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majority society. Standing together as a group can increase deaf people’s influence” (p. 6). For Charlton (1998), empowerment leads to more opportunities for people with disabilities: “Empowerment must translate into a process of creating or acquiring power. When power is taken, it is taken from someone. Someone loses” (pp. 122– 123). Fosshaug (2004) quotes Lars Havstad, the 19th-century Norwegian who was the first deaf person to attend university in Norway: “Deaf people are getting together not to isolate themselves, but to gather power and information for life in a society where sounds and spoken languages are prevalent” (p. 6). To highlight the meaning of “gather power and information,” I prefer to draw upon Pease’s (2002) reconstruction of empowerment as “the insurrection of [deaf] subjugated knowledge” (p. 33). Identifying oppressed people’s “strengths and knowledges” and spreading that knowledge over the community “can be a force for social change” (Pease, 2002, p. 35). Pease argues that discourse is one of the means through which majority groups dominate minority groups. Therefore, empowerment can be understood as producing alternative power-saturated knowledge rather than as seeking to seize or take power. Political struggle can thus be conceptualized as the struggle between different knowledges (Ranson, 1993). If knowledges and power are inseparable from one another, as Foucault (1980, 1988) suggests, then we must recognize the link between the empowerment of oppressed people and the development and distribution of knowledge (Hartman, 1992). (Pease, 2002, p. 33). Foucault’s concept of power governmentality (1980, cited in Pease, 2002) is crucial to an understanding of the stress on oppressed people’s agency: “Governance is not only something done to us by those in power; it is something we do to ourselves. We thus act upon our own subjectivity to govern ourselves” (Pease, 2002, p. 32). For Foucault (1978, cited in Pease, 2002), power and resistance go hand in hand. That does not imply that people always contest; people can internalize oppression, accept the dominant rhetoric, and—as such—not always liberate themselves (Charlton, 1998; Freire, 2005; Pease, 2002). Yet Pease (2002) states that we can “support marginalized people’s resistance and assist in the insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (p. 33). Crucial to this is that marginalized people come into contact with new discourses that produce new knowledges and promise free and alternative ways of living (Jankowski, 1997). This is what Flemish deaf people experienced through participating in the kadercursus, seeing Gallaudet University and the Danish Federation of the Deaf, and talking to empowered deaf people. As I have previously mentioned, it seems that deaf cultural rhetoric was gone after the 1960s (see also Ladd, 2003). As the life stories of Flemish deaf activists reveal, deaf cultural rhetoric was not taught in deaf schools. It was not discussed and passed on in the deaf community and through deaf families. Deaf education had been very minimal; as a result, many deaf people not only graduated as functional analphabetics but were also seriously limited in their knowledge about the world (Broeckaert, Bogaerts, & Clement, 1994; Van Herreweghe, 1995). Therefore, deaf people did not have access to liberating rhetoric from other social movements in Flanders through media such as newspapers and television. It was not until 1992 that the television news was cap- tioned, and therefore made accessible to deaf people (D’Hoore, Vandevelde, & Verstraete, 1998). Many people were frustrated by deaf education. Gaby (translated interview, 2004), a Flemish deaf leader, looked back on her deaf school years: I loved to study; I am a curious person: practice a lot, learn a lot, and know a lot. But I was very frustrated that the teacher always taught about speaking, speaking properly. That was such a waste of time. Really, the goal of learning: information, knowledge . . . we didn’t see much of that. Freire’s (2005) banking concept of education can be applied when light is shed on Flemish deaf education as sketched in the life stories of Flemish deaf people. The teacher deposits his or her narrations on the students, who passively receive the information, store it in their brains, and reproduce it on command. Education and knowledge are not perceived as a process of mutual and dialectic inquiry between students and teacher, but rather as a deposit by people who have knowledge into people who lack knowledge. Students get used to deposit storing and become passive acceptors of the world rather than active transformers of the world: The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their humanitarianism to preserve a profitable situation (Freire, 2005, p. 73). As Filip Verstraete (translated interview, 2003) explained, there was no alternative; lives and identities were fixed: “That is the way it is.” VOLUME 152, NO. 1, 2007 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF 160 O n e H u n d r e d a n d S i x t y Y e a r s 13
