operatorally
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- Oct 28, 2006
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Does anyone know anything about the National Institute on Deafness and Other communication disorders?
The reason I ask is that I'm a hearie, and I'm studying to be a teacher [I used to be a relay operator which is how I became interested in deaf rights]. One of my profs asked us to go to the website for the National Institute on Deafness and Other communication disorders. I went to it and it talks about screening children [from the point of view of hearing people obviously...] for hearing issues or deafness, as well as [primarily spoken] language development.
I can see that for hearing people with kids who might have issues speaking or responding to spoken language, there's a need to find out if they're deaf or have developmental delays or dyslexia etc, but the fact that deafness is called a communication disorder pisses me off. How is deafness a communication disorder when deaf people who flourish in ASL-fluent communities have no problem communicating with each other? The real 'communication disorder' for deaf people is the fact that the hearing world does such a poor job of making life accessible for deaf/hoh folks...
So yeah, I have class on Monday and I'm going to use it as a chance to encourage other teachers-to-be to rethink the way they categorize deafness and I would be thrilled if anyone here has any experiences with the NIDCD that they can share.
Thanks
The reason I ask is that I'm a hearie, and I'm studying to be a teacher [I used to be a relay operator which is how I became interested in deaf rights]. One of my profs asked us to go to the website for the National Institute on Deafness and Other communication disorders. I went to it and it talks about screening children [from the point of view of hearing people obviously...] for hearing issues or deafness, as well as [primarily spoken] language development.
I can see that for hearing people with kids who might have issues speaking or responding to spoken language, there's a need to find out if they're deaf or have developmental delays or dyslexia etc, but the fact that deafness is called a communication disorder pisses me off. How is deafness a communication disorder when deaf people who flourish in ASL-fluent communities have no problem communicating with each other? The real 'communication disorder' for deaf people is the fact that the hearing world does such a poor job of making life accessible for deaf/hoh folks...
So yeah, I have class on Monday and I'm going to use it as a chance to encourage other teachers-to-be to rethink the way they categorize deafness and I would be thrilled if anyone here has any experiences with the NIDCD that they can share.
Thanks