COUC 504 Week 2 Cultural Immersion Project Part 1 Paper Example

Cultural Immersion Project Part 1: Learning About the Deaf Community Through Research and Media

Why I Chose the Deaf Community

I chose the Deaf community because it is a cultural group I have almost no experience with, and because counselors in any setting will meet deaf and hard of hearing clients. Before this course, my only contact was a grandfather who lost much of his hearing in his sixties and refused hearing aids. I have never met a person who uses American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language, I do not know any signs beyond the alphabet I learned in Scouts, and I have never attended a Deaf event. Throughout this paper I follow the convention of using Deaf with a capital D for people who share the language and culture of the community, and lowercase deaf for the condition of not hearing.

The Assumptions I Brought

Writing down my assumptions before reading was uncomfortable. I assumed that deafness is primarily a loss, something medicine tries to fix and that people would choose to be rid of if they could. I assumed that deaf people mostly live in the hearing world with some difficulty, rather than in a community of their own. I assumed that sign language is a signed version of English. And, without thinking about it, I assumed that a deaf client in counseling would simply need an interpreter and could otherwise be treated like anyone else. My grandfather's frustration shaped these assumptions, since for him hearing loss was isolating.

What the Scholarly Sources Showed

Three scholarly sources challenged those assumptions. The first changed how I understood Deaf families. Mitchell and Karchmer (2004), analyzing national survey data on deaf and hard of hearing students, found that fewer than five percent had at least one deaf parent, less than half the ten percent figure often repeated. The overwhelming majority of deaf children, in other words, are born into hearing families. Culture in the Deaf community is therefore passed on largely outside the family, through schools for the deaf, Deaf clubs and friendships, rather than from parent to child as in most cultural groups I know.

The second source showed that Deaf identity is not one thing. Bat-Chava (2000) used social identity theory to study 267 deaf adults and identified three identities in roughly equal thirds: a culturally hearing identity oriented toward the mainstream, a culturally Deaf identity centered on the community and sign language, and a bicultural identity drawing on both. Interviews with a subset of participants illustrated each type, and there was qualified support for the prediction that people with culturally Deaf or bicultural identities would have higher self-esteem. My grandfather would have fit the first group; many members of the community fit the second and third.

The third source addressed mental health directly. Fellinger et al. (2012) reviewed research showing increased rates of mental health problems among deaf people alongside significant barriers to care. They noted that many deaf people regard themselves as members of a cultural minority who use sign language, that about a quarter of deaf individuals have additional disabilities, and that early access to effective communication with family and peers supports deaf children's mental health. They concluded that access improves when services include professionals trained to communicate directly with deaf people, along with qualified sign language interpreters.

What the Media Resources Showed

Through Deaf Eyes (Hott & Garey, 2007) gave me history I had never heard: deaf schools that taught in sign language, a long period when educators pushed speech and lipreading instead, and the 1988 protest in which Gallaudet students shut down the campus until the university appointed its first Deaf president. Sound and Fury (Aronson, 2000) followed two brothers, one Deaf and one hearing, whose families disagreed sharply over cochlear implants for their deaf children, and it showed how a medical choice can feel to Deaf parents like a question about whether their culture will survive. CODA (Heder, 2021) showed the opposite arrangement, a hearing child of Deaf parents, and portrayed the Deaf family members as funny, capable and close rather than pitiable. One scene stayed with me: the daughter sings at a school concert, and the film briefly drops the sound so the audience experiences the moment as her parents do, watching faces instead of hearing music. All three resources featured Deaf people telling their own stories, which made them more useful to me than material written about the community from outside.

How My Assumptions Changed

What changed most for me is that I now see the Deaf community less as people defined by a loss and more as a linguistic and cultural minority with its own language, history and institutions. ASL is a complete language with its own grammar, not signed English. Many Deaf people do not regard deafness as something to be fixed, though others, like my grandfather, experience it as a loss, and the research suggests both experiences are real. My assumption that a deaf client simply needs an interpreter now looks incomplete. Communication matters, but so do identity, family history and the experience of growing up as the only deaf person in a hearing home. I also understand my grandfather differently. He lost his hearing late in life and had no community to join, so his isolation was real, but it was not the whole picture of what being deaf can mean.

Implications for Counseling

Three implications stand out. First, a counselor should ask rather than assume how a deaf client identifies, since culturally hearing, culturally Deaf and bicultural clients may want very different things from counseling. Second, family history deserves attention, because most deaf clients grew up in hearing families where communication may have been limited, which can shape attachment and belonging. Third, I need to know the referral options for counselors who sign and for qualified interpreters, and to recognize the limits of my own competence. An interpreter changes the counseling relationship, since a third person is present for every word, so I would want training in working with interpreters before I tried it. The research on additional disabilities also reminds me to screen carefully rather than attribute every difficulty to deafness. As a Christian, I am moved by the way Jesus, healing a deaf man in Mark 7:33, took him aside privately and communicated with him through touch and gesture before speaking (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). Whatever one makes of the healing, the passage shows a person approached in a way he could understand, and I take that as a model for meeting clients in their own language.

Questions I Still Have

The research left me with questions that I hope the events and interview will answer. How do Deaf adults who grew up in hearing families describe the moment they found the community, if they did? How do members of the community feel about hearing people who learn some ASL and then show up at Deaf events, and what makes such a visitor welcome or intrusive? How do Deaf Christians experience churches that offer interpreting compared with congregations led in ASL? And for counseling, what has made a hearing helper trustworthy or untrustworthy in their experience? I expect the answers to vary from person to person, which is itself one of the lessons of the Bat-Chava study.

Plans for Parts 2 and 3

For Part 2, I plan to attend a monthly Deaf coffee social held in Columbus, where Deaf and hearing signers meet to practice ASL, and a church service conducted in ASL. Before going, I will learn basic greetings and practice introducing myself so that I am not relying entirely on others to communicate. For Part 3, I hope to interview a Deaf adult who grew up in a hearing family, with a certified interpreter present, to learn how that person's identity formed and what helped or hurt along the way.

References

Aronson, J. (Director). (2000). Sound and fury [Film]. Aronson Film Associates; Public Policy Productions.

Bat-Chava, Y. (2000). Diversity of deaf identities. American Annals of the Deaf, 145(5), 420-428. https://doi.org/10.1353/aad.2012.0176

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Fellinger, J., Holzinger, D., & Pollard, R. (2012). Mental health of deaf people. The Lancet, 379(9820), 1037-1044. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61143-4

Heder, S. (Director). (2021). CODA [Film]. Apple Original Films.

Hott, L. R., & Garey, D. (Directors). (2007). Through deaf eyes [Film]. WETA; Florentine Films/Hott Productions.

Mitchell, R. E., & Karchmer, M. A. (2004). Chasing the mythical ten percent: Parental hearing status of deaf and hard of hearing students in the United States. Sign Language Studies, 4(2), 138-163. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2004.0005