Deaf People’s Retrospective Views and Lived Experiences of Ableism and Discrimination in Education: A Qualitative Study Informed by Critical Disability Studies

Deaf Children’s Right to Sign Language in Education

According to Murray (2015) and Paul & Snoddon (2017), deaf people’s right to sign language in education is among the key principles promoted by the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), an international organisation established and led by deaf people themselves. WFD has in its membership base a large number of national organisations led by deaf leaders with linguistic human rights among their key priorities. By collaborating with other international disability groups, WFD played a key role in drafting the 2006 CRPD (Paul & Snoddon 2017). WFD submitted a report to the UN (Haualand & Allen 2009) highlighting the four basic tenets of human rights for deaf people: 1) the right to use sign languages and have their sign languages recognised and respected as fundamental to deaf people’s culture and identity; 2) the right to access bilingual education through the medium of sign languages; 3) the right to be free from discrimination in all areas of social life and to have their accessibility rights recognised in policy and legislation, and to be treated as equal citizens in society; and 4) the right to access sign language interpretation services.

Irish Sign Language Act 2017 and Deaf Education in Ireland

Statistics show that over 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents in families where they are typically exposed to spoken language (Mitchell & Karchmer 2004). Deaf children born to such families do not have access to sign language until they enroll in a deaf school and meet other deaf children, by which time they will have been deprived of an accessible language during the first five years of their lives (Snoddon 2009). Consequently, evidence shows that deaf children experience chronic underperformance in literacy skills following early exposure to a monolingual spoken language environment (Haualand & Allen 2009). These issues comprise one of the reasons that gave the Irish Deaf Society the impetus to successfully campaign for legal recognition of ISL, culminating in the enactment of the Irish Sign Language Act in December 2017. Although not granted the status of an ‘official’ language of Ireland alongside Irish and English in the Constitution of Ireland, the Act recognises ISL as the indigenous language of the deaf population in Ireland. One of the key functions of the Irish Sign Language Act is to ensure that deaf people’s right to access information through the medium of ISL is protected. Despite this, ISL remains an excluded compulsory subject in state schools in the Republic of Ireland at both primary and secondary level schooling. Although the CRPD (2006) was ratified by the Irish Government, frequently education programmes for deaf children take place without being properly informed by the principles set out in Articles 2 and 24 of the CRPD. McDonnell (2016), for example, noted that deaf adults had no input in determining educational content and for most programmes this remains the case, because deaf people continue to be excluded from discussions on developing policy and practice. Consequently, there is no dedicated bilingual policy at national level that guarantees deaf children access to ISL as a language of instruction (O’Connell 2021). In deaf schools, policy and practice vary markedly across different types of schools: for instance, studies show that ISL is permitted in post-primary classes but is mostly unavailable at primary level due to a low number of primary school teachers fluent in ISL (Mathews 2017; O’Connell 2021). Sign bilingualism has been promoted as a key solution to the education problems faced by deaf children, the central tenet of which is that access to sign language for learning is a birth right of every deaf child and language deprivation is never acceptable (Swanwick 2016).

Theoretical Framework

Given the study’s focus on combatting deaf people’s experiences of ableism and discrimination in educational settings, and ensuring their linguistic rights are acknowledged and recognised, the researcher incorporated the framework of ableism theories (Campbell 2009). The tenets of critical disability studies assert that ableism is endemic in society and education. CDS scholars argue that disability is the result of attitudinal, structural and institutional barriers created by society, which prevent people with disabilities from accessing and enjoying the range of opportunities, resources and information that people without disabilities take for granted (Goodley et al. 2019). CDS researchers further contend that the lived experiences of people with disabilities should be at the forefront of academic research and policy debates, and that attention to studying ableism is largely absent in policy and legislation (Campbell 2009). Ableism studies provide a useful framework for analysing and understanding deaf people’s lived experiences of educational disadvantage. Though many definitions of ableism have been offered by disability studies researchers, the one that closely identifies with this study is delineated by Hehir (2002, 3):

societal attitudes that uncritically assert that it is better for a child to walk than roll, speak than sign, read print than read Braille, spell independently than use a spell-check, and hang out with nondisabled kids as opposed to other disabled kids.

