Culture, by general definition, refers to customs and values shared by a group of people, usually from a particular geographic region. While deaf people don’t inhabit a shared land, they do share a language, have culture-specific social values, and live by their own customs and etiquette. Deaf literature is in ASL and is catalogued in video libraries; strong visual arts and theater arts communities exist. Deaf clubs around the world give the community a sense of place, as deaf people connect with one another internationally. “Introductions in the deaf world usually include the names of people from the school or city where the new person, the one being introduced, comes from,” says Hoffmeister. “It parallels the idea of networking — that is, who knows who where.”

Cole instructs student in American Sign Language. About 100 students from throughout Boston University take sign language classes at the School of Education each semester.

The University offers myriad ways for students to immerse themselves in the deaf world. Now studying to be an ASL interpreter, Blau-Shane recalls practicing her language skills in the Deaf Studies Club and the Boston University Deaf Organization, whose meetings are conducted in sign language. She and fellow students attended signing suppers in the dining halls, where communication is in ASL.

Both Blau-Shane and Cole emphasize that beyond ASL, specific cultural mores and etiquette exist in the deaf community. Because most deaf children have hearing parents, school is often the only place the children learn about the deaf world. “Even if other deaf kids are around, if the teacher has no background, where can they get their values, their cultural rules?” Cole asks. “It often develops naturally among kids — for example, they learn to get each other’s attention visually — but to really feed the culture and identity comes from teachers. Teachers have a big responsibility to make sure the child has the full essence of what it means to be deaf.”

Those unfamiliar with the deaf world wouldn’t know, for example, that there are appropriate and inappropriate parts of the body to tap to get someone’s attention, or that there are proper and improper distances to keep when waving one’s hand. They wouldn’t know that hugging is an important aspect of deaf culture, as are long good-byes. “Whenever anything’s wrapping up, it takes hours and hours to say good-bye,” says Blau-Shane, who as a hearing person found it challenging at first to mingle within the deaf world. “What’s most difficult for hearing people going into ASL or deaf culture is that it’s a very noneuphemistic language and culture. It’s a visually based language, so physical aspects become very important. It’s not considered rude to describe people based on physical characteristics — even ones that wouldn’t be appropriate in hearing cultures. You can say ‘that fat lady’ or ‘the guy with the big nose.’ It’s hard for hearing
people to get around the embarrassment of describing people in detail physically.”

By familiarizing them with the culture, faculty help students realize firsthand the need to approach deaf education from the deaf perspective. But what about the when-in-Rome view that the deaf community, as a minority, should learn to function according to the rules of a society where most people are hearing?

	Cole instructs student in American Sign Language. About 100 students from throughout Boston University take sign language classes at the School of Education each semester.

Hoffmeister refers to this hearing-based viewpoint as “hearingness,” and one of his priorities for the program is to cure students of their hearingness. “What was great about Martha’s Vineyard was that the two cultures respected each other,” he says. “We don’t have that today.” The notion that the deaf community must conform to the rules of the hearing world, Hoffmeister believes, is both unrealistic and unfair. “It’s possible for a hearing person to learn to sign. It’s not feasible for a deaf person to learn to speak — it’s very, very difficult.”

In a perfect world, Hoffmeister believes, the medical community, which favors cochlear implants over teaching ASL, would play a role in promoting sign language, not spoken English, as the first language for deaf children. Cochlear implants, surgically inserted devices that transmit sound information, offer parents the impression of a cure — that a deaf child can live just like a hearing child — but it’s not as simple as that. Poole Nash notes that when children receive cochlear implants early on, the focus is on learning to hear at the expense of learning a language, such as ASL, by which they can immediately communicate. While Poole Nash doesn’t dismiss the implants as ineffective or harmful, she emphasizes that they should be used in conjunction with learning sign language. If implants aren’t effective and children haven’t simultaneously learned ASL, they could face severe cognitive delays. “One thing we know for sure is that you need to have a language, and you need to have it early,” Poole Nash says. “I think the field is putting a lot of kids at risk by not starting them with both modes at the same time.”

Yet this reasoning is too often overridden by the desire of hearing parents for their child to be “normal.” “Parents look at the child and say there’s something wrong,” Cole says. “They want to fix the child. There’s nothing wrong with the child — and it’s a hard concept for many people to see.” Hoffmeister, a child of deaf parents, points out that this occurs almost solely with hearing parents. “If you asked my father if he wanted to hear,” he says, “his answer would be no. He wouldn’t want to change who he is.”

“If I were to have a deaf child, that would be the greatest thing in the world to me,” Cole says. “I would be ecstatic. I would be happy if the child were hearing, but it wouldn’t be the same. People don’t get it because they see it as a disability, as a deficit. It doesn’t fit what they perceive as the norm. So that’s where our program comes in. We try to educate people on what it means to be deaf, to remove it from the definition of disabled.”

Keeping deaf culture alive amidst rapidly progressing technology and those who seek to cure deafness rather than embrace it poses a challenge. The technological advances that enable the deaf community to interact with the hearing may one day be responsible for the extinction of ASL. “There are certainly going to be people who need sign language for the rest of my life,” Poole Nash says. “I’m not sure about the rest of my young children’s lives. Technology changed the entire way the community interacted,” she says of Martha’s Vineyard. “It all worked perfectly because there was no advanced technology. You communicated face-to-face or you communicated in writing. There weren’t any phones; there wasn’t radio; there wasn’t anything that put deaf people at all at a disadvantage.”

But while people in the deaf world communicate via TTY and e-mail, they don’t believe those forms will ever replace their first language. “I don’t think the language will disappear,” says Cole. “For a while we were very excited about e-mail, and we’d stay home and get on the Internet. After a while the newness wore off, and we realized this is still English — it’s not my language; I can’t really express myself clearly and completely. There’s no way to show facial expression or facial grammar in
a printed word. So people get back to where they came from and get together. Physical contact, face-to-face contact, is a very important part of our lives. When we get together, we’re constantly talking. And the love of our language shows through the manner in which we communicate.”

Sidebar: Facial Expressions

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