Looking Ahead While Glancing Back

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, we have seen that a remarkable amount of progress has been made over the past 30 years toward understanding the impact of deafness on learning and development. Bringing together educational and research findings from diverse disciplines, we have endeavored to explain the current state of the art with regard to raising and educating deaf children, as well as some historical bases for contemporary approaches to deaf education. In describing research relating to educational foundations and teaching-learning processes, we have seen that providing parents with balanced and accurate information, continued research efforts, and professional development for teachers are vital parts of the educational futures of deaf students. At the end of each chapter, we have summarized significant findings and developments. Rather than attempting to provide an additional summary here, we reiterate some of the general themes of this book and the major implications for parents, teachers, and others involved in educating deaf students. Probably the most general and salient theme of this book is that the deaf learner should not be viewed as a hearing learner who cannot hear. It is often tempting, for reasons of either perceived equity or for expedience in the classroom, to assume that deaf and hearing children are the same. As we have seen, deaf and hearing children have different backgrounds, experiences, communication histories, and knowledge. To optimize the educational opportunities of deaf learners, we need to develop instructional materials, teaching strategies, and learning environments that take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their special needs. This means that treating deaf children the same as hearing children may be doing them a great disservice. At a minimum, we should resist superficial modifications to educational settings so that deaf children can share classrooms with hearing children when the fundamental needs of all involved have not been considered. A recurring finding across language, social, and academic domains is that early intervention for deaf children and their families is critical. Such programs do more than just support the development of communication and language—they provide deaf children with similar peers, role models, and contexts that promote early development.