Sociology Lens

“Oh, I hate that,” my colleague moaned, leaning on the hay- in “hate” with a weary sigh. The that in question was a grammatical construction I had not encountered in my previous TESOL experiences: from as a noun, linked to a country of origin on the other side of a being verb. My from is…Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala. “I don’t know where they get it from,” my colleague continued. “It’s not like they ever heard it from a native speaker.” And there our conversation ended. The native speakers had spoken, and they never did say My from is.

At the time, I was 24 years old. And I was then, and am still, White, middle class, and privileged with access to credentials, to a career I loved and identified with, and to a car to get me to and from it all. I stood in front of students, many of whom were decades my senior, many of whom worked multiple jobs, many of whom rode multiple buses to get to those jobs and even more buses to get to our class. Many of them communicated in multiple languages, including English, which they learned by listening to and engaging with people. What they needed from our class was support in, and practice with, the codes of the written English language.
As semesters went on, I cavalierly kept on asking the question that elicited the my-from-is answer – a question that was all too simple for me: Where are you from? And with the unwitting ease that comes from privilege, I would model the grammatical response: “I am from North Carolina.” But in the rest of my everyday life as a professional, credentialed native speaker, I could be from North Carolina, and all that that entails in terms of accent, word choice, rhythm. Many of my students had lived in the vicinity of our DC metro area school far longer than I had. They had families here—children, grandchildren – friends, co-workers, religious communities. They were of this place and of the places they had been before. And to say “my country is…” necessitated a choice between country of origin and country of residence – a choice that may have felt like a false one. Their “from” was something multiple and hybrid and complex – too personal to fit into a prepositional phrase. Grammar bends for identity.

I’m thinking about this now because this is the time of year when there never seems to be a shortage of declarations about what exactly has defined the past twelve months. For example, news blogs declare whose words count as the year’s “best essays“; linguists and other “assembled experts” hunt for a “word of the year.”

But whose words make it to these lists? And whose ideas and experiences represented within them? Whose creativity do they recognize, and whose do they pass over? I write these as real questions – questions that I hope  others might want to launch a conversation from…

Deafness and hearing loss is a condition or state of being whose meaning is contested. The biomedical, or infirmity, understanding of deafness is that hearing loss is a disability that, in many cases, can be cured or ameliorated through advanced technological devices and procedures, including surgery and internal and external prostheses. The newest of these technologies, cochlear implants, can help a deaf infant hear and speak in almost the same way as a hearing person.

As opposed to the biomedical model, a cultural understanding of deafness understands deafness to be a physiological difference around which a rich linguistic and cultural heritage has evolved. The cultural model does not understand deafness as something to be corrected, but rather as a natural, unproblematic state. Deaf proponents of the cultural understanding of deafness identify as members of a linguistic minority and culture group, referred to as the Deaf-world.

It is tempting to reify physical conditions, such as deafness, as “real” biological entities that are outside the influence of social forces. Reification is the social process of attributing absoluteness and naturalness to the purely conventional, and carries with it the risk that reified processes appear to lose their social character. Reification turns human products into something other than human products, such as facts of nature, thereby allowing humans to forget their own authorship of the phenomenon in question. Because of the biological nature of physical abilities such as hearing, specialists and laymen alike forget the purely conventional and social nature of disability classifications, and instead attribute a profound natural power to these categories. As a result of this flexibility, bodies themselves are a highly contested space, in which competing cultures vie for the right to define and sculpt that body. Defining a body as disabled or abled does not occur in a vacuum, nor is it an automatic classification; instead, it is always in contrast to the normal that the abnormal is understood.

In the contemporary era, an adult or child is first identified as hearing or deaf through audiometric testing. In 2006, 96% of American newborns received their first audiometric test within hours of birth (National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management 2009). At the point of being so labeled, an individual or parent is faced with two broad options. They can chose to incorporate the infirmity model of deafness into one’s own world view and, accordingly, seek hearing and speaking correction in an attempt to conform and achieve normality. Those who adopt corrective technologies such as the cochlear implant in an attempt to conform affirm that deafness is in fact a disability that can and should be corrected. Alternately, one can resist the conforming process, thereby resisting the label and the association of deafness as a disability in need of correction.

The affirmation of the infirmity understanding of deafness leads to the search for new and better technologies to address deafness, including stem cell research and gene transfer therapies that aim to ultimately eliminate the birth of deaf infants. This work is done partially to eliminate the stigma of deafness. These advanced techniques, if “successful,” will have the effect of regulating and eventually eliminating Deaf culture, language, and Deaf people altogether. These attempts are seen by those adopting a cultural understanding of deafness as parallel to eugenics or genocide. Although the term eugenics implies the reduction or elimination of deafness through compulsory exogamous marriage and sterilization or through gene therapy, genocide evokes a more active attempt to eliminate a group of people or a culture. The word genocide recalls vast pogroms and systematic killing, however, the slow elimination of a minority group can occur by the destruction of the distinct elements that bind the collectivity, such as language, customs, and art forms. Because the infirmity model of deafness aims to eliminate the need for American Sign Language (ASL), the loss of this language could result in the loss of the culture itself. In this way, language death, or glottocide, can lead to the loss of cultural identity, and may represent the denial of the basic human and civil rights of children to speak their native language.

