A Jerney in to the Deaf World

Watching the film Through Deaf Eyes was eye opening to Deaf history and culture. The film was a great introduction and snapshot of what it is like to be Deaf and to live in not only the Deaf world but to also be a part of the hearing world. Watching the film and learning the history and the achievements that the Deaf have overcome was inspiring. It was also depressing to see the kind of oppression that Deaf people have faced and within their own community. One of the biggest things that I took away from the movie was that Deaf people can do anything they wish to do, besides hear. Seeing the way they stood up and demanded a Deaf president of Gallaudet University and that helping to influence the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act was inspiring. Whenever I would think of what it would be like to be Deaf, I thought of the immediate loses that a Deaf person would have and that just isn’t the way to look at it.

In mainstream American society, we tend to approach deafness as a defect. Helen Keller is alleged to have said, "Blindness cuts people off from things; deafness cuts people off from people." (rnib.org) This seems a very accurate description of what Keller's world must have been. We as hearing people tend to pity deaf people, or, if they succeed in the hearing world, admire them for overcoming a severe handicap. We tend to look at signing as an inferior substitute for "real" communication. We assume that all deaf people will try to lip-read and we applaud deaf people who use their voices to show us how far they have come from the grips of their disability. Given this climate, many hearing people are surprised, as I was at

I think that all parents with deaf children should embrace their child and their new culture and learn the language that is most easy for their child to communicate in. Most deaf children feel lonely and abandoned from their families because no one ever bothers to include them into family conversations. Whenever the deaf person would ask what's going on, they would say “Oh we'll tell you later.” Always the same thing and deaf people are tired of it. They want to know now and be included! It's not fair that they have to be left out just because they're deaf. It causes depression and resentment in the deaf person when the family constantly excludes the deaf family member. In some situations, deafness was viewed as evil. One man said that his aunt told him that he must have been a bad man in his past-life and as punishment, he was born deaf in this life-time.

The deaf community does not see their hearing impairment as a disability but as a culture which includes a history of discrimination, racial prejudice, and segregation. According to PBS home video “Through Deaf Eyes,” there are thirty-five million Americans that are hard of hearing (Hott, Garey & et al., 2007) . Out of the thirty-five million an estimated 300,000 people are completely deaf. There are over ninety percent of deaf people who have hearing parents. Also, most deaf parents have hearing children. With this being the exemplification, deaf people communicate on a more intimate and significant level with hearing people all their lives. “Deaf people can be found in every ethnic group, every region, and every economic class.” The

In “Through Deaf Eyes” you will find a range of perspective on the question what is deafness? This film is a balanced presentation of deaf experience. I believe that the film does a good job of revealing the struggles and triumphs of deaf people in society throughout history. The documentary covers a span of close to 200 years of deaf life in the United States. You will see experiences among deaf people in education, family life, work, and social activities.

While reading " Deaf in America: Voices From A Culture " I notice the purpose of this book was to wrote about Deaf people in a new and different way. The book main focus is that Deaf people have a condition that they can't hear. The culture of Deaf people is what both authors want to begin yo betray. What I found interesting while reading is that the majority of indidivauls within the community of Deaf people do not join it at birth. While reading these chapters I've seen both auhtors try to present the culture from the inside to discover how Deaf people describe themselves and how they think about their lives.

Two centuries ago, the Deaf community arose in American society as a linguistic minority. Members of this community share a particular human condition, hearing impairment. However, the use of American Sign Language, as their main means of communicating, and attendance to a residential school for people with deafness also determine their entry to this micro-culture. Despite the fact that Deaf activists argue that their community is essentially an ethnic group, Deaf culture is certainly different from any other cultures in the United States. Deaf-Americans cannot trace their ancestry back to a specific country, nor do Deaf neighborhoods exist predominantly throughout the nation. Additionally, more than ninety percent of deaf persons are born

In chapter 4, it explains how Deaf people live in a hearing world. Some people who have grown up with Deaf people really don't see Deaf people as any different than themselves. Verditz had an idea that sign language comes from spoken languages, English and ASL are similar and different from each other having English as my first language has helped me learn ASL but the sentence structures are very different from English. Sign language is a visual language.

Have you ever felt like there was nothing that you can do for your child? In this book, Deaf Like Me, by Thomas S. Spradley and James P. Spradley, I can see the journey that Lynn’s parents took to get her help. (Spradley & Spradley, 1978). This book was an excellent read. I really liked the way that they described the ways they tried to help Lynn to understand the world around her. The book, is a great asset for any family that might be unexpectedly put into a situation that they know nothing about such as a deaf child.