DEAF WAYS OF EDUCATION LEADING TO EMPOWERMENT Of course, oppressors aim to continue their domination, and the combination of the banking concept of education and paternalism has proved to be a successful strategy (Freire, 2005). Yet there is one thing that bank depositors seem to overlook: “The deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality” (Freire, 2005, p. 75), and therefore push oppressed people to reflection: “If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation” (Freire, 2005, p. 75). Edward (translated interview, 2005), another Flemish deaf leader who joined in the Gallaudet trip, reflected on his school time: When I was in the first class in X [a deaf school], I was in a group of peers. There were six of us. Two students experienced difficulties; they were a bit behind. I was bored all the time. Then I said, “Oh, come on,” and the teacher replied that I had to be patient, tolerant. It was easy for him to say that, but I was sitting there all the time twiddling my thumbs. Half an hour later, I was really fed up: I attended school because I wanted to learn, not because I wanted to sleep. I got into a serious argument with the teacher. I said, “I’d better stay at home.” The teacher got really mad and sent me to the director. I didn’t care. So, I went to X [the director] and he said, “The teacher told me that you have to calm down a bit.” “Me? Calm down? Why do I attend school?” The director used to say that we all go to school to learn. So . . . he couldn’t really say something. . . . Then the class was split up in two groups and then I developed better. Oh, that was impossible, splitting up the class, that was really not 14 possible. Until they started to think, and then things changed. As Vincent and Edward emphasized, they had a lot of questions before. As searchers, they noticed the contradictions in the system, and their “subjugated [deaf] knowledges” (Pease, 2002, p. 33) told them that something was wrong. Yet Vincent stressed that he was not able to find the answers himself. As paternalism and oralism blocked any information that included the perception that deaf people were an ethnolinguistic minority, and they themselves did not have access to majority society and the liberating rhetoric developed in other minority groups, deaf people needed to come into contact with their signing peers from abroad in order to acquire deaf cultural rhetoric and become empowered. The alternative to banking education is dialogue (Freire, 2005). Dialogue, questions and answers, and discussions are core themes in the life stories. Passivity and acceptance are replaced by critical thinking (Freire, 2005). Starting from the concrete reality of the Flemish everyday experience, and the confrontation with a better reality in deaf dream worlds, dialogue will wake up Flemish deaf people. The world is no longer something outside deaf people’s lives, but becomes a world that can be changed and in which deaf people actively participate (Freire, 2005). Jerry (translated interview, 2004), a Flemish deaf leader, reflected on this process, which he experienced when he met empowered deaf people in Denmark and at Gallaudet: Then there was a study trip to Denmark. The first day of our trip, my eyes opened several times. It was already enough for me. It was too much for me to deal with. After that, X set up another study trip to Gal- laudet. That was a 5-day trip, 1 week. I joined. Then I started to feel, “Oh, actually I lost many years.” Then it all started. Back in Flanders, I was really strong. I had changed. Then I became really active. . . . Also, I will never forget that—I was on my honeymoon in the south of France. I was young and we were married. And then there were two people: “Are you deaf too?” “Yeah, we are deaf too.” Those people were Americans. That was a smart man. Very interesting. The things he told! He signed very relaxedly. And I looked and looked . . . with my mouth open. At night, in bed, I couldn’t sleep. It swirled around in my head. Oh, that was such an interesting man! There are deaf people who can do that! That man is an interesting deaf man! That is possible! I wanted to turn myself into an interesting deaf man too; I had to. Because of those people I met, always because of those people I met. And afterward I was thinking, and I realized, “I can do that too!” The school had never showed me: I can do the same things. It is only through meeting deaf adults who were smart that I started thinking and got the feeling, “I would like to become the same! I am strong! I can do that too!.” . . . We had direct communication, we had eye contact, and in 1 hour I grabbed so much information. . . . And then, at the deaf school, it took me so long for that. Through signs, I understood everything easily, and I let it all come, absorbed it all. Flemish deaf people, lacking strong Flemish deaf cultural identities, and sharing transnational commonalities of deaf lives in a hearing world (Murray, in press), easily connect with empowered deaf people from abroad. This also illustrates the VOLUME 152, NO. 1, 2007 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF
Page 1 and 2: Meeting Global Deaf Peers, Visiting
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Meeting Global Deaf Peers, Visiting Ideal Deaf Places ... - NCRTM

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