A Deaf Way of Education: Interaction Among Children in a Thai Boarding School
A Deaf Way of Education: Interaction Among Children in a Thai Boarding School
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Date
1995
Authors
Reilly, Charles Banks
Advisor
Hopkins, Richard L.
Citation
DRUM DOI
Abstract
This is an ethnographic study of peer society in a boarding school
for deaf children in the Kingdom of Thailand. The aim is to describe the
students' after-hours interaction together and its function in their
intellectual and social development. Deaf children tend to be
institutionalized because they are unable to fully participate in the
process of socialization conveyed by speech. Deafness is perceived as an
inevitable loss to intellectual and social capacity. Considered to be
uneducable in ordinary settings, they are sent to residential schools,
which remain the predominant placement worldwide.
The informal interaction among deaf students has largely been
ignored or decried as impeding educational goals. Yet as their first
opportunity for unhindered communication, the interaction among
deaf students reveals their learning capacity and preferences. Aged six to
nineteen years, the youth created educational activities to learn the sign
language, in-group and societal norms, and worldly knowledge. They
devised a complex social organization via a sign language that is little
used or appreciated by teachers. They regulated their modes of
interaction with each other according to relative skill in the sign
language and mental acuity (a "social hierarchy of the mind"). This provided a pathway of gradually diversifying learning activities. The confinement to a given status group fostered teaching and learning
among youth of similar skill levels ( and provided an example of
Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development.")
Student leadership was split into elders who wielded authority and
those few youth who were skilled and creative masters of signs. These
"signmasters" were generators of new ideas, storytellers and interpreters.
This honored role was aspired to by youngsters, and the skills had been
consciously passed down. At the same time there was pressure, by some
students and teachers, to supplant creative activities with regimentation.
The study recommends that educators examine the overall school
environment to assure that there is a "normal" balance of activity that is
similar to other children in the society, and to consider the value of deaf
students' interactions and sign language as resources in the classroom.