Chapter 7: Conclusion: Power, Language and the Ideology of Mainstreaming Deaf Education.

Deaf education is a prime example of how social institutions are used to achieve political, social and economic goals. Initially established with religious motivations, deaf education has since been shaped by a complex range of factors that has resulted in the emergence of a hegemonic medical discourse of deafness, whereby DHH people are classified, segregated, and treated based on their ‘audiological deficiency’. Traditionally, resistance to the medical model emerged from residential schools for the deaf. Despite risk of negative sanctions, these schools facilitated the intergenerational transfer of Deaf culture and sign language. However, with the rise of inclusive educational policies, improvements to hearing aid technology and early (and recently bilateral) cochlear implantation, a DHH child in Ireland is now more likely to attend their local mainstream primary school. Subsequently the spatial organization of deaf education has changed dramatically in recent years. This has not been without consequence for the DHH child. 

After early identification, the predominately medical services provided to parents employ several modes of power to steer parents towards a speech-only mode of communication. As the majority of DHH children have hearing parents, the medical diagnosis and subsequent seduction towards a medicalized model of deafness comes at a particularly vulnerable time. Many of these parents also lack the contact with Deaf community members required to make an informed decision. A negative discourse of deafness and sign language is used to perpetuate the medical model of deafness, and to recoup parents who deviate off the speech-only path for pragmatic reasons. While mainstreaming spatially inhibits the collective agency of parents to persevere with an alternative discourse of d/Deafness, any acts of transgression/resistance are temporally limited to early childhood, and to one generation. Although the Deaf community utilizes collective resistance, they are geographically isolated from many DHH children, and face several barriers in infiltrating education and medical systems.

This research observed how expert authority has used the subjectification of parents and the domination of teachers to transcend institutional boundaries to medicalize the home and school. Having initially used domination and seduction to exert power, the subjectification of parents and the DHH child reinforces the desired goals of medical institutions. As such, despite the dispersal of power through mainstreaming, the institution continues to have an important role in disseminating goals. When faced with resistance, modes of power change to maintain the hegemonic discourse. In response to parental non-compliance, professionals exercised coercion by manipulating the information that they transmitted to parents. Parents that successfully persevered with their transgressions/resistance were more likely to have access to the Deaf community, an ideological basis for their decision, or more experience of raising a DHH child. As such, they were better resourced to employ multiple forms of resistance.

The mainstreaming process highlights that (1) power is a complex, heterogeneous, and context-dependent force and that (2) any seeming hegemony is unstable and comes with the possibility of resistance. The Irish deaf education system, at present, is characterized by a robust hegemonic medical discourse. Parents in this study were seen to reproduce, maintain and resist against this hegemony. Hearing professionals, meanwhile, used their authority as experts, their position as gatekeepers to identification and service provision, parental trust, and their influence in the mainstream education system to maintain the medicalization of deafness. Though the mainstreaming movement is often framed as a step towards embracing a social model of disability, it often supports a medical agenda which, for DHH children denies their access to sign language and to alternative discourses of d/Deafness.

There is currently a shortage of empirical research pertaining to deaf education in Ireland. Although many participants expressed concerns about the current educational provision for DHH children, it was beyond the scope of this book to address all of these concerns. Being qualitative in nature, this study only represents the experiences of a sample of DHH children in Ireland. This study was limited by the small sample size, and the purposive sampling method used. Also, in the absence of large-scale quantitative data on deaf education in Ireland, this research cannot be contextualized in a larger quantitative framework. A large-scale, quantitative, nationwide census of deaf education is needed to establish demographic information on educational placement, as well as educational and social outcomes. The focus of this research evolved to concentrate on language choices in early childhood, as such, parental and professional interviews dominated this research. Further research exploring DHH children’s accounts of their mainstream experience must also be addressed. This book did not include the voice of the some key players such as visiting teachers and did not examine in detail the experiences of DHH children born outside of Ireland, many of whom live in homes where English is not the first language spoken. Most of the fieldwork stage of this research was conducted in 2006 and 2007, the latter years of the “Celtic Tiger” era of economic prosperity in Ireland. Some of the later interviews were conducted in 2008, at the beginning of the economic downturn. This highlights the need for ongoing and current research to track the experiences and development of DHH children as it is impacted by broader socio-political and economic conditions. Recent changes to the policy and administration of deaf education not represented in this book, include the publication of the 2011 policy advice paper on deaf education, a review of the Visiting Teacher Service in 2014, the change of management structure at the Visiting Teacher Service in 2017, and a new model for allocating additional teaching resources that has been in place since September 2017. Plans are also afoot to develop both an ISL entry route to initial teacher education at primary level [note: established September 2019], and to re-establish a graduate education program to qualify teachers of the deaf in Ireland.

Although an inability to hear can mark DHH children as being different, the Deaf community has long called for a social model of Deafness that celebrates this difference. Mainstreaming has the potential to allow DHH children to move between hearing and d/Deaf spaces, and to teach hearing teachers and peers new ways of communicating with Deaf children. In practise however, the prevalence of the medical model suggests that mainstreaming, instead of deinstitutionalizing DHH students, is merely reinstitutaionlizing them. All the while, DHH children continue to move slowly through this system, presumably coping, but perhaps never quite reaching, the potential they so deserve.