Meeting Global Deaf Peers, Visiting Ideal Deaf Places ... - NCRTM

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ness course had been set up. The course was linked to the activism of the deaf federation and presented deaf people as a community that shared the same language, habits, traditions, and history. It also offered deaf people a rhetoric of equal opportunities, rights, participation, oppression, deaf culture, emancipation, integration, etc. Deaf people received information about deaf education in Flanders, services for deaf people, government services and organizations for people with disabilities, beginning scientific research on deaf people and sign language in Flanders, and international organizations for deaf people such as the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and the European Union of the Deaf (EUD, formerly ECRS). The course encouraged deaf people to take responsibility and participate in existing governmental structures and institutions for deaf people. Although the course stressed signs as the natural means of communication for deaf people and advocated the recognition of sign language, sign language was defined as Signed Dutch, which should serve as a bridge between hearing and deaf people. It was the first time that Flemish deaf people were provided with information about their rights, their place in society, and other aspects of their history. They learned a lot from the information in the course, which was all new to them. Yet in their life stories for the present study, Flemish deaf people did not elaborate on the content of the kadercursus and the issues discussed in the course. The research participants were more excited about their global encounters with transnational empowered deaf individuals (Breivik et al., 2002; Murray, in press) in Flanders and abroad. Their eyes gleamed when they recounted detailed memories of their experiences in deaf dream worlds abroad (see below, “Deaf Cultural Rhetoric and Ideal Deaf Places”). Between 1992 and 1994, the Flemish Federation of the Deaf organized trips to Denmark (1992), the Netherlands (1993), the United States (1994), and England (1994). In Denmark and the Netherlands, the group received information about the national deaf federations, organizations of parents of deaf children, sign language classes, services for deaf people, and educational opportunities, among other things. When visiting the Danish national deaf federation, deaf people also learned about bilingual education, the perception of deaf people as a linguistic minority, and how deaf people could run their organization and participate in government decision making. In the United States, at Gallaudet University, the group followed a oneweek schedule including meetings with university president I. King Jordan, Gallaudet professor Yerker Andersson, and others; visits to the university library, Kendall Demonstration Elementary School, and the Model Secondary School for the Deaf; and presentations on study at Gallaudet. The Flemish deaf people were impressed with the use of sign language everywhere on campus and in all classrooms. They had learned about bilingual education in Denmark, and after visiting Gallaudet they were 100% convinced that bilingual education was the best teaching method for deaf children (see also “Studiereis naar Gallaudet,” 1994). At the Centre for Deaf Studies in Bristol (England), the group had a short training session for deaf sign language teachers. The trip to Bristol was crucial for the Flemish deaf people in their search for effective arguments for the position that Flemish Sign Language should be used in deaf schools rather than Signed Dutch. When members of the Flemish deaf community are explaining about the kadercursus, it is clear that they have been provided with a new rhetoric that breaks with the past. Social movements “provide their members with an alternative rhetoric that brings a different ideology, different behaviors, and different identity into day-to-day life” (Jankowski, 1997, p. 4). As I illustrate in the present article, the power of the kadercursus is in its wake up, or awareness raising: Now empowered with a rhetoric that brings a different ideology to day-today life, the oppressed have a new power to celebrate their heritage, to reject labels imposed on them by their oppressors, and to acquire new traits that enhance feelings of pride and power (Jankowski, 1997, p. 6). Research Findings The stage in their lives before they come into contact with cultural rhetoric is described by Flemish deaf people as sleeping. After examining the sleeping stage, I will highlight the deaf cultural rhetoric that will lead to Flemish deaf people’s empowerment. I will argue that deaf empowerment can be defined as the “insurrection of subjugated [deaf] knowledges” (Pease, 2002, p. 33), thereby illustrating how deaf people create their own education through a common sign language (Mottez, 1993), deaf experience (Murray, in press), and the experience of a barrier-free environment (Jankowski, 1997), or deaf dream world. To conclude, I will reflect on the transitions that deaf identities experience in this process of empowerment, distinguishing stages of wake up and the circle of deaf empowerment. Sleeping Flemish deaf role models distinguish stages of before and after in their life 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 9
DEAF WAYS OF EDUCATION LEADING TO EMPOWERMENT stories, marking the changes global deaf encounters brought to their lives. The sleeping metaphor refers to the oppression deaf people experienced during oralism and the absence of deaf cultural rhetoric. To understand the standard hearing view that Flemish deaf people had internalized (Freire, 2005; Jankowski, 1997), I will illustrate how oralism controlled the information provided to the deaf community in both deaf schools and deaf clubs. As Filip Verstraete (translated interview, 2003), a Flemish deaf leader, explained, there was no deaf cultural rhetoric transmitted in deaf families: Yes, my parents are deaf and when I was a kid, nothing was ever said about what it meant to be deaf, about who you are as a deaf person, a deaf identity, deaf awareness. Really nothing; that was not discussed at all, never. I knew deafness that is a disability, that is the way it is. Ronny Van Landuyt (translated interview, 2004), who joined the Gallaudet trip, reflected upon the absence of deaf cultural rhetoric in deaf clubs and deaf schools before: When we were 12 years old, we went to high school. In high school, the school level was higher; that was good. In the dormitory, we had a priest. He organized well, priest X, who passed away. Things were better; there were a couple of teachers who used signs. There were two teachers who really signed enough; the others were oral. But it was not the case that we broadened our horizons about “deaf,” no, nothing. It was always the same: lesson, lesson, lesson. Speech exercises, language exercises, math exercises. Narrow minded. Nothing about history, nothing about the 10 world, nothing about interesting things. . . . When I finally went to the deaf club, it was not interesting. It was always soccer, soccer. Really for hours. Now I can say that was bullshit, but before I didn’t realize that. For me, that was not interesting. It was just about one theme; other topics were not discussed. The individuals I interviewed for my research all talked about times after the 1960s, when indeed all deaf cultural rhetoric, deaf history, and community knowledge seemed to be gone. Nonetheless, there has always been a small group of people to whom deafhood is transmitted (Ladd, 2003). A small group of deaf people has always played a role in the Federation of the Deaf (although it was established and dominated by clergy), and in the 1970s there was a group of deaf people who wanted to set up a federation run by deaf people themselves (Scheiris & Raemdonck, in press). Yet apart from this small group, the majority of deaf people were left in the dark. Any alternative discourse that perceived deaf people as an ethnolinguistic minority rather than a group of disabled people was blocked. In the interviews, research participants explained how they provided deaf friends with information gathered in their own deaf families and from mainstream news media. They strongly reacted against teachers in schools for the deaf who were not able to communicate with deaf students who depended on sign language. Deaf people were also blocked from gathering general background knowledge about the world. Flemish deaf people refer to this stage, which is marked by fixed (medical) identities (Braidotti, 1998) and the absence of deaf cultural rhetoric, as sleeping. Deaf Cultural Rhetoric and Ideal Deaf Places The rhetoric of deaf people perceiving themselves as an ethnolinguistic minority group was presented to the world for the first time in the Gallaudet revolution in 1988 (Jankowski, 1997). Jankowski explains that three important rhetorics can be identified that have been empowering for deaf people in the United States. First, there is the rhetoric of sign language as a formal language, supported by a sign language dictionary and sign language research in the 1960s and 1970s. Second, there is the rhetoric of deaf culture, which allowed deaf people to perceive mainstreaming and inclusion as cultural genocide and to defy the label of disabled. The rhetoric of the deaf community as an ethnolinguistic minority opened the doors for the empowering third rhetoric: the can-do rhetoric. This rhetoric of equality liberated deaf people from the rhetoric of hearing paternalism and from their internalized oppression. Deaf people are now proud to be deaf, and can decide about their own lives. The latter stage can be illustrated by I. King Jordan’s famous and empowering statement, “Deaf people can do anything that hearing people can except hear” (Christiansen & Barnartt, 1995, p. 164). Making comparisons to the rhetoric that was empowering for deaf people in the United States brings the parallels with deaf cultural rhetoric in Denmark and Flanders to the fore. The rhetoric of deaf people as an ethnolinguistic minority group, which can be proud of itself, which believes in its ability, equality, and independence, and which actively advocates for better deaf lives, seems to be empowering for deaf people in different localities in the world (De Clerck, 2005; Widell, 2000). Regarding his trip to VOLUME 152, NO. 1, 2007 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF
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Meeting Global Deaf Peers, Visiting Ideal Deaf Places ... - NCRTM

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