Deaf education
Deaf education is the education of students with any degree of hearing loss or deafness. This may involve, but does not always, individually-planned, systematically-monitored teaching methods, adaptive materials, accessible settings, and other interventions designed to help students achieve a higher level of self-sufficiency and success in the school and community than they would achieve with a typical classroom education. There are different language modalities used in educational setting where students get varied communication methods. A number of countries focus on training teachers to teach deaf students with a variety of approaches and have organizations to support and advocate for deaf students.
Identifying deaf students
Children may be identified as candidates for deaf education from their audiogram or medical history. Hearing loss is generally described as slight, mild, moderate, severe, or profound, depending upon how well a person can hear the intensities of frequencies. Of the children identified as deaf, only 5% are born to deaf parents. This percent of deaf students may have a linguistic advantage when entering the education system due to more extensive exposure to a first language.In cases of congenital hearing loss, parents can start to notice differences in their children's hearing as soon as newborn to three months old. If a child doesn't respond to sudden loud sounds, this could be an indication. As the baby begins to age to around four to eight months, they should turn their head towards where the sound is coming from. Around a year to 16 months, if they don't pronounce words correctly, or don't speak at all, this could also be an indication. All those are indications of congenital hearing loss, which means the child was born this way.
A child can also acquire hearing loss at a young age due to a middle ear infection, a serious head injury, exposure to loud noises over a long period, and many other causes. If this occurs, the same symptoms will occur as they do with congenital hearing loss. If this happens when a child is older, around toddler or preschool age, there are more signs to look for. Signs could include a child not replying when their name is called. The child may pronounce words differently than the rest of their peers. If the child turns up the TV incredibly high or sits very close, this could also be an indication. One of the biggest indications that a child may have hearing loss is they intensely focus on the person's lips and facial expressions to understand what they are saying when they are having a conversation with someone. If a child has these signs, getting a screening for hearing loss would be the next step.
As recently as the 1990s, many parents in the United States were unaware that their child was deaf until on average 2.5 to 3 years old, according to the U.S. National Institute of Health. Worse yet, many other children were not identified as having any hearing impairment until they reached five or six years of age. In 1993, the National Institutes of Health's Consensus Development Conference on Early Identification of Hearing Loss concluded previous risk-based assessment was not sufficient and that all infants should receive hearing screenings, ideally prior to hospital discharge postpartum. At the time of this decision, only 11 hospitals nationally were performing screening on 90 percent of babies born, according to the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management. Since then, universal hearing screening has greatly improved early identification.
Language deprivation is defined as lack of access to language during a child's critical period for language exposure, which begins to taper off precisely around the age of five. Unlike any other population, the vast majority of Deaf and hard of hearing children are at risk of having this type of limited exposure to language in early childhood. Research on language deprivation and early childhood interventions to prevent language deprivation are burgeoning. Language Equality & Acquisition for Deaf Kids, for example, is a national campaign that aims to ensure that D/HH children in the United States gain the early language foundation necessary to be kindergarten-ready.
For D/HH adolescents and adults who have passed the critical period for language acquisition and have experienced language deprivation, the consequences are far-reaching. Delayed age of acquisition of a first language has deleterious effects on all levels of language processing, ranging from syntactic, to lexical, to phonological difficulties, not to mention cognitive delays, mental health difficulties, lower quality of life, higher trauma, and limited health literacy. Additionally, delayed exposure to a fully accessible language in early life not only affects the ability to acquire such a sign language later in life, but "leads to incomplete acquisition of all subsequently learned languages". The impact of language deprivation is severe and must be considered in efforts toward early identification of deaf and hard of hearing children as well as intervention.
Individual needs
Deaf education programs must be customized to each student's needs, and deaf educators provide a continuum of services to deaf students based on individual needs. For instance, if a student is in a mainstream class, a note taker or interpreter might be an accommodation provided in their education plan. In the United States, Canada, and the UK, education professionals use the acronym IEP when referring to a student's individualized education plan.Educational philosophies
There are a variety of educational philosophies that differ in their views both regarding language use and goals for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.Bilingual-bicultural education
In this philosophy, deafness is approached as a cultural, not a medical, issue. In a bilingual-bicultural program, deaf children learn sign language such as American Sign Language as a first language, followed by a written or spoken language such as English as a second language. Bilingual-bicultural programs consider spoken or written language and sign language equal languages, helping children develop age-appropriate fluency in both. The bilingual-bicultural philosophy states that since deaf children learn visually, rather than by ear, education should be conducted in a visual language. To promote students' accuracy and fluency in either language, sign language and spoken language are not used simultaneously, because natural sign languages, such as American Sign Language, possess their own phonological system, morphology, and syntactic structure that differs greatly from that of spoken languages. In addition to bilingualism, this philosophy also emphasizes mastery of two cultures, both Deaf culture and hearing culture.Proponents of this philosophy emphasize the need for deaf and hard-of-hearing students to have exposure to a fully accessible language from a young age for optimal cognitive development. Supporters believe that, due to the widely recognized variability in cochlear implant and hearing aid outcomes, sign language access is critical to ensure that deaf and hard-of-hearing children do not experience language deprivation, which has significant effects on mental health, socioemotional development, language fluency, and educational outcomes, among other factors.
Critics of this philosophy believe that without a strong emphasis on spoken communication, this philosophy may lead to students being unable to integrate into the typically-hearing world.
Auditory-oral and auditory-verbal education
In this philosophy, deafness is approached as a medical, not a cultural, issue. There are two main educational philosophies for deaf and hard-of-hearing students based on an emphasis on auditory and verbal skills. The names of these philosophies are sometimes used interchangeably, but the methods primarily used in each philosophy are distinct.Oralism
is a philosophy that the education of deaf students should be conducted through and should promote the use of spoken language. This philosophy utilizes a variety of approaches, including lip reading and speech training. Oralism was popularized in the late 1800s and largely enforced throughout Europe and North America, following the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in 1880. Oralism was established as an alternative to manual education and stands in opposition to the use of sign language in the education of deaf and hard of hearing students.Total Communication
is an educational philosophy for deaf and hard of hearing students which encourages the use and combination of a variety of communication means, including listening, lipreading, speech, formal sign languages, artificial sign systems, gestures, fingerspelling, and body language. The goal of the Total Communication philosophy is to optimize communication skills using a combination of means that are most effective for each individual child, leading to implementations of this philosophy that greatly differ from one to the next.Whereas the Bilingual-Bicultural philosophy emphasizes the separation of spoken and signed languages, the Total Communication philosophy allows simultaneous use of signed and spoken languages. It also allows the use of artificial signed systems, which are based on the grammar and syntax of spoken language and stand in opposition to formal sign languages, which have their own distinct grammar and syntactic rules.
Proponents of this philosophy believe that flexibility in communication strategies is critical for the success of deaf and hard of hearing children and that no one approach is effective for the majority of these children. Total Communication emphasizes taking the strengths and needs of individual children into account and believes that mixed communication strategies that cater to these strengths lead to optimal outcomes.
Critics of this philosophy argue that using multiple modalities is problematic, because it reduces the linguistic quality of both languages and therefore does not constitute full language exposure for deaf and hard-of-hearing children.