Although deaf people and people with disabilities share similar, overlapping experiences of ableism, the difference lies in their ability characteristics (McDonnell 2016). For example, deaf people experience discrimination related to speech dis/ability, a type of discrimination that more strongly correlates with oralism.

Although widely discussed in deaf education research, oralism remains a particularly slippery term, with researchers offering little by way of a fully developed theory of the concept; the literature is replete with conceptual inconsistencies regarding what oralism actually means. For instance, its core meaning is often identified as ‘an educational approach that prioritizes speech’ (Vieira & Molina 2018, 2), ‘a pedagogical approach for the exclusive teaching of speech and lipreading’ (Harmen 2021, 151) and an educational system (Hutchison 2007). The position adopted in this article admits to all of these characteristics, but it is oralism as an ideological formation that is most important here. By definition, oralism is an ideology asserting the belief that deaf people are better served by learning to speak than sign (Hehir 2002) and that people who have the ability to speak are superior to people who have no speech (Komesaroff 2013). Although oralism is concerned with the development of speech in deaf children, language is often a central question in debates about deaf education policy. Under oralism, hearing teachers imposed spoken languages onto deaf children, forbidding the students to use sign language (Komesaroff 2013). Deaf people schooled under oralism recount how they were physically punished by teachers for breaching the school’s ‘no signing’ policy (McDonnell & Saunders 1993).

In another context, deaf people may experience discrimination associated with hearing dis/ability. This is a type of discrimination related to ‘audism’, an ideology upholding the belief that individuals with ability to hear are superior to those without such ability (Bauman 2004). A prime example of audism is the creation of a school’s internal ‘apartheid’ system to separate the partially deaf students from profoundly and severely deaf students (McDonnell & Saunders 1993). Audism discrimination happens when teachers place more attention on partially deaf students than on severely or profoundly deaf students. While the two concepts – audism and oralism – share similarities in the perception of the inferior other, the emphasis is quite different: oralism is concerned with speech dis/ability while audism is more specifically related to hearing dis/ability. Both audism and oralism denote forms of ableism relative to a persons’ ability to hear and speak. In this study, the ableism concept, as defined by Hehir (2002) and elucidated by Campbell (2009), provides a more useful theoretical base for illuminating an understanding of deaf people’s retrospective views and experiences of education in Ireland.

Participants

The data collection approach and process were organised around a series of qualitative interviews conducted with 40 deaf adults and children over a period of seven years between 2010 and 2016: the first one emerged from a doctoral study and the other is based on the results of a postdoctoral research project funded by the Irish Research Council. A total of 13 interviews with deaf adults were selected to form part of the current study based on themes identified as relevant, in the context of human rights, to ISL and the lived experiences of ableism and discrimination in educational contexts. The sample included 13 participants who attended mainstream school, three participants who attended deaf schools only, and three who attended both mainstream and deaf schools (see Table 1). Participants were recruited through schools and deaf grassroots voluntary groups in Dublin. Snowball sampling method was also employed where participants recommended another potential participant (Cresswell 2007). Purposeful sampling method was employed by using judgement to select people who took part in the study with the foreknowledge that they could provide answers necessary for the study (Patton 1990). The sample reflects the characteristics of the deaf population from which they were purposefully selected. The adult participants have lived experience of human rights violations in relation to the right to ISL and access to quality education through the medium of ISL. The gender breakdown of the participants is seven females and six males, aged between 28 and 63 years.

Interviews were conducted with deaf adults who had been schooled in mainstream schools as well as schools for deaf children, while the interview data were interpreted within a critical disability studies and ableism studies framework. Interviews were conducted in ISL. Since the interviewer is deaf and uses ISL, an interpreter was not required. Examples of interview questions include: How did you experience language in the classroom? How did you experience dis/advantage in school? How did you experience discrimination? How did you access education and learning contents? What was the social and cultural context of the experience? What was the attitude of teachers and peers from your perspective?

