Kudos to Joey Baer for pulling up a
1977 clip (see 1:30 minute) by Ella Mae Lentz where she says "we need to teach formal ASL in classrooms along with English." While Ella was emphasizing this as a possible tool of decolonizing audism from the hearing society so that both society and the deaf students can acknowledge their ASL as their native language, this is very relevant to what we call bilingualism.
What bilingualism means is still being debated...still? Unfortunately, despite to scholars advocating why bilingualism works in deaf education. A lot of it has to do with our current American hegemony. Even bilingualism is not welcome for other hearing individuals whose English language is not native to them (see Mexican-Americans).
If you look at current laws on bilingualism, they only focus on those who are ethnic groups; deaf people need not apply since deaf people are still under the Medical/Disability Model (see ADA and IDEA) which is problematic. So, even if these Mexican-Americans were able to convince their states to grant bilingualism, this would not be given to Deaf Americans. But wait, we have deaf schools that actually teach bilingualism! So in a way, our American government is turning a blind eye on the actual language usage made in these schools possibly focusing more on the budgetary "burden" by these schools (which we know now that mainstreaming is the burden here). So, technically, under the current bilingualism laws in America, states could easily shut down deaf schools based on the fact that they are exercising a possibly illegal language pedagogy in the classroom?
Wow, this is getting complicated. I have a point here: going back to the spirit of Ella's 1977 vlog, we need to make bilingualism a weapon. We need to convince America that bilingualism is a good thing and actually, bilingualism becomes a compromise with English (their language) and ASL (our language).
Bilingualism has become an emerging force not just for linguistic minority populations (i.e. English Language Learners-ELL’s), but also within deaf education, and it shows promise in a shared pedagogy (both ASL and spoken English). Bilingualism is starting to be welcome in academic debates and Cummins goes on to contend that “there are close to 150 empirical studies carried out during the past 30 or so years that have reported a positive association between additive bilingualism and students’ linguistic, cognitive, or academic growth” (Cummins 2000, p. 37). I want to argue that this would also alleviate the same oppressive force that Ella talks about in 1977.
I suggest that bilingualism is one way for the divisive schools of thought to respect the diversity of linguistic “cultures” produced by different groups in the shared production of “collective memories, knowledge, social relations, and values within historically constituted relations of power” while at the same time, preserving their unique cultures (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 50).
Bilingualism is still an ongoing work in progress even after 1977...we still must continue to embrace and fight our right to language access.
