{"id":70627,"date":"2020-08-11T00:25:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-11T04:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/?post_type=bu-article&p=70627"},"modified":"2023-09-13T15:51:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T19:51:09","slug":"a-new-era-of-deaf-education","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/magazine\/articles\/2020\/a-new-era-of-deaf-education\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Era of Deaf Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When Boston\u2019s Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing celebrated its 150th anniversary in November 2019, it achieved another milestone: it became the only \u201cdualmagazine-language school\u201d in the US to teach both American Sign Language
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To an outsider unfamiliar with the world of deaf education, the move might not seem very dramatic or edgy\u2014but it was. American Sign Language isn\u2019t universally embraced in deaf education; most deaf children in the US are taught the same English curriculum designed for hearing students.<\/p>\n

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And many pay the price academically: deaf people consistently attain lower levels of education than hearing people. According to the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes, 83 percent of deaf adults complete high school, compared to 89 percent of hearing adults, and far fewer continue their education in college.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019ve always used ASL,\u201d says Maritza Ciliberto (\u201991,\u201993,\u201995), Horace Mann\u2019s principal, \u201cbut not with the intentional approach that we have in the last few years. The emphasis prior to that was always learning English and spoken language, which is not feasible for all students.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Feasibility is key, because many students at Horace Mann, which serves young people in kindergarten through grade 12, face unique challenges; most of its students are profoundly deaf and their first language is not English. On the 2017 English and mathematics state MCAS tests, Horace Mann students in grades 3\u20138 were ranked as \u201cnot meeting expectations,\u201d scoring significantly lower than their district peers. The school\u2019s fivemagazine-year graduation rate has been just 23 percent.<\/p>\n

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For the faculty in BU Wheelock\u2019s deaf studies program, who have been on the vanguard of philosophical changes in deaf education that promote sign language, Horace Mann\u2019s new dualmagazine-language designation by the school district and the state was a cause for celebration. BU has a connection with Horace Mann stretching back to its founding\u2014many deaf education students complete fieldwork at the school or, like Ciliberto, take permanent jobs there\u2014and its deaf studies faculty have long lobbied the state for a revamp of deaf education. They point to research that shows the school\u2019s new approach should help turn those test scores around.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHistorically, teaching deaf children ASL has often been seen as a last resort, only worth pursuing if schools can\u2019t teach them to hear and speak. In this framing, learning ASL is a sign of failure,\u201d says Naomi Caselli, an assistant professor of deaf studies at BU Wheelock. \u201cThe dualmagazine-language designation takes learning ASL and English\u2014becoming bilingual\u2014as an accomplishment that deserves recognition. It is a remarkable act of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Seeds of Change<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In the 1800s, schools banned sign language in favor of teaching deaf students to speak, read, and write in English like \u201cnormal\u201d people. Inventor and BU professor Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife and mother were deaf, was one of those who favored suppressing the use of sign language. Bell taught at Horace Mann before and during his time as a BU professor in the 1870s, working with students to help them learn to speak English. Teaching sign language, he once said, would be \u201ccontrary to the spirit and practice of American institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The way of thinking he championed only really began to change in the last 50 years, although debate around it remains contentious.<\/p>\n

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Robert J. Hoffmeister came to BU in the late 1970s, arguing that teaching methods that shunted aside ASL were based on a myth that learning sign language would prevent deaf children from excelling in English.<\/p>\n

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Then and now, Hoffmeister says, society had been conditioned to view deafness as a negative\u2014a condition in need of fixing.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis is where we run counter to the medical profession,\u201d says Hoffmeister, a professor emeritus and coauthor of the landmark text A Journey Into the Deafmagazine-World<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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More than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, most of whom rely on the medical establishment for guidance, he says. Technological advancements in cochlear implants and other supports often give parents hope that their child will develop speech. Few ever meet other deaf people and most elect to pursue a spoken language as a primary communication method. Hoffmeister says the reality is that there is no cure for deafness and his research has shown that the more fluent a student is in ASL, the better able they are to learn, think, and acquire additional knowledge.<\/p>\n

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The child of deaf parents and a fierce advocate for Deaf culture when it was not a popular stance, Hoffmeister says incremental changes in deaf education in the last 15 years, including the dual designation at Horace Mann, are cause for optimism.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m hopeful for the future,\u201d he says. \u201cFor a long time, I felt like a lone wolf in this field.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Developing a Curriculum<\/strong><\/p>\n

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One of the latest advances was made by BU Wheelock researchers Todd Czubek (\u201992,\u201998, GRS\u201917) and Kristin DiPerri (\u201904). They recently created the first ASL\/English bilingual curriculum for deaf students and have been invited to schools around the world to share it.<\/p>\n

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For years, Czubek worked as an elementary school teacher for deaf students in New Mexico. In the absence of an official bilingual curriculum, he and his colleagues adapted lesson plans for hearing children, teaching deaf children about English and grammar when they did not yet have a foundation in spoken English. His students simply weren\u2019t making progress, he says, so he began looking at ways the school\u2019s curriculum fell short.<\/p>\n

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Those lesson plans, Czubek says, make assumptions\u2014that students are growing up in homes with accessible language models and that they will come to school well equipped to use their first language\u2014that are not always true for deaf students. \u201cFrequently, deaf students are coming from homes where they aren\u2019t getting a foundation in language\u2014not just spoken language, but access to language, period. And we\u2019re asking deaf kids who don\u2019t have this foundation to practice something that they just don\u2019t know,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are certainly examples of deaf students who come from signing homes and develop a first language who do well. Those kids typically are the ones who outperform those who don\u2019t come from signing homes. So, I was like, \u2018Wait a second, we need to back up.\u2019 There needs to be a curriculum that makes sense for those kids who come in who haven\u2019t developed a language and whose access to the world is primarily visual.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The curriculum builds on ASL, using it as a scaffolding for students to later learn English. \u201cWe want students to be able to understand, study, and leverage all that they can learn and master about a visual language and then take that metalinguistic awareness that they developed in their first language and be able to apply it in a second language,\u201d says Czubek. He and DiPerri designed a \u201cconcurrent curriculum\u201d where students first learn about a grammar principle in American Sign Language. Once they\u2019ve mastered that, they go on to study how that same grammar principle is realized in English. \u201cThe curriculum begins as really fundamental, making sure that students grasp how language and ideas are organized. The modality difference between English as a spoken and written language and ASL as a signed language presents a huge chasm that has been really hard for our field to cross, but this curriculum allows us to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Czubek and DiPerri based the curriculum on a program they developed at the Scranton School for Deaf & Hardmagazine-ofmagazine-Hearing Children in Pennsylvania in collaboration with the Learning Center for the Deaf\u2019s Center for Research and Training in Massachusetts, which is run by Hoffmeister. The results over several years of testing were \u201cconsistently incredible,\u201d Czubek says, with the majority of students in the program performing at or above levels of English proficiency and general knowledge.<\/p>\n

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Pioneering a Dualmagazine-Language Designation<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Such advances, as well as the broader advocacy of faculty like Hoffmeister, have deeply influenced Horace Mann\u2019s Ciliberto, a graduate of BU\u2019s deaf studies program.<\/p>\n

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A teacher at Horace Mann for more than a decade, beginning as a paraprofessional, she hopes to build on Czubek and DiPerri\u2019s curriculum as part of the school\u2019s dualmagazine-designation effort. For the last three years, students at Horace Mann, who are taught by teams of ASL and English teachers, have been immersed in sign language learning from the time they enroll in kindergarten.<\/p>\n

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By giving deaf children the opportunity to learn ASL and English at a young age, she says, the school will be improving their ability to connect with their peers\u2014and the world.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Boston\u2019s Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing celebrated its 150th anniversary in November 2019, it achieved another milestone: it became the only \u201cdualmagazine-language school\u201d in the US to teach both American Sign Languageand English. To an outsider unfamiliar with the world of deaf education, the move might not seem very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9090,"featured_media":52319,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[6613],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[6630],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/70627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9090"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70627"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/70627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72976,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/70627\/revisions\/72976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=70627"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=70627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}