New York Teacher yesterday entitled Teaching Children who are Hearing-Impaired.
Those words alone are indicative of a perspective that views children who are deaf and hard of hearing as lacking, damaged and in need of fixing.
I do not take issue with the author who comes across as a passionate, caring teacher eager to share her experiences in order to edify new teachers in the field of deaf education. She provides a few helpful suggestions about FM units and how to use interpreters but one "tip" had me shaking my head.
She writes, "Hearing-impaired youngsters are concrete learners and often have difficulty with abstract concepts. We have to ease into such concepts."
This statement is reminiscent of one presented during a workshop I attended on assessment and intervention for students with "hearing loss and other disabilities". The keynote speaker said that hearing-impaired children lack the ability to communicate with others and this inability to access language has a negative impact on social skills and abstract reasoning.
I take issue with these blanket statements because they are misleading. While this may be true for some children who are deaf or hard of hearing it is not true for all of them. And it is certainly not true for those culturally Deaf children who have had access to a visual language since birth. (Is that a blanket statement? Oops!)
When it comes to education one size does not fit all. Sometimes an oral approach with speech therapy is successful and sometimes a signed environment best meets the needs of a student. It's frustrating that both sides of the oral vs. manual debate cannot put forth all the educational options for parents. Too often doctors give misleading or one-sided information--keeping parents in the dark--to push their own agendas.
Why can't we all just play nice?