Reflection About Deaf Culture

After reading Deaf Again I learned a lot of new things I didn't know about Deaf culture and was drawn in by the story of Mark Drolsbaugh. "The hardest fight a man has to fight is to live in a world where every single day someone is trying to make you someone you do not want to be " – e.e cummings. I was brought into the book immediately from this quote and realized how difficult it must have been for Mark to find his identity. He was trying to hang on to his hearing in fear of going deaf as if there was something wrong or not proper with being deaf. It took him a long time, twenty-three years to realize that the Deaf culture is receiving and it was there for him to embrace the entire time. It would be difficult to be able to hear and

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.

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.

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

In this 2 hours of deaf history I found it very interesting. It taught me a lot about deaf history. In those 2 hours I found out about how people would treated deaf people. Deaf people were treated very badly, they were treated like something was wrong with them. There is nothing wrong with them even though they can’t hear, nothing is wrong with them they are still humans with feeling. Deaf people were told that they had to go to a school so they could learn to talk (oral schools). In those they were not aloud to sign or use hands in class. They would try and teach deaf kids how to speak by putting their hands on the teacher's throat to feel the vibrations of when the teacher speak and the kids had to copy that feeling on themselves and when

     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

“While with hearing people, she was expected to adapt to their behaviors and to their ways of talking. She realized that their view of her as handicapped could not be overcome; it was too deeply rooted in their culture” (Padden 154). In quote Tom Humphries is talking about Carol Padden in a very influential time of her life. Being a part of a subculture like the deaf community must be enriching but also have interesting effects on how people within the subculture see “normal” individuals. Deaf people can be seen throughout history, the best historical information found was in The Deaf Community in America: History in the Making, written by Melvia M. Nomeland and Ronald E. Nomeland. They provide many details about the history of deaf individuals like, “The first mention of a deaf person, Chushim, is noted in the Torah” (Nomeland 6). The Torah is the religious text of the Jewish people, and was written around 1312 B.C. Education for deaf people took over 3,000 years for there to be public education for the Deaf. “The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, another school, was opened at Kent Road in 1792 to accept deaf children from poor families” (Nomeland 17).

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

Not at all like racial minorities, most by far (at least 90%) of hard of hearing individuals are not naturally introduced to a Deaf minority amass (Mitchell and Karchmer, 2004; Schein and Delk, 1974); as it were, their family is hearing. Not having a Deaf foundation, the greater part of guardians of hard of hearing individuals don't mingle their youngsters about their identity as Deaf individuals or open them to Deaf culture. Inquire about recommends that hard of hearing individuals not naturally introduced to a Deaf family have a more drawn out time of character advancement, and that the vast majority don't turn into a piece of the Deaf people group until their high schooler years. This more drawn out time of personality advancement is likely

I was interested in immersing myself with this group because they are a community of people that I’ve often wondered about. I’ve always wondered about the way they communicate with others and was it hard being deaf or hearing impaired in some ways. As myself, I learned that most people feel uncomfortable when meeting a Deaf person for the first time and this is very normal. When we communicate with people, we generally don’t have to think about the process. When faced with a Deaf person, we are uncertain which rules apply. We don’t know where to look, or how fast or loud to speak. When the Deaf person gives us a look of confusion, we don’t know how to correct the problem. Accept the fact that your initial

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.

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

Deaf and hard of hearing people are just like us. They are not any different, but hears like us. There is some common misunderstanding, that is really annoying for Deaf and hard of hearing people. Those misunderstanding are can you understands us? Are you able to drive? Do you need a wheelchair? Can you read and write? Do deaf people have sex? Etc.…These kinds of questions annoyed deaf people the most. People do not realize that deaf people do not have as much as difficulty as normal folks thinks that they have. They can do almost everything and just as much no less. Sometime, they begged to be considered the same as hearing folks. They want to be equals, respected, and value just as much as hearing people. Sometime, we forgot to ask ourselves.

I may not be considered part of the hearing culture due to my severe to profound hearing loss, but some people might be surprised to hear that I am not considered a part of the Deaf culture. A majority of the Deaf culture is very critical of those who assimilate with hearing people and accept hearing culture as their majority culture. I believe that every hearing impaired and deaf person is an individual and needs to do what is best for them instead of being worried about following the rules of the Deaf culture.

CI’s were manufactured in order to create ease of function in day to day lives of deaf people but has conjured up ethical and social issues amongst specific cultures. Across different cultures there are opposing and parallel beliefs regarding cochlear implants and the benefits and harms regarding the process of implanting one. Many deaf communities within western cultures such as America and Australia view CI’s as unnecessary and offensive towards deaf culture. According to a majority of cultures, receiving CI’s is seen as inappropriate and takes away a person’s identity. Heather Artinian, in the annual TED conference who is a deaf person who wears cochlear implants explained that receiving cochlear implants places the individual between two identities, neither deaf nor hearing. This is because once receiving her cochlear implants, the deaf community within her western culture no longer perceives her as a deaf person because, following receiving the implants, she was able to hear sounds and communicate in ways which deaf people who hadn’t received the implants could not. She too described that she was also not part of the hearing culture as she was not considered as a hearing individual due to being born deaf and despite receiving the CI’s, is still regarded as deaf opposed to as a