Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students

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A sociology of access to education for deaf students

Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd | June 2014

Shrink-wrapped inclusion


Aim and content of this presentation

AimTo describe a double paradox in deaf-inclusive education:

– inclusion reproduces exclusion– in reason we lose our individuality –Friedrich Schiller 1

ContentExplanandum | Experiences of deaf students in HE

– Their access in Scotland and the Netherlands– The ‘Have you heard?’ study

Explanans – Deafness as extensible concept– How included deaf students are made

and make themselves


On emigration

We cannot be the unmoved movers or take the view from nowhere. 2


Explanandum | Experiences of deaf students in higher education


Deaf students in Scottish HE (2002–03) 3

• Students’ perceptions of the level and quality of support may not accord with those of access and support staff.

• Comments from students suggest that levels of access and support vary across institutions, and this is a factor for students deciding where to study.

• Lack of awareness and the need for self-notification may cause delays in the organisation of access arrangements.

• A number of students felt that they needed to work harder than peers to achieve the same goals.

n=28

• Students report that group tutorials and seminars are most challenging, accepting as ‘inevitable’ that it is difficult to devise effective access and support strategies for those situations.

• Although some deaf students in the sample report a positive social experience at their HE institution, the majority find social participation difficult and unrewarding.

• As expected, some students are uncomfortable being identified as deaf by way of the high visibility of access and support arranged for them, while others accept it as part of a Deaf identity.


Deaf students in Dutch HE (2010–13) | context 4

• There is reported structural underperformance of primary and secondary deaf education.

• Deaf youngster are at risk in school-work transitions, and at risk of relative underemployment.

• They are at habitual risk of social exclusion in- and outside education.

• Secondary school results contra-indicate tertiary education.

• Policy measures punish institutions for study delays.

• There is unwillingness to be a magnet for sub-optimal students.

• There is negligible legal imperative or grass-roots activism.

• Contextual data collection is culturally impopular.

• There is comparatively modest public awareness or disquiet.


Deaf students in Dutch HE | findings 4

• There is strong, significant interaction between hearing impairment and study delay.

• 16 respondents could not specify their deafness on registration; 13 refused.

• In assessments they benefit from adjustments in place for other (e.g. dyslectic) students.

• Deaf students get general support, but wish for specific support.

• Deaf students wish for cutting edge technologies, e.g.:– courses to run in social media

(facebook)– smartphone app courses– instant message networking– speech-to-text autotranslation

n=47


Deaf students in Dutch HE | data example 4

adapted curriculum

adapted materials

adapted learning environment

advance access materials

adapted traineeships

adapted time schedule

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Granted

Wished for


Deaf students in Dutch HE | interviews 5,6

Hazekamp 2012, n=5

• Deaf students avoid students who talk a lot.

• They tend to sit in the front of teaching rooms.

• They make little use of study advisors or support.

• Instead, they arrange their own support.

• Some only attend when that is obligatory.

Quist 2012, n=7

• Lack of support is structural feature of educational career.

• Some choose a university for the proximity of deaf peers, not for a particular programme.

• Some stop HE for lack of literacy skills.

• Those who do well do not feel addressed by university support: it is ‘for other students’.


The first paradox in detail

• While inclusion (such as university support) compensates for the functional impairments of students and so enables their physical participation,

• many students appear to actively avoid support, since– they don’t feel addressed by the stated categories of need,– they feel stigmatised and/or excluded by being singled out,– they experience the support as misdirected or failing,– and/or the core business of HE does not include them.

Strong claim | while HE includes deaf students nominally, it excludes them by doing so physically and not intellectually or intelligently.


The ‘have you heard?’ study 2011–13 7

• 79,158 students from the universities of Oldenburg and Groningen and the applied sciences university of Utrecht were mailed invitations to an online survey.

• 10,466 (13%) students completed the survey.• In addition to a range of personal and study-related data,

students were asked to self-report,– when relevant, standard questionnaires on hearing loss,

tinnitus and/or hyperacusis;– measures of psychosocial strain and judgments of speech

recognition under different auditory conditions (Oldenburg Inventory);

– measures of their ‘perception of listening ease’ (PLE).


The ‘have you heard?’ study | key data 7

• 28.8% of respondents indicated impaired audition.

Of these,• 55% report hyperacusis, 14% hearing loss, and 7% tinnitus;• 6% report a combination of tinnitus and hyperacusis, 4% a

combination of all three;• 22% experience psychosocial stress due to impaired audition;• the level of psychosocial stress rises along the dimension of

severity of the impairment.


The ‘have you heard?’ study | study disruption 8

• 50% of students report very often or almost always experiencing concentration loss due to noise disruption.

