Abstract
The Government of Malaysia has embraced international policy guidelines relating to disability equality, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Its aim is to ensure that 75% of children with disabilities are included in mainstream classrooms by 2025 as part of a wider agenda to eliminate discrimination against people with disabilities. Including deaf children on an equal basis in the linguistically diverse, exam-oriented Malaysian school system is an ambitious and complex task given the difficulties they face in developing effective language and communication skills. The data presented here are taken from a larger study which explored teachers’, head teachers’, parents’, and children’s experiences of inclusion through in-depth interviews in three Malaysian schools. The study design was informed by a framework developed in the UK to guide best practice of educating deaf children in mainstream schools and focused specifically on the learning environment. This article presents contrasting educational experiences of two deaf adults, and then considers the experiences of four deaf children in their government-funded primary schools. A series of inter-related dimensions of inclusion were identified—these include curricular, organisational, social, acoustic and linguistic dimensions, which impact upon children’s ability to communicate and learn on an equal basis. Poor maintenance of assistive technology, insufficient teacher training and awareness, inflexibility of the education system, and limited home-school communication are some of the factors constraining efforts to promote equal participation in learning. There are promising signs, however, of teacher collaboration and the creation of more equitable and child-centred educational opportunities for deaf children.
Highlights
The purpose of this article is to examine the educational experiences of two deaf adults and four primary age deaf learners in the light of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
Zack and Yuyu are profoundly deaf and their parents were able to afford speech therapy and early amplification. They were both educated in government-funded schools in Selangor State, but have had different experiences of the education system, largely due to the modes of communication used in the schools they attended, as illustrated by the following vignettes: Zack is in his early 20s, and has worn hearing aids since he was four years old, when his mother became concerned about his difficulty in speaking their home language, Malay
The Ministry of Education does not keep records of deaf children educated in mainstream schools as they are outside the formal special education system, and so Caliph was identified for this study through the cochlear implant team
Summary
The purpose of this article is to examine the educational experiences of two deaf adults and four primary age deaf learners in the light of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The contrasting experiences of the ‘successful’ deaf adults, who were educated prior to the introduction of the national policy on inclusive education and the ratification of the CRPD, highlight a series of complex and inter-related dimensions of inclusion. They illustrate the ‘deaf inclusion dilemma’ and some of the assumptions made about disability equality in education. In scrutinising the education of both the adults and the children, we identify ways in which barriers to equal recognition and treatment of deaf children in mainstream settings can be overcome. The first author has played a critical role in researching policy and practice in the inclusion of deaf learners in mainstream schools, much of which is not available in the public domain or in published documents
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