Deaf studies for transfer deaf adolescents
This capstone project focuses on developing a curriculum unit that deals specifically with Deafhood. The purpose of this curriculum development project is to help deaf students who transferred from mainstreamed schools to a school for the deaf, leam more about the DEAF-WORLD and thusly adapt to the new environment by constructing a Deaf identity and becoming confident in themselves as contributing members of society. Increasingly, transfer students are introduced to a new educational and cultural environment where sign language is free flowing, one of the primary educational and social languages of the deaf. The curriculum unit is divided into five programs:
Deafhood: A concept stressing possibilities, not deficits
Born-deaf, sign-language-using people have for the past two centuries been placed within a succession of externally constructed models, notably the traditional ``medical'' or pathological model. This perceives them primarily as biologically deficient beings in need of cures or charity in order to be successfully assimilated into society. This paper proposes that the concept of colonialism is the one that most appropriately describes the ``existential'' reality of deaf communities, and offers instead a deaf-constructed model. Utilizing recent confirmation of the existence of bona-fide feaf cultures, it highlights the extent to which these communities have resisted such models, maintaining their own beliefs concerning their validity and quality of their existence, and what they offer to non-deaf societies. This ``vulnerability as strength'' is manifested through the concept of deafhood, which is presented as the first move towards a formal narrative of decolonizing and liberatory possibilities.
Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France
This text explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the "philosophes" to the introduction of the sound motion picture. It shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien regime metaphor of painting as silent poetry into a 19th-century school of over 100 deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as "savages," excluded and ignored by the hearing. This book is concerned with the process and history of that marginalization, the constitution of a "centre" from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse. Based on archival and pictorial research, the text's intertextual analysis of what it terms the "silent screen of deafness" produces an alternative history of 19th-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism and art history, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine, and should also interest a general audience concerned with the relationship of the deaf and the larger society.