Deaf Autonomy
Authors:
Michael E. Skyer and Leah R. Norris
“Deaf autonomy” should be positioned as a core goal for all people who learn, teach, and work in systems serving deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people. Deaf autonomy is a process by which deaf people—specifically deaf students—increasingly control their own educational trajectories and become authors their own stories. At the same time, this requires that teachers and parents of deaf people increasingly relinquish their control of and authority over deaf students.
Deaf autonomy is an idea that we borrow from deaf researcher Joseph Santini who coined the term and described it empirically ten years ago. Our contribution is to expand Santini’s ideas into primary, secondary, higher education, and civic life in general. Deaf autonomy is related ideas such as self-esteem, motivation, and metacognition. These are all are subcomponents of and requirements for the larger goal of deaf autonomy. That is, to be autonomous deaf students need to be confident in their own abilities, ready to take charge of their lives, and able to plan and devise actionable strategies that benefit them and others. The formation of these higher cognitive processes undergird deaf autonomy.
Beyond Santini’s research, we have experienced from our own lives and learned a range of practical lessons drawn from our life histories and positionalities, including as mentors, educators, and researchers working across primary, secondary, and higher deaf education sites. As one example, midway through my (Michael) own PhD journey I was appointed a mentor by one of my bosses. This mentor provided me bad advice that, if taken, would have limited my potential as a PhD researcher and would have put firm boundaries around my ability to advance in my career. I realized later that the so-called mentor and my boss were working together to keep me “quiet” and “complacent” because it benefited them (not me) for me to remain in my “lane,” which was an unglamorous but mission-critical position. To be the author of my own story, I needed to feel that I was capable of making my own choices, possess the ability to act in opposition to the advice offered, and use my own inner cognitive strengths to self-analyze, plan for the future, and ultimately to be successful in my own self-determined goals.
We think that more stories like this need to be shared among deaf communities, especially those comprised of young deaf people who are confused by or feel oppressed by current systems and structures which may serve to limit them in unfair ways. By weaving our experiences, your experiences, and research-substantiated findings, we beleive that deaf people can thrive as members and leaders of deaf and disabled communities, including in deaf education, but also can transcend these spheres of influence to become figureheads in all walks of life.
While thriving as autonomous deaf people is our major goal, we are continuously harmed by structural forms of audism and ableism. These structures include policies, thought-processes, and habits of mind that are hostile to deaf and disabled people. For example, many qualified educators who are deaf do not teach hearing people or work in hearing schools with students who are not deaf. We wonder—why is that? As another example, it is common for deaf people to valorize other deaf people and that is good unto itself; however, seldom do we encounter hearing people who hold deaf people in similar esteem. As a last example, we are concerned by trends inside deaf communities where disabled people are sometimes thought to be “lesser” than deaf people. The idea that formerly held sway— “We are deaf, not disabled!”—is a sobering reminder that ableism can thrive in deaf communities when it is not questioned.
There are many other negatives emerging from ableism and audism that play out in deaf education spaces and harm the autonomy of deaf students who are prevented from leading their own lives of consequence. These include barriers to authentic educational interactions (for example, “pull out” educational models), the grievous effects of language deprivation (by now, you should know that it is hearing people who cause language deprivation by their actions and inactions), and benevolent paternalism (for example, the subtle processes by which deaf professional’s expertise is devalued over hearing people’s expertise). These and many other instances show how autonomy is taken away, which in turn can prevent the development of higher cognitive processes in deaf students. The a lack of deaf autonomy can hinder our individual and collective efforts at achieving a deaf education system in which deaf people can thrive not just survive. Like Santini, we think that deaf autonomy is necessary, and it can lead to the positive transformation of deaf education.
Deaf autonomy is practiced by both individuals and by deaf people working in communities. Through the ongoing development of community-based deaf autonomy, deaf professionals can lead younger deaf students to gain skills in resilience and grow their self-confidence. Positive self-concepts are crucial for navigating the complexities of our hypermodern world, which is made increasingly complex and difficult through ableism and audism. Likewise, deaf people working individually can be motivated and use their own inner resolve to notice when audism and ableism are hurting them, and, in counter-fashion, can act to remove the source of harm or extract themselves from a harmful situation. While we define major risk factors that prevent or inhibit deaf autonomy, our main contribution is to highlight the protective factors that promote and sustain deaf autonomy. Protective factors include skills such as self-advocacy and ideas such as deaf-positive ipseity—which is a wholesome approach to understanding one’s own self and developmental trajectory. Actions that support deaf autonomy include interactive and ongoing familial involvement in the home and biosocial learning scaffolds in schools.
Ten years after Santini’s groundbreaking work, we invite you to consider the real outcomes of promoting deaf autonomy in our time, in our classrooms, in our lives. Resilience is an outcome of deaf autonomy – that results in deaf people who can cope and navigate structures that are hostile to them. Moreover, we must focus on it as one means to cultivate deaf education systems that encourage deaf people of all ages to live self-determined lives of consequence.
A summary:
GOALS – Create and support pathways for deaf people to:
- Achieve authentic autonomy
- Build capacities of resilience
- Construct frameworks to recognize and address injustices, such as moral, social, ethical, legal dilemmas
RISK FACTORS
Audism, per the research – overt, covert, aversive, dysconscious)
Audism, per our experiences – systematic, informal, ignorant, hostile
Language deprivation and language barriers
Benevolent paternalism
Victimizing behaviors
Helicopter Parents
Bouncy-Castle Teachers
PROTECTIVE FACTORS
Deaf-positive ideology
Self-advocacy (individual advocacy, system advocacy)
Ipseity development
Familial involvement and support – but not to the point of overdetermination
Biosocial instructional scaffolds via multimodal multilingual pedagogies
OUTCOMES
Deaf autonomy
Deaf resilience
Deaf professionalization and specifying deaf studies
Living lives of consequence