Learning To Be Deaf Without Losing Your Hearing

By Kim Harrell and S Lea

Part biography and part commentary, in the book you will find delightful and engaging stories that chronicle a deaf studies professor's journey the the hearing world into the Deaf world.

Based on her experiences from life on the farm, to her triumph of establishing a college level deaf studies program, you will see her challenge the sy

• Language: English
• Publisher: S Lea Books
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781792335549

Kim Harrell

Kim L. Harrell, of Seaford, VA, is a 20-year Army veteran and a first-time inspirational author. She is the wife of Pastor Thomas Harrell, Jr., the mother to one daughter and one son, and grandmother to one beautiful granddaughter. Together with her husband of 19 years, she has Co-Pastored H20 Church in Petersburg, VA for seven years. Kim loves serving and encouraging others and believes that her purpose is to uplift, encourage, and motivate women. She believes in sisterhood and in her spare time she loves walking.

Book preview

Introduction

Many of us think of a culture as something that is rooted in a particular geographical place, a particular country or region whose history may go back for centuries. Culture can be defined as people with a shared language, shared customs and shared values passed down from generation to generation. Chinese culture is rooted in the country of China, Italian culture is rooted in the country of Italy, French culture is rooted in the country of France. Even when individuals migrate outside of the country of their origin, the language, the customs and values can continue to be passed down from generation to generation regardless of where they reside.

This is not so for Deaf Culture. There is no country of Deaf, and no geographic place or region where Deaf Culture emanated from. Like other cultures, Deaf Culture is thick and it is rich and it is resilient. So how was it formed? Where did it come from? How does it survive?

For the less than 10% of Deaf children who were born to Deaf parents and raised in beliefs and practices that were passed down to them from their parents, Deaf Culture is rooted in a lifestyle and a shared language no different than any other culture. However, well over 90% of Deaf children are born to hearing parents, so Deaf Culture cannot be passed down from generation to generation to them. How then did those Deaf children born to hearing parents come to establish and maintain the strength of a Deaf Culture?

Think of cultures as coming from a large river flowing downstream, forming eddies, tributaries, lakes and ponds, all separating into their own habitats and ecosystem. Deaf Culture is like traveling upstream, visiting each eddy, each tributary, each lake and pond to find people like themselves and forming a river of their own. Deaf Culture is not always passed down from generation to generation, so it has to be passed down from Deaf person to Deaf person. For Deaf people who have found each other, in spite of city boundaries, county boundaries, state lines or across borders, common experiences bring them together to form a culture unlike anything else.

From the early days in American history there were communities using forms of sign language. With the establishment of Deaf schools teaching American Sign Language (ASL), it would be these schools that were the roots of Deaf Culture here in our country. These communities and these schools served as the gathering places for Deaf individuals to live among Deaf people like themselves. Sharing a language and sharing a way of looking at the world provided an opportunity to form a culture.

In the past, hearing parents who had Deaf children basically had two options. They could send their child away from home to a school for the Deaf, or keep them at home with no possibility of education. Thankfully, many Deaf children were sent to schools where they could learn to communicate through various means, including American Sign Language (ASL), get an education and find their culture. This was difficult for parents and children who were separated, but it was something that could work out very well for a Deaf child who would become part of the Deaf Culture.

Over the decades, and as certain regions in our country found ways to incorporate Deaf children into the educational system if they had hearing aids, speech therapy and supportive families, children would stay at home while getting an education, but they lacked the connection with a Deaf Culture that could most likely benefit them.

Decisions to enroll Deaf children into Deaf schools versus mainstream schools, versus no school at all are very complex. Whether an individual was profoundly Deaf, or hard of hearing, whether you lived in close proximity to a Deaf school, or whether a family had the finances needed, all were factors in how Deaf individuals faced life’s challenges.

This book does not explore the history or the struggles of Deaf people in the past. What we are trying to do is to give hearing people a glimpse of what Deaf Culture is and what life can be like for a Deaf person today. The most important point we’re trying to make is that Deaf people have a culture of their own.

Being Deaf embodies a deep description of who a person really is. It is a culture, a lifestyle, a way of thinking beyond any physical characteristics or heritage. When we use Deaf with a capital D we are addressing a description of an individual from the perspective of their culture, their Deaf Culture.

However, depending upon the era, depending upon an individual’s parents and family, depending on geography, depending on whether a person attends a Deaf school or a mainstream school, just like any other culture, within the Deaf Community there is also the existence of a myriad of possibilities of what the Deaf Community looks like today. It’s no different than any other culture in which you might find an older generation of people who communicate only in the native culture’s language, to younger individuals who become your peer at school or in the workforce and speak the same language as you do. The Deaf Community consists of individuals who come from many different backgrounds, but share a single language and a deep understanding of each other.

Through storytelling, based on life experiences of a Deaf studies professor, we identify many important features of Deaf Culture and the Deaf Community as it functions today. Through those same stories we will look into the life of an individual who came from a hearing culture and later discovered Deaf Culture. She was never compelled to choose between the two cultures, instead, she finds the best in both.

This professor first teaches the Deaf Culture of today. She then moves back, bit by bit, into the past and describes how we came to where we are now. It is her style of teaching, and this book will attempt to replicate that.

In Part I: Learning to Be Deaf, our first story, Chapter 1: Gate Change, comes fully loaded with lots and lots of examples of what Deaf experiences can be like in a hearing world. Stranded at the airport because of a missed gate reassignment illustrates how important visual cues are to Deaf individuals. In this case, posted information that was incorrect and announcements of the change that were not heard left a Deaf passenger at a disadvantage.

This story also reveals the misunderstandings by many in the hearing world that Deaf individuals cannot speak or write. It explains how they can maneuver quite nicely through the hearing world, but are often forced to play the Deaf card in order to get what is needed. In this opening segment, the professor describes rules that are different between Deaf and hearing people, and the networking that goes on as an obligation so your Deaf Community is aware of companies and organizations that are not Deaf friendly.

In Chapter 2: Life on the Farm, we see how visual cues are so critical from very early on. Deaf children who lack hearing capabilities can still seem quite normal for a period of time. They understand the face of happiness and they understand what is going on around them simply because of what they see, and how they are touched and taken care of.

This may be why so many Deaf children in the past went undiagnosed until a later age, when verbal skills didn’t seem to be forming and parents or family member suspected something else was going on. Unfortunately for some children, parents or clinicians who did not recognize that a child had a hearing issue often labeled the child as developmentally delayed, or a term introduced in the 1960s mentally retarded. This might possibly land the child in a special school, in an environment that they had no business being in. These were tragic cases, but they did occur.

Now, thankfully, infants are screened and hearing issues are detected early on. This helps parents and clinicians make decisions in the best interest of the child based on all the resources that are available today. However, since over 90% of Deaf children are born to hearing parents, decisions can be difficult unless they have a really astute clinician who understands the benefits of sharing all possible choices for their Deaf child.

The family profiled in this book recognized the situation and intervened early on, providing all the possibilities for a normal life. This was predicated on the fact that this child had enough hearing to benefit from hearing aids and, with speech therapy, could be raised inside the family and in mainstream schools. That is not always the case for Deaf children.

This was also achievable because the geographical region in which they lived had resources for speech therapy at the time. Oralism was not always taught in many parts of our country. Deaf children were sent to Deaf schools to focus on ASL. Speech therapy was sometimes considered counterproductive for a Deaf child. But speech therapy and other available resources can allow a Deaf child to be raised in hearing culture, the culture of her their own hearing family.

In Chapter 3: The Jeep, our focus is on the clear message that promoting independence and confidence clearly prepares Deaf children for the challenges they likely will face. Chapter 4: Bad Habits illustrates the value of teaching Deaf children to fight back if they are being bullied. This added bit of confidence might be something useful throughout their life.

The first time we see the movement from hearing culture to discovering Deaf Culture is in Chapter 6: Culture Shock. Unfortunately, that did not turn out so well. This could be a very difficult period for a Deaf person who was raised as a hearing child. Being Deaf does not always assure acceptance within the Deaf Community. There were rules and expectations by the Deaf Community about what being Deaf was, and our professor did not fit into the mold. However, things have changed since then.

Luckily, in Chapter 7: Finding a Deaf Identity, we see that there were also people in the Deaf Community who were more open-minded about all the variations of what being Deaf is. The ability to find a Deaf identity in that environment comes easier. This was the