Perceptions of and Responses to Stigma

It was a Sputnik moment, President Obama said, when the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) standardized test scores were published late last year. The US ranked somewhere in the mid-20s for most subjects. “America is in danger of falling behind,” Obama warned.

We’re being “out-educated,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan cried.

Panicked pundits followed suit: “Wake up!” “Catch up!” Fill up that “gap!”

There’s no doubt that our everyday uses of language matter. The language we use can shape how we perceive our experiences, can shape the distinctions we make— can shape the distinctions we do not make. The language of education in the United States is increasingly a language of deficits. Oft-cited sociological concepts in this discourse– e.g. cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977),social capital (Bourdieu 1984, Coleman 1988), human capital (Coleman 1988) — have, in many ways, advanced this sort of deficit thinking. In the language of “capitals” roughly, the knowledges and skills of particular sets of dominant groups are seen as “capitals” valuable to an existing matrix of power (Collins 2000). In this language, only certain knowledges “count” as capital. Other knowledges are discounted, and those who hold them are considered “at-risk” of a deficit or on the wrong side of an “achievement gap.”

Nevertheless, goals invoked in media and in policy continue to propagate this imagery of closing “achievement gaps,” overcoming “knowledge deficits,” marshalling “human capital,” and staunching the “alarming decline of U.S. educational attainment.” The picture painted becomes that of a great big sink hole; faced with that image, “filling the void” becomes the sought-after solution.

In his 1968 treatise for social justice in education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire lays out his famous criticism of the “banking concept of education.” In practice, such a concept approaches learning as a process that can be rationalized – made efficient, predictable, calculable, controllable – so that knowledge can then be transmitted, measured, invested, and measured again as if it were capital. Emphasis is on the getting: get an education, get more knowledge, get “facts” (and only facts), get ahead. In banking practices of education, students participate actively in their own learning only insomuch as they are “receiving, filing, storing” the knowledge they are told they must take in (Freire 1993: 73). The relationship between knower and known becomes like that between a piggy bank and some cash, a to-go cup and some coffee, a tick and the plasma of your poor dog: it is the relationship between a “receptacle to be filled” and the material that will fill it (Freire 1993: 72).

This is not to say that some of those materials (i.e. the school subjects on which students are being tested) aren’t really good stuff. Surely they are. But it is the way we engage with those materials and with the learning process – the ways we perceive them, the ways we see ourselves connecting with them— that comprises much of the trouble with the “banking concept.” Students are encouraged and rewarded not for questioning the assumptions undergirding course materials and ideas, nor for examining and challenging what gets left out in the inherently selective act of planning curricula.  Rather they are encouraged and rewarded for that “receiving, filing, storing”; they are encouraged and rewarded according to where they fall along a static, linear model of success. The banking concept, I will argue, marginalizes students’ critical identities in the classroom: the “21^st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity” that education policy-makers claim to prize are pushed to the side-lines of school days and school spaces in order to allocate sufficient resources for meeting standardized measures like Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and “value-added” teaching. Dialogue and collaborative, dynamic learning efforts –efforts that privilege the creation of connections rather than the attainment of fixed end—are sloughed off because they don’t quite fit into the package of conceptual deliverables like “accountability” and “teacher effectiveness.”

The Sputnik moment, then, is less of a moment than it is a point of view—a controlling image that focuses attention on deficits, fear, and falling behind;  an image of satellite surveillance, observing processes of teaching and learning from a position of power high above.  It is this hierarchical observation, this constant examination of learning as a linear process that can be evaluated against standardized measures. It is this Sputnik point of view that continues to engender a binarized idea of education: either we fill up, measure up, or we fall behind.  Spaces for exploring big, important questions, questions that may not have answers— or at least questions certainly don’t have any one answer—become the collateral casualties of this orbit. And that is a loss.

An Achievement Gap That Won’t Be Fixed in Schools

Social Capital and Education: Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology

The second day of the conference has been filled with three more interesting and innovative papers. David Crystal’s (University of Bangor) keynote lecture entitled ‘Language Death: A Problem for All’ highlights the troubling statistics that ‘96% of the world’s languages are spoken by just 4% of the people’. Given the interdisciplinary nature, and the methodology of this virtual conference, Crystal’s paper draws attention to the use of language as a way to ‘break down barriers’.

The two other papers presented today relate to disability, albeit with very different approaches. The first was given by Wendy Turner (Augusta State University) and is entitled: ‘Human Rights, Royal Rights and the Mentally Disabled in Late Medieval England.’ In her paper Turner suggests that modern preconceptions of medieval disability are not generally supported by the empirical evidence. The second paper ‘The Status of the Learning Disabled in Philosophy of Mind and Disability Studies’ by Maeve M. O’Donovan (College of Notre Dame of Maryland), approaches the subject of learning disability through personal and academic experience and research.

As well, as the ongoing ‘battle of the bands’ competition – plenty of time still to vote! – today also saw the first ‘winning comment’ prize awarded to Rebecca Wheeler.