operatorally

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

Deafness

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jillio

It is called a communication disorder because communication is affected. If you plan on teaching, you need to understand that communication issues for deaf children are the most important issues to be considered...much more important than their level of residual or aided hearing.