Deaf Resources in the TCC Library: Deaf Culture, Community, and Society Resources

Hard of hearing since early childhood, John Christiansen spent the first 30 years of his life trying to fit in to a hearing world that did little to accommodate his communication needs. Although he excelled in academics, Christiansen found social situations stressful at every level, until he obtained a position as a professor of sociology at Gallaudet University. There he learned sign language and joined a new community. Reflections: My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds grew out of his personal experiences inhabiting these two worlds. As a sociologist, Christiansen could identify the toll that trying to communicate with hearing people took on his psyche, the classic looking-glass self in action: I am what I think you think I am. He saw that people with hearing loss frequently blame themselves for social awkwardness and gaffs, even though the responsibility for clear communication should be shared. Still, after living in the hearing world for most of his life, he opted to undergo a cochlear implantation to try to improve interaction with his hearing friends, wife, and children. His description of adjusting to his cochlear implant brings fresh reality to the implant process. As he puts it, he was not a superstar. After ten years, though, he feels positive enough about his experience to endorse it. As a denouement to his affecting memoir, he describes the disruptive 2006 protest at Gallaudet over the choice of a new president from his vantage point as a member of the search committee.

By turns heart-tugging and hilarious, Myron Uhlberg’s memoir tells the story of growing up as the hearing son of deaf parents—and his life in a world that he found unaccountably beautiful, even as he longed to escape it. “Does sound have rhythm?” my father asked. “Does it rise and fall like the ocean? Does it come and go like the wind?” Such were the kinds of questions that Myron Uhlberg’s deaf father asked him from earliest childhood, in his eternal quest to decipher, and to understand, the elusive nature of sound. Quite a challenge for a young boy, and one of many he would face. Uhlberg’s first language was American Sign Language, the first sign he learned: “I love you.” But his second language was spoken English—and no sooner did he learn it than he was called upon to act as his father’s ears and mouth in the stores and streets of the neighborhood beyond their silent apartment in Brooklyn. Resentful as he sometimes was of the heavy burdens heaped on his small shoulders, he nonetheless adored his parents, who passed on to him their own passionate engagement with life. These two remarkable people married and had children at the absolute bottom of the Great Depression—an expression of extraordinary optimism, and typical of the joy and resilience they were able to summon at even the darkest of times. From the beaches of Coney Island to Ebbets Field, where he watches his father’s hero Jackie Robinson play ball, from the branch library above the local Chinese restaurant where the odor of chow mein rose from the pages of the books he devoured to the hospital ward where he visits his polio-afflicted friend, this is a memoir filled with stories about growing up not just as the child of two deaf people but as a book-loving, mischief-making, tree-climbing kid during the remarkably eventful period that spanned the Depression, the War, and the early fifties.

At just a few months old, Zoe was gradually losing her hearing. Her adoptive parents loved her--yet agonized--feeling they couldn't handle raising a Deaf child. Would Zoe go back into the welfare system and spend her childhood hoping to find parents willing to adopt her? Or, would she be the long-sought answer to a mother's prayers? Brandi Rarus was just 6 when spinal meningitis took away her hearing. Because she spoke well and easily adjusted to lip reading, she was mainstreamed in school and socialized primarily in the hearing community. Brandi was a popular, happy teen, but being fully part of every conversation was an ongoing struggle. She felt caught between two worlds--the Deaf and the hearing. In college, Brandi embraced Deaf Culture along with the joys of complete and effortless communication with her peers. Brandi went on to become Miss Deaf America in 1988 and served as a spokesperson for her community. It was during her tenure as Miss Deaf America that Brandi met Tim, a leader of the Gallaudet Uprising in support of selecting the university’s first Deaf president. The two went on to marry and had three hearing boys--the first non-deaf children born in Tim’s family in 125 years. Brandi was incredibly grateful to have her three wonderful sons, but couldn't shake the feeling something was missing. She didn't know that Zoe, a six-month-old Deaf baby girl caught in the foster care system, was desperately in need of a family unafraid of her different needs. Brandi found the answer to her prayers when fate brought her new adopted daughter into her life. Set against the backdrop of Deaf America, Finding Zoe is an uplifting story of hope, adoption, and everyday miracles.

How can parents and teachers most effectively support the language development and academic success of deaf and hard-of-hearing children? Will using sign language interfere with learning spoken language? Should deaf children be placed in classrooms with hearing children? Are traditionalmethods of teaching subjects such as reading and math to hearing children appropriate for deaf learners? As many parents and teachers will attest, questions like these have no easy answers, and it can be difficult for caring adults to separate science from politics and fact from opinion in order tomake informed decisions about how to help deaf children learn.In this invaluable guide, renowned authorities Marc Marschark and Peter Hauser highlight important new advances in scientific and educational research that can help parents and teachers of students with significant hearing loss. The authors stress that deaf children have strengths and needs that aresometimes very different from those who can hear. Consequently, if deaf students are to have full academic access and optimal educational outcomes, it is essential that parents and teachers learn to recognize these differences and adjust their teaching methods to them. Marschark and Hauser explainhow the fruits of research conducted over the last several years can markedly improve educational practices at home and in the classroom, and they offer innovative strategies that parents and teachers can use to promote learning in their children. The result is a lively, accessible volume that shedslight on what it means to be a deaf learner and that provides a wealth of advice on how we can best support their language development, social skills, and academic success.

In a study written from within the deaf community, the authors demonstrate how deaf people live historically, culturally, and linguistically complex lives, and how being or becoming deaf opens the door to an enormously rewarding life.

Oliver Sacks has been described (by The New York Times Book Review) as "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century," and his books, including the medical classics Migraine and Awakenings, have been widely praised by critics from W. H. Auden to Harold Pinter to Doris Lessing. In his last book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Dr. Sacks undertook a fascinating journey into the world of the neurologically impaired, an exploration that Noel Perrin in the Chicago Sun-Times called "wise, compassionate, and very literate . . . the kind that restore(s) one's faith in humanity." Now, with Seeing Voices, Dr. Sacks takes us into the world of the deaf, a world he explores with the same passion and insight that have illuminated other human conditions for his readers everywhere. Seeing Voices is a journey: a journey first into the history of deaf people, the (often outrageous) ways in which they were seen and treated in the past, and the new understanding that started to dawn in the eighteenth century; and a journey into the present situation of the deaf--a situation which, all too often, is still one of misunderstanding and mistreatment. Dr. Sacks writes of how he has come to see deaf people "in a new light, as a people, with a distinctive language, sensibility, and culture of their own." Indeed, it is only in the last ten years that the extraordinary and beautiful visual-gestural language of the deaf--Sign--has been fully recognized as a language, as linguistically complete, rich, and expressive as any spoken language, a language with its own distinctive basis in the brain. The one overwhelming peril for the deaf is to be kept from achieving language competence of any kind, to be denied access to both Sign and speech, and that tragedy is completely preventable by early exposure to Sign. Sign is also social and cultural. It lies at the heart of the many manifestions of "deaf consciousness" in the past twenty years, among them the remarkable uprising of the deaf students at Gallaudet University in 1988. The revolt gained international attention and showed the world decisively that deaf people have "come of age" and no longer want to be treated as "disabled." Dr. Sacks gives a vivid personal account of the revolt and ponders its implications for the future. All his encounters in the course of this exhilarating journey raise issues of surprising depth and richness which, though of paramount interest to deaf people and all concerned with them, also extend powerfully to the human condition in general.