• 48% fail to hear questions posed by fellow students.• 20% report that lack of understanding results from disruption.• 28% need to work harder as a consequence.• 14% need to ask further clarifications due to noise disruption.• 11% leave lectures.

N=7,321Utrecht PLE data were excluded following technical error.


The ‘have you heard?’ study | disruption types 8

hi-fi noise disruption• 70% talk noise• 31% people movements noise

low-fi noise disruption• 15% climate and ventilation noise• 11% technical equipment noise


The ‘have you heard?’ study | student proposals 8

• Students prioritise raising lecturers’ skills (8.6%), imposing norms on student behaviour (6.5%) and various technical solutions (8.4%).

• Students with auditory impairments are up to 4% more likely to advise corrective measures than are hearing students.

However, greater differences were observed when sorting student responses by institution:• Oldenburg students proposed imposing norms on students

behaviour and raising didactic skills of lecturers 2x more often.• Groningen students proposed online lectures 3x more often

and were 6x more likely to advise technical control solutions.


The ‘have you heard?’ study | Groningen data 9

van den Dool 2012, n=2.202

• Very little use is made of support.• Students do not expect a study-

delay.• Hearing impaired students (n=571)

do not experience greater study barriers than do hearing respondents (n=1.631)


The ‘have you heard?’ study | conclusions 8

• A holistic understanding of the sound of study suggests that the bare facts hearing impairment prevalence rates among students are transcended and that listening be re-socialised, approached as a shared sociocultural performance that is based on collective and continually evolving habits.

• Hearing disorder, we suggest, describes those persistently adverse social circumstances of hearing and listening that are collectively owned and given by social norms and material culture, subsuming a wide variety of physical (sensory) and psychological traits.


The second paradox in detail

• The scientific understanding of hearing impairment is ever more enumerative, data-intensive, ranking and narrowing,

• so that the public response to hearing impairment tends ever more towards the abstract and impersonal, and toward categorial attributions.

Nb, this observation mirrors Schiller’s critique of Kant’s practical reason: if we are dominated by pure or practical reason, we lose our individuality and become mere members of a species, because we are divested from our particularities. 1


Explanans | a sociology of shrinkwrapped access


For me, the ends of sociology are:

• to make the ordinary appear strange (so that new horizons for collective action may appear);

• to remind ourselves that things can always be different (which implies that all facts are underdetermined);

• and uncover the structuring operations of power (that is, to see order).


Wiebe Bijker


We live in a sociotechnical world. 10


Deafness is a sociotechnicaland extensible concept.


I moved—a silent exile on this earth 11

As in his dreary cell one doomed for life,My tongue is mute, and closed ear heedeth not; Deep silence over all, and all seems lifeless;The orators exciting strains the crowd Enraptur’d hear, while meteor-like his witIlluminates the dark abyss of mind—Alone, left in the dark—I hear them not.

The balmy words of God’s own messengerExcite to love, and troubled spirits sooth—Religion’s dew-drops bright—I feel them not.

—Hartford Asylum student, 1880


Deafness is a relationship, not a state 11

…and the use of the silence metaphor is one indication of how the relationship is dominated by hearing. Hearing is defined as the universal, and deafness as emptiness.


Chinese women bind their babies’ feet 11

…to make them small; the Flathead Indians bind their babies’ heads to make them flat. Those who prohibit sign language in the schools are denying the deaf their their free mental growth and are in the same class of criminals.

Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf member, 1890



Deafness is partly a product of sociotechnology

1 neonatal screening technologies2 neurolinguistic (imaging) technologies3 audiological instruments and tests4 acoustics instruments and tests5 aids to hearing6 cochlear implantation and surgery7 rehabilitation and its monitoring systems8 genetics and counselling techniques9 sign language corpora10 educational attainment tracking systems11 Learning support such as laptops, notetaking and extra time12 social (incidence) statistics and (psychological) classifications


You find yourself in a dark room and you cannot hear. 12

What will you look for, a hearing aid or the light switch? Like all of us, deaf people do not live by the absence of sensory input, but by their presence. Although definitional of deafness, not hearing is a circumstantial attribute of being deaf.


This conflict of impulses, 13

…to ‘repair’ on the one hand, and to acknowledge diversity on the other, must be one of the deepest contractions of the twenty-first century. Deaf people, whether they like it or not, live their lives in the middle of this contradiction.


Bruno Latour


Latour’s gathered objects 14

Technological objects are combinations of things acting as matters of fact and things acting as matters of concern.


Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy Space shuttle explosion in lego 2010


Ian Hacking


Hacking’s classification of objects and ideas 15

Indifferent kinds• unaware of being classified• constantly active

• e.g. a pathology of deafness

• Interactive kinds• aware of being classified• dynamically interactive

• e.g. deafness


I have added technology as producing a distinct class of ‘fixed’ kind

Indifferent kinds• unaware of being

classified• constantly active

example

pathology of deafness

deaf gene

Interactive kinds• aware of being

classified• dynamically

interactive

example

deafness

hearing impairment

Determinate kinds• aware of being classified• interactive and

dynamically constant

example

the cochlear implanted child

the language-delayed child

the deaf pupil

the included deaf student


The sociotechnical character of determinate kinds

Determinate kinds stabilise or ‘fix’ meanings and so create the illusion of historical and synchronic, calculable equivalence.

Example: the quantified self/other | Deaf students can self-identify or be identified (singled out), classify or be classified, monitor or be monitored, and compare or be compared with other students on measures of educational inclusion, educational performance, linguistic competence, and so on.

Enumeration is at the heart of determinate kinds. Determinate kinds serve a sociotechnical ecology of scientific, public and individual ends through technical means for (self-)monitoring.


Zygmunt Bauman


Liquid modernity 16

In Bauman’s liquid modernity, the relationship between individuals and the state is compared to caravanning:individuals exhibit a passing association with the environments they inhibit, with caravanner and campsite-owner avoiding deeper commitments either side.Rather than caravanners organising collectively in search of better provisions at any one site, they simply move on.The claim is that we are ‘free to choose’; but there is no liberty in the imperative of choice—it has become our destiny.

By implication, we are all migrants.


‘…how can we be kind, benevolent and humane toward others if we lack the capacity genuinely and truly to accept alien nature in ourselves, to adopt alien situations and to make alien feelings into our own?’

Final thought 1


The workshop

ClaimThe central problem with the notion of inclusion is that it is never clear who, where or what is ‘alien’: precisely who is excluded from precisely what? Is it not a dog chasing after its own tail?

Thought-experimentHence if we would mean to ‘truly’ include the learners that inclusive education circularly excludes then education might be openly playful, drawing on the particular contributions to developing learning that all those who learn can make.


References

1. Schiller, F. [1794] (2009) Über die ästetische Erziehung des Menschen | On the æsthetic education of man. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

2. Greene, M. and Griffiths, M. (2003) Feminism, philosophy and education: imagining public spaces, in N. Blake, P. Smyers, R. Smith and P. Standish (eds) The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of education, pp.73–92. Oxford: Blackwell.

3. Brennan, M., Grimes, M. and Thoutenhoofd, E.D. (2005) Deaf students in Scottish higher education: a report for the Scottish Funding Council. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.

4. Thoutenhoofd, E.D. and van den Bogaerde, B. (2010) deaf students in Dutch higher education. Paper presented to the Equality, Diversity Inclusion Conference. Vienna: Vienna University of Economics and Business.

5. Hazekamp, J. (2012) ‘Al gehoord?’ Kwalitatief onderzoek naar studiebarrières en copingstijlen van studenten met een gehoorbeperking. Master dissertation. Groningen: The University of Groningen.

6. Quist, Y. (2010) Doof studeren. Master dissertation. Groningen: The University of Groningen.

7. Schulze, G., Rogge, J., Jacobs, G., Knot-Dicksheit, J., Thoutenhoofd, E.D. and van den Bogaerde, B. (2013) Grundlagenstudie zur Erfassung der Hörfähigkeit von Studierenden an den Universitäten Oldenburg, Groningen und der Hochschule Utrecht, in Empirische Sonderpädagogik nr1, S.85–99.

8. Thoutenhoofd, E.D., Knot-Dickscheit, J., Rogge, J., van der Meer, M., Schulze, G., Jacobs, G. and van den Bogaerde, B. (under review) The sound of study: student experiences of listening in the university soundscape. Manuscript.

9. Van den Dool, R. (2012) ‘Al gehoord?’ Een kwantitatief onderzoek naar studenten met een beperking aan het gehoor. Master dissertation. Groningen: The University of Groningen.


10. Bijker, W. (1997) Of bicyles, bakelites and bulbs. Cambridge: MIT.

11. Baynton, D.C. (1992) ‘A silent exile on this earth’: the metaphorical construction of deafness in the nineteenth century. in American Quarterly 4(2):216–243.

12. Thoutenhoofd, E.D. (1999) See deaf: on sight in deafness. https://www.academia.edu/527261/See_deaf_On_sight_in_deafness.

13. Padden, C. and Humphries, T. (2006) Inside Deaf culture. Harvard: Harvard UP.

14. Latour, B. (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. in Critical Inquiry 30(2):225–248.

15. Hacking, I. (1999) The social construction of what? Harvard: Harvard UP.

16. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

https://www.academia.edu/527261/See_deaf_On_sight_in_deafness

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Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students

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