American Annals of the Deaf

In this concluding article of an American Annals of the Deaf Special Issue, we draw on Vygotsky's Fundamentals of Defectology to argue that the essence of deaf pedagogy is not centered on constructing deaf students' hearing abilities but on a biosocial orientation that considers the whole multimodal child with unfettered access to natural signed languages. In alignment with this biosocial view, we recognize and resist the overarching influence of biomedical professionals and systems on deaf education. Such biomedical influence comes with convenient detachment from accountability in education systems while arguably causing at least significant, if not maximal, harm to the optimal developmental outcomes of deaf children...

Lev Vygotsky (1993) described deaf ontology as dynamic interactions that uniquely but inexorably synthesize biology and society. The deaf biosocial condition is a deceptively simple theory. Principally, it clarifies imbricated issues of axiology, power, and knowledge by centering positive adaptive compensations that sublate deafness. Using Vygotsky's theoretical proposals, I organized four distinct paradigms of deaf research and analyzed a historical case of sign language deprivation from Soviet Russia in the 1930s...

In U.S. deaf education, disablement results from a normative interpretation of disability in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. However, Vygotsky's Fundamentals of Defectology (1993) allows educators to view current deaf education pedagogical practices through a sociocultural-constructivist lens and reject the current remedial special education model. We explore our experience as teachers of the deaf to analyze the current state of deaf education, synthesizing two core areas of Vygotskian research-sociocultural theory and deaf pedagogy-and applying them within a framework outlining characteristics of accessible educational environments that facilitate deaf children's sociocultural and intellectual development...

Children, including those who are deaf, become aware of and learn about their environments through playing and social and cultural interactions. For most deaf children, preschool classrooms are optimal spaces for these interactions to occur, but only if they can fully engage with this environment. We discuss the need for and constituent aspects of full access to learning in these environments for deaf children. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory is employed chiefly as the basis for exploring and analyzing useful strategies for educators and families of deaf children...

Deaf education research and practice have not always lived up to the ideal of improving deaf students' lives. Consequently, we have constructed novel arguments supporting deaf pedagogy using pragmatic ethics, the aim of which is to increase benefit and decrease harm to individuals and society. The ideal of harm reduction asks the pragmatist to pursue the path of action least likely to result in injury to others. Besides applying ideas that reduce harm, educators must also increase benefits for deaf students...

The African worldview of Ubuntu predates Vygotskian theory, but the Ubuntu view that the community defines the person aligns uncannily with Vygotsky's biosocial proposition and contemporary conceptions of deaf ontology and epistemology. Unlike prevailing Euro-American thought, Ubuntu accentuates the view that it is not any physical or psychological characteristic of the individual that defines personhood. Instead, Ubuntu aphorisms, the containers of meaning in African epistemology, indicate that the reality of the communal world is at least equal if not superior to individual life histories...

Vygotsky's (1993) Fundamentals of Defectology is a radical's handbook of deaf and disability studies. Vygotsky's overall research program views disabilities, including deafness, from an integrated biosocial and critical theory standpoint. In two movements, I introduce an American Annals of the Deaf Special Issue on Vygotskian perspectives in deaf education focused mainly on his Defectology volume. Movement One describes Vygotsky's life, research, death, and posthumous impact by situating his deaf pedagogy research as one node in a network of defectological pedology, translated as applied special educational psychology...

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Little is known about the history of women's curatorial work in museums, particularly the work of deaf women. The contributions of Archer M. Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (HSM&L) in New York City and the women to whom he entrusted library and museum work deserve to be better known. Some of these women were deaf, and two of them, Eleanor Sherman Font and Margaret Sherman, were great-granddaughters of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the first public school for the deaf in the United States...

It is argued that Oralism and Total Communication underestimate the profound nature of deafness and the potential value of fundamental research. The evolution of these philosophies is described, and changes in philosophy are discussed.

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Improving reading skills is considered one of education's highest priorities. The present study investigated teachers' knowledge of reading skills instruction in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). A mixed-methods design was used to obtain data that would improve understanding of teachers' knowledge about teaching reading skills to d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students. Fifty-five teachers of d/Dhh students completed a questionnaire; 26 of the teachers were interviewed in the qualitative portion of the study...