This document provides an overview of Deaf World and Deaf culture. It discusses important figures like Thomas Gallaudet who helped establish education for the Deaf. It also explores the history of American Sign Language and compares Deaf and hearing cