Education Programs: K–12 Oral Schools

Approaches to Deaf Education in the United States

There are several options for educating deaf students, with programs ranging from complete interaction in traditional classrooms to education at deaf-only schools.

• Inclusion. In the inclusion model, students spend all or most of their school day with hearing students. This method often requires a high degree of curriculum modification and changes in teaching styles. It is usually considered for deaf students with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. With the inclusion model, students may receive specialized services inside and outside of the classroom, including specialized tutoring-type sessions or speech and language therapy, along with any special auditory technologies they require.
• Mainstreaming. Deaf students who are mainstreamed are placed in classes with hearing students for specific periods of time based on their skills. For the remainder of the day, deaf students receive specialized instruction.
• Segregation in a separate classroom or school. With the segregation model, deaf students spend no time in class with hearing students. They may attend a special school for deaf children or attend a special needs classroom in a mainstream school. This option provides some social interaction opportunities (such as at recess and lunchtime), but the interactions are limited.
• Exclusion. If a student is unable to be educated satisfactorily in any school, he or she may be excluded from education altogether. (This does not include students who have been expelled or suspended.) It may include students who are in a hospital or are housebound. Deaf students who are excluded may receive individual or group instruction at home or a special center, but often exclusion occurs in developing countries, where there is no legal mandate for deaf education, meaning these students are not educated at all.

Oral Education for Deaf Students

Regarding the education of deaf students, there are two major schools of thought. Either deaf students are encouraged to communicate via American Sign Language (ASL; known as manualism), or they are encouraged to follow auditory-verbal and auditory-oral methods (shortened to oral education, or oralism). The National Association of the Deaf advocates a bilingual approach, to best support deaf students in their educational pursuits.

Oralism focuses on listening and spoken language and involves a great deal of parent involvement, relying on the belief that a deaf child can learn to speak and listen so that his or her family does not need to learn cued speed or sign language. Instead, deaf individuals communicate by using speech, lipreading, and mimicking the breathing patterns and shapes of the speech of hearing people. This is important to understand because 92 percent of deaf children are born to two hearing parents.

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