Mary Carol Combs, University of Arizona, Arizona, USA
Joanne Cripps, Deaf Culture Centre, Toronto, Canada
Anita Small, Deaf Culture Center, Toronto, Canada
Kristin Snoddon, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

PEDAGOGIES AND POLICIES OF THE ABSURD IN ARIZONA

Mary Carol Combs explained policy decisions made by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE). In the spring of 2010, school districts were ordered to remove certain teachers from ESL classrooms. These teachers spoke English with a heavy accent. ADE dispatched monitoring teams to districts across the state. Nine districts were cited for violating the fluency regulation.

As Combs argued, the accent policy conflates teaching English well with speaking it without an accent. This, most linguists would agree, is unreasonable. As absurd as the policy is, however, it is just one piece of a larger assault. This assault is visited on English learners and the schools and teachers who serve them.

Other policies of the absurd include a law banning ethnic studies classes. The rationale for this ban is that these classes promote ethnic solidarity and the overthrow of the U.S. government. In Arizona, there is also a state English proficiency exam whose cut scores were politically and arbitrarily established. Moreover, there is an ongoing legal battle over state funding afforded to districts serving English language learners. There is also a forced ethnolinguistic segregation of English language learners from their English-speaking peers. English language learners are segregated into 4-hour English grammar and vocabulary blocks.

Combs placed these pedagogies and policies of the absurd into a larger political and educational discourse that demonizes immigrant students and their communities.

DEAFHOOD VERSUS AUDISM IN DEAF EDUCATION

Anita Small and Joanne Cripps described the unique circumstance of Deaf children. These children are a cultural and language minority group in the education system. Small and Cripps provided an empowering language planning framework as an alternative to audism in schools. Most Deaf students are mainstreamed as a cultural minority group within school board programs across Canada. These students are also most often the only Deaf member in their family. For these reasons, the issue of minority identity development and attitudes toward Deaf students in the schools is pertinent.

The authors defined audism and offered a language planning framework to address audism in education. Language planning for empowerment includes attitude planning, status planning, acquisition planning, and corpus planning. The authors highlighted seminal works in attitude planning. They also described stages of minority and majority identity development as these stages interface with each other.

Small and Cripps contrasted the current emphasis on access and inclusion with the need to create a Deaf cultural space. This space includes an empowering environment for Deaf students to progress through the stages of positive identity development. The authors identified empowering environmental factors, focusing on the impact of expectations and mentorship. They also discussed encouraging self-efficacy rather than self-esteem. Deafhood was presented as a critical feature to be nurtured in the identity development of Deaf students.

Small and Cripps provided compelling evidence for the need to recognize American Sign Language (ASL). ASL needs to be recognized as a language of instruction in status planning. This includes clarifying the distinction between ASL and signed systems.

Identity text development and transformative pedagogy were highlighted as critical acquisition planning approaches. Multiple examples of identity text development with Deaf students were offered.

Small and Cripps described corpus planning efforts with research and development of the first animated ASL dictionary. Deaf children can finally search for ASL words independently. Moreover, with this dictionary, ASL is captured for language standardization, language spread, and language acquisition. Policy implications and recommendations based on the language planning framework and research were discussed.