Bilingualism, Philosophy and Models of

Celebrating the Deaf World

Bilingual-bicultural education also stresses the importance of cultural awareness. This means that students are exposed to both Deaf and hearing cultural models, and students are explicitly encouraged to celebrate membership in different cultures. Another of the fundamental ideas behind this approach to education is that deaf students interact with the world from a position of strength. Programming and school experiences reinforce the notion that membership in the Deaf world is an asset that can be leveraged for advantages in terms of language skills and awareness (i.e., reaping all the rewards that bilingualism offers). There are also advantages in terms of more expansive orientations to cultural differences (highlighted by the natural and respectful juxtaposition of Deaf and hearing worlds) and the acknowledgement of the unique and valuable perspectives on the world that are afforded by using a Deaf lens. In addition to instruction in and about both signed and written languages, the curriculum in a bilingual-bicultural approach features opportunities to explore Deaf art forms, Deaf history, and Deaf cultural norms. As such, this approach to education highlights the importance of Deaf role models and healthy, respectful, and equitable partnerships with hearing people. In this way, bilingual education seeks to positively affect deaf students’ identity development and relationships with Deaf and hearing communities. Students’ positive sense of self, in turn, has a strong effect on their academic engagement and language learning.

Background and History

Bilingual-bicultural education emerged in the late 20th century following decades of oralist education [Page 80]and the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of various systems for manually encoding spoken language. However, before oralist models became predominant around the time of the 1880 International Congress of Educators of the Deaf in Milan, Italy, some 19th-century schools for deaf students included elements of bilingual education. At the congress, spoken language was adopted as the preferred language of instruction for deaf students. Thus, a monolingual philosophy long dominated Deaf education before the introduction of bilingual models.

Bilingual education for deaf students is based on linguistic research dating from the 1960s that recognizes sign languages as displaying the same levels of linguistic organization and sophistication (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) found in spoken languages. Research in American Sign Language (ASL) linguistics, along with government-commissioned reviews of educational programs for deaf students, contributed significantly to the emergence of bilingual-bicultural models. This new understanding of sign languages was accompanied by recognition of the failure of both oralist education and education that utilizes manually coded spoken language. Such invented codes for spoken language using signs borrowed from ASL or other native sign languages lack the full grammar of any language. The Deaf bilingual education movement also took inspiration from the Deaf President Now revolution of 1988 that saw Gallaudet University appoint its first Deaf president.

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