AllDeaf.com - View Single Post - SEE: "has become extremely popular in the schools"?

shel90 · 01-31-2008, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Reba

I'm sure I'm not telling anyone anything new when I say that "trends" have continually flowed thru Deaf education over the past couple hundred years in America. Oral vs. signing, SEE vs. ASL, residential vs. mainstream, bi-bi, total communication, cued speech, and so forth.

SEE was very "popular" for a period when the developers of it pushed hard to get it into all deaf ed programs (follow the money). Then, the pendulum swung towards ASL and bi-bi for a while, especially after the DPN movement, and a surge of Deaf pride and empowerment. The public schools had a dilemma. Most of their educational interpreters used variations of SEE and PSE but to be politically correct they wanted to use ASL in their programs. What to do? Well, they can tell everyone that they promote ASL but keep using PSE until that future day when they can hire more ASL terps. Guess what? That future day never arises in some schools.

Or some public mainstream schools decide that if the terps say they use ASL, and tell the Deaf students that, yes, this is ASL, maybe no one will notice that it's NOT ASL!

You can't imagine how many times I'm sent on an interpreting assignment to a consumer who has specifically requested ASL interpreting only to find out that they use very English PSE signing. They know that ASL is preferred in the Deaf community, so they insist that they are using ASL. I don't argue with Deaf consumers; I just adjust my signing to fit their needs without comment. As we chat, I find out that they attended mainstream programs, and that their only signing models were the educational interpreters or an occasional fellow Deaf student.

What I'm trying to say is, SEE never really went away. It just got shuffled around, took on a pseudonym, and laid low for a while. But it was still there.

SEE will always be "popular" with public school "educators" because it's easier for the hearing people to deal with.

Is "easier" the same as "better"? Is "popular" the same as "effective"? You be the judge.

I was never exposed to SEE. My first exposure to sign language was a pure model of ASL so I dont know what it is like to sign SEE full time.

Anyways, I feel that since hearing children are getting the proper model of English and we know that spoken language is not fully accessible to deaf children like it is for hearing children so if I want an equal educational access for all deaf children like their hearing counterparts get, then the visual language should be a pure model of the language whether it is BSL, ASL, FSL and so on. That's my opinion.

As a teacher, I cant imagine delivering the same effective lessons using SEE as I do using ASL.

I worked in a TC program one time at a public school and all of the teachers and interpreters called SEE as "ASL". One of the teachers who worked there briefly used to argue with everyone about how it wasnt ASL. At the time, I was just starting to learn ASL and didnt understand it enough to be able to distinguish the 2. Looking back, that deaf teacher was right.