Data Analysis

Using a critical disability studies framework, this study sought to understand deaf peoples’ lived experiences of ableism and discrimination; in particular, how they experienced school policy on ISL and the effects of these experiences on their social and educational health and wellbeing. The research sought to identify key themes that arose during the participant interviews. Interviews were recorded online and uploaded on a file stored in a laptop computer. Each interview was transcribed verbatim using the ‘interpretive approach’ (Miles & Huberman 1994) and recordings were revisited to gain a deeper understanding of context (Flick 2007). Each participant was given a copy of the transcript of their interview for validation and to ensure confidentiality, with all identifiable contents such as place names and geography removed with the agreement of participants. When the transcripts were returned to the researcher, they were included as data collected. Data from interview transcripts and field notes were read and analysed (Van Maanen 1988).

The following questions were used as prompts to elicit meaning from the data: What were people doing? Why did this happen? What is the meaning of what they said? The questions that were asked all surrounded participants’ experiences of ISL in school. Frequent comparisons across data were conducted to develop theories. Data were coded on a line-by-line basis to capture what went on before, during and after interviews (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw 2011). Patterns of experiences and beliefs were compared with all other categories in order to identify overlapping patterns of experiences. This process entails experimenting with themes and ideas, and shifting them into groups. In the interest of clarity, each category of data was read and re-read. Participant voices provided rich material on language barriers and strengths.

Ethical Considerations

The research data for this study are derived from doctoral and postdoctoral research projects conducted between 2010 and 2016. For these projects, the Mary Immaculate College institutional review board approval was sought and granted [A12–003]. Participants consented to participate and to have their contributions analysed for the sole purpose of the research projects, including the publication of the research findings. The research data were pseudonymised and kept as anonymous and confidential as possible.

Theme 1: On Being Deprived of Opportunities to Learn and Use ISL

Questions related to the use of ISL in a deaf school context triggered narrations on participants’ experience of classroom interaction. These participants described being constantly reminded of the school’s ‘no signing’ policy; this was at a time when oralism ideology was present – during the period of the 1970s and 1980s. These accounts can be considered expressions of discrimination or injustice rooted in ableism. Six participants reported on the problematic interactions they had with their teachers and fellow students. They recall moments when their teachers admonished them for signing to other students. Some participants witnessed a teacher punishing students for breaching the ISL policy. They described some examples of what teachers did to the culprit: one student was told to report to the school principal’s office and explain what he had done; another student was told to stand outside the classroom as a mark of shame. Others had their hands slapped with a wooden ruler. Alan explained that, in the early 1980s, his teacher made several attempts to stop him from signing during class:

[My] teacher became frustrated with me. [He] could not stop me signing … my hands [were tied] behind my back. He did the same to the others. Children who had no speech were slapped on the hands but, because I had good speech, I [received] the more severe punishment. (Alan)

Like Alan, George tried to make sense of his teacher’s many attempts to stop students signing to each other. He suspected the teacher was anxious to get deaf children to start speaking to each other. George remembered seeing another student being physically punished for signing. One day, the teacher noticed that George was signing to another student. The teacher intervened to tell him that ‘[i]n this class, you are not allowed to sign. You must speak.’ At this point, one student responded in ISL, ‘but we can’t hear speech,’ to which the teacher responded by making him stand outside the classroom. George believed that the teacher’s policing of ISL made him feel hyperconscious about what might happen if he got caught. Both George and Alan were conscious that they would be disciplined if they used ISL.

It appears that deaf students received better treatment from mainstream school teachers, compared to teachers in deaf schools. However, participants had little or no opportunity to learn ISL in mainstream school settings. Indeed, some went through the entire period of their schooling without having any contact with other deaf students. Being surrounded entirely by hearing people, deaf students had to negotiate the everyday pressures of lip-reading spoken language speakers during class. Frank, for example, found that the effort to lip-read people every day caused him to feel anxious, confused and fatigued:

My English teacher spoke with her back turned to us. She walked around while reading a book. She was speaking and reading at the same time. I couldn’t lip-read her. I didn’t know what she was saying. Then, one day she asked me a question. I couldn’t answer it … [S]he asked another question: ‘What age was the boy in the story?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know!’ I really had no idea.

