publication’s medium is also its message. Qualitative data were produced and analyzed via structured coding cycles then interpreted through two theoretical frameworks focused on culture and aesthetics in critical pedagogy. Our analysis highlights conflicts at the nexus of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology of deaf education and research. Findings reveal how deaf students gain and develop critical consciousness within the classroom, depending on their teachers’ conceptions of marginalized cultures, use of signed languages, and multimodal knowledge, all of which modulate power and ethics in deaf pedagogy and research about it. Our study concludes with implications for ASL video-publications for teacher-training in deaf higher education and in research production and dissemination