     Born hearing to deaf, signing parents, Mark gradually lost his hearing. Despite the fact that his deaf parents preferred sign communication, Mark was raised and educated without the use of sign language. His parents and grandparents were concerned that sign might interfere with speech and restrict his educational achievement. Although Mark became increasingly hard-of-hearing, he worked hard to "pass" as a hearing person. This ambition, he later discovered, actually constricted his development and limited the depth of relationships with family and friends. During these long years, he just "didn?t know what (he) was missing." When he later learned ASL, chose to mix with deaf people, and learned to

The Book I decided to read is called “Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf”. In this book the author Oliver Sacks basically focuses on Deaf history and the community of the deaf developed toward linguistic self-sufficiency. Sacks is a Professor of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He became interested in the problem of how deaf children acquire language after reviewing a book by Harlan Lane. The book was titled “When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf”. This book was first published in 1984 and was published again in 1989. Before reading Harlan’s book Sacks did not know any sign language. The book encouraged him to begin studying sign language. Sacks became extremely interested on how the deaf learn to communicate with the ability of sound being nonexistent. He wanted to know what this process may tell us about the nature of language. Seeing Voices is made up of three chapters, the history of the deaf, a discussion of language and the brain, and an evaluation of the problems behind the student strike that occurred at Gallaudet University, in March of 1988.

The book “A Journey into the Deaf-World”, by Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan, is about the different people who are considered deaf: hard-of-hearing, deaf, and CODA. People who are hard-of-hearing are people who don 't hear well; people who are deaf lack the power of hearing since birth; you can be born hearing and throughout time lose some or all of your hearing sense. People who are CODA (children of deaf adults) are often signing because their parents are deaf and CODA’s often are helpful by being interpreters. CODAs become a great link between their parents and the hearing world. This book explains about deaf culture and how sign is a visual and manual way of conversing. The benefits of sign language are many and the ASL “foreign language” is growing among hearing as well. About more than 500,000 people sign in America alone. ASL is dated from 1779, but probably even earlier. Sign language promotes cultural awareness; deaf culture uses sign language as their main form of communicating.

American Annals of the Deaf is an educational journal that is committed to providing educational experiences of high quality as well as related services for the deaf. This journal has been around for over 150 years, and over time they have been dedicated to making sure that children and adults who are deaf or hard of hearing are receiving quality assistance for their disability (NEED CITATION). In July 1996, they published a scholarly article in response to a survey Catherine Gillespie and Sandra Twardosz conducted about the literacy environment and different practices that children are receiving in a residential school for the deaf.

In Mark Drolsbaugh’s book, Deaf Again, he is able to bring the reader through his life struggles and triumphs as a member of the Deaf community. There were three major themes that reoccurred throughout his life. These themes consist of communication barriers, a negative image on deafness, and limitations on social experiences. An example of communication barriers starts in the beginning with his birth. From the beginning, he talked about how his parents struggled to communicate with the doctors when the epidural was not administered properly or when the anesthesia machine was not working. This communication barrier caused his mother to go through a natural birth and almost lose her life because she could not tell the doctors that something was wrong. Under the circumstances that Drolsbaugh’s grandparents did whatever they could to preserve his hearing this left him with feelings that deafness is bad. This notion fostered a negative self-image. Due to Drolsbaugh’s loss of hearing he had a hard time making meaningful social connections. This affected him greatly in his dating life. As he talked about in the book he dated a girl who was hearing but could sign for three years until they broke up. He said how he tried to hold onto that relationship because he knew that there are not many girls that he knew at the time that could sign and be able to communicate with him fully. This affected him socially with friends as well.

From antiquity, being deaf was looked upon as an undesirable and a culture which was disconnected with the rest of mainstream society. Often members of the community found themselves ostracized by members of other cultures, who viewed them with suspicion, and were thought to be possessed, or in communion, with undesirable “spirits”, particularly during the advent of the Christianity that was in practice during the Middle Ages. During this period, before the advent of Gutenberg’s metal, movable type printing press, the populace was mostly illiterate and religious texts and spiritual obligations/instructions were verbally transmitted to the people by the literate clerics of the day. Thus, the deaf were believed to have no access to “Fides