Based on Frank’s account of the incident, the teacher appeared to operate from an assumption that the student was able to lip-read her with little difficulty. Since Frank had not protested, the teacher may have thought that he was doing okay. Frank did not have the confidence to ask for help. He admitted that, as the lone deaf student in class, he didn’t want to draw negative attention from his classmates. As a result, Frank found himself isolated, unable to understand what was happening in class. Most participants made the general point about the attitude of the teachers and school administrators in responding to their struggles with spoken language communication. The school had expected the deaf student to catch up quickly; if they didn’t, they were considered stupid or lazy for not keeping up with the class.

Theme 2: On the Ableist Barriers to Incidental Learning

The interviews involved honest reflections about participants’ narration of isolation and loneliness they experienced in a mainstream school setting. As the interview questions touched on social interaction with hearing students, the participants focused on the school context and the general attitude of their teachers and peers. Participants provided an insight into how they felt excluded from enjoying classroom activities with hearing students. When describing the sense of isolation they experienced in class, participants used the ISL signs for ‘alone’ and ‘isolated’. These signs created a powerful image of life in mainstream school. As Jim recalled:

I got tired of lip-reading and started reading books in class. The teacher didn’t mind. He just talked away. It was easier for me than having to constantly read lips and misunderstand people. The boys often laughed at me because I assumed the teacher was talking about something else. I often got it wrong and it made me blush. I was educating myself by reading but I felt isolated. One day the teacher made an announcement but I didn’t know what it was. When I approached him he told me I was to form a group with Stephen and John. He was shocked when I asked him if he could point them out to me. He said, ‘You’ve been in this class a few years, and you still don’t know their names!’

Jim pointed out that he hadn’t been able to know the identity of his classmates simply because he couldn’t hear the names being called out at the beginning of class. He explained that the shock on his teacher’s face made him realise that he had been missing out on some important information. Jim pointed to the school system as a factor in his failure to know the identity of his fellow students. His account represents a powerful critique of the school, which he said treated him as if he had the same needs as everyone else. Jim emphasised that he received no support from the school with regard to his access needs. Similarly, Helen said that she received no support from the school and as a result missed out on incidental learning contents:

I did not have incidental learnings that hearing children had. They could hear and listen … learn from each other but I could not hear everything they said. Incidental learning is important … I missed out on the information they were sharing … [W]e did group work in class … everyone talked, but I was cut off … they knew more than I did.

Helen explained that access to incidental learning in mainstream school is about access to verbal instructions, information, anecdotes, conversations and casual chat. She used the ISL signs for ‘cut-off’ and ‘by myself’ to create a sense of the isolation that she felt while surrounded by people conversing in spoken language. She explained what it feels like to be in a situation where teachers hardly ever noticed what she was going through. Helen believed the teachers were either oblivious to her struggles or had decided to ignore the situation and carry on as normal. Participants from deaf schools shared similar experiences as Helen, in that their teachers appeared indifferent to their struggles to access academic learning content. Dorothy, for example, was particularly critical of her teachers, saying that she had ‘no idea what the teacher was saying’ and that she was ‘getting tired of taking lip-reading and speech lessons’. By the same token, Simon thought his teacher was ‘more interested in teaching [him] to speak than getting an education’.

Theme 3: On the Subject of Deaf Teachers

Most participants said that they would have liked to have been taught by a deaf teacher. Laura said the fact that she hadn’t been taught by a deaf teacher had contributed to her educational disadvantage. She believed that deaf teachers were more likely than hearing teachers to use ISL in the classroom. Jane and Jenny stated that hearing teachers tended to hold negative views about deaf students’ ability to learn. More specifically, they said that hearing teachers were often negative about deaf students’ intellectual abilities. In another interview, Dorothy declared that ‘deaf people make better teachers of deaf children than hearing people.’ Sean expressed the view that teachers skilled in ISL were better teachers than those who had no ISL skills. Sean attended mainstream and deaf schools in the early 21st century and was taught by deaf and hearing teachers. By his account, deaf teachers were fluent in ISL while only some hearing teachers could hold a conversation in ISL, and at that were not necessarily fluent. Sean felt that he was fortunate to have the benefit of being taught by a deaf teacher during secondary school because his education had improved as a result. He noted:

[H]istory classes were difficult because my history teacher could not sign. Whenever he talked about the Irish Civil War, we would always ask the partially deaf student to tell us what he was saying. The teacher said something to the class and the student would translate in ISL …

Similar incidents were reported by participants who attended deaf schools during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period of time when oralism was particularly prominent. In that context, participants stated that they witnessed some deaf students engaging as a go-between; that is, those deaf students used ISL to relay to their peers what the teacher was saying. They also noted that some students did not translate the teacher’s instructions because they weren’t sure whether or not they understood the teacher correctly. Simon noted that hearing teachers were inclined to discriminate by focusing attention only on partially deaf students. He suggested that his teacher found it easier to communicate with partially deaf students and did not devote much time to educating the profoundly deaf students.

Theme 4: On the Ableism of Low Expectations

Some participants reported that their teachers tended to measure success by how well they could hear and speak. Nine participants – Alan, Carol, George, Helen, Jane, Jenny, Jim, Sean and Simon – reported that they had experienced ableism via their teachers’ low expectations of them as students. For some, such a negative attitude from their teacher had a knock-on effect on their confidence and self-belief. Jane highlighted this point very powerfully:

Some teachers had low expectations of my ability. One of them told me I was definitely going to fail my exams if I did higher level subjects. I wanted to try but their negative attitude hurt me. I was 17 at the time. [I was] doing the Leaving Certificate but I knew I was able to do it … [T]he teacher kept saying I was going to fail … [I]n the end, I proved them wrong. (Jane)

Furthermore, Jane demonstrated clearly how a teacher’s negative beliefs about deaf people can translate to lowered expectations regarding their academic abilities and future career aspirations. For example, instead of allowing them to learn from mistakes, she found the teacher tried to protect them from perceived failure. Jane suggested that her teacher might have been operating under an assumption that deaf students were going to fail and, for that reason, they needed to be protected. Her comments underscored her teacher’s ableist mindset. Several participants remembered being advised by their teachers to avoid embarking on a career in teaching. Carol was asked by her mainstream teacher what she wanted to do for a future career. She said she wanted to become a teacher of deaf children, to which the teacher replied that she needed to be more realistic and focus on work that matched her abilities. In other words, she had to lower her expectations about her future career:

[T]he teacher’s negative attitude came out in the open. I was not able to challenge him. I was too upset to even think there was something wrong with what he said to me. I struggled to accept his opinion of me. I believed hearing people were more intelligent than deaf people so I eventually [believed that what he said was true]. I was convinced I was not clever enough or good enough to be a teacher. (Carol)

At the time, Carol could not put into words the adverse impact of her teacher’s negative comments on her confidence. She could sense that something was wrong in what the teacher had said but was unable to find the courage to challenge the teacher. Some other participants explained that they were similarly discouraged from doing what they wanted to do, such as taking on higher level exams or pursuing a university degree. For example, Jim recalled that his teacher advised him to avoid taking on the more challenging tasks that he assigned to hearing students. On reflection, Jim felt that this negative comment had affected his confidence going forward.

Limitations

The major limitation of this study is the sample itself: the focus is on the lived experiences of a select few deaf individuals whose narratives present themes relevant to the aims of this study. The participants were recruited from Dublin and all of them were in the 18–65 age bracket at the time of interview; thus these findings may not be a true representation of the experiences of the general Irish deaf community. In addition, the current study does not include individuals under 18 or over 65 years; the situation and experiences of these cohorts could be completely different to that of the study sample. For this reason, the results of this study cannot be generalised to deaf people in those age groups.

This sample does not include hearing people who work in the field of deaf education, because their life experiences would differ to those of deaf people. Neither does it include the author’s own experiences, as this would necessitate a separate paper and is in any case beyond the scope of this particular study. Future research could usefully include the perspectives of deaf and hearing teachers concerning the human rights of deaf children. Including parents of deaf children in research with a human rights focus could also provide deeper insights into the situation of deaf children’s rights in Ireland. Notwithstanding these limitations, however, this study’s findings shed new light on the experiences of deaf students in school and lay the ground work future research into the relationship between human rights and ISL.