Reading Signs

In Michigan, an American Sign Language (ASL) teacher named Ryan Commerson is in the seventh day of a hunger strike. [via Penny Richards] He is starving himself (and outside in Detroit in November, to boot) to draw attention to practices and personnel in state-run education for the deaf which he (and quite a few other people) believe is doing a grave disservice to the students at the Michigan School for the Deaf (MSD) and the Detroit Day School for the Deaf (DDSD). [I apologize for the acronyms and will try to make the technical terms comprehensible, but it's somewhat unavoidable. I'm a novice in this field myself, being much more familiar with blindness, so I'm entirely open to correction on technical points]

One very distinctive feature of this starvation protest is the use of a blog. Though the conversation in comments is mostly limited to students, teachers, and family members, it invites the attention (and support) of the wider world. Hunger strikes are (it seems to me) quite rare (at least nowadays, in the US), but the ability to draw attention well beyond the immediate community and local media could bring it back in a big way. Take this local TV news segment: thanks to the internet, this is now effectively global news footage.

Commerson's demands are both specific and extensive:

• Resignation or firing of the principles of MSD and DDSD (the latter appears to have happened) and a nationwide search for sign-fluent replacements committed to
• an educational and cultural theory known as"Bi-Bi" or 51/49, which treats ASL as a distinct language in its own right and English as a separate (and to some extent secondary) language. This would replace the current (state-mandated) Total Communication (TC) theory, which treats sign language more as one of several tools for communicating with the hearing world than as a medium for deaf-deaf communication
• The state Board of Education also should, he insists, issue a mandate that"Bi-Bi" be the model for all state Deafness education, to ensure that any gains made through this action be protected in the future
• Increases in staff numbers and salaries (which lag behind public teacher rates) at MSD and DDSD to better serve students, attract the best people and demonstrate the state's commitment to Deaf education.

This echoes the student strike at Gallaudet a few years back, which demanded leadership and practices which reflected the activists' belief that the Deaf community (and the capitalization matters) is a distinct cultural and population with a right to preserve its practices, language and sense of community. (Commerson's supporters just posted an excellent explanation of the educational and cultural theory involved. Note that one of the authors is a Gallaudet Peer Advisor) At the heart of these disputes is the question of whether deafness is more an identity than (merely?) a disability. Some even eschew the concept"disability" entirely, preferring to focus on the abilities and achievements and institutions of their community than on the challenges of negotiating the wider world (challenges which, they argue, would be considerably lessened if the"hearing world" would adopt also the culture/identity model instead of the disability model).

I'm not sure how far back this split goes: my impression (and I hope our Disability Studies friends will join the discussion to educate us) is that it arose mostly in the 1960s or 1970s; I'm quite sure that it was in place by the mid-80s. Commerson and his supporters claim that TC is a failed theory, producing high numbers of underprepared graduates. I haven't seen a lot of statements in support of TC, to be honest; the impression left by the statements available is that it's an attempt to be as broadly integrative as possible, that it's supported primarily by hearing parents of deaf children, by educators who see the Deaf community as a sort of assimilative failure.

One thing which is going to make these discussions more complicated over the next generation or two is genetics. Well, perhaps eugenics might be the proper word: advances in pre-natal genetic testing have resulted in, at least in some populations, significant drops in the rate of birth of people with certain conditions. Down Syndrome is the most obvious, but not the only one. One challenge facing Braille literacy advocates (and groups which advocate blindness as an"inconvenience" rather than a disability) is a steady decline in the number of blind students who don't have other physical or developmental problems. This is a difficult personal issue for me, and one about which I generally think hard and say very little; let's just say that the first thing a"genetics counselor" needs is a good understanding of genetics and the second thing is people skills... and some don't have either.

Meanwhile, there's a short-term issue: there's a man starving himself in the hopes that his students and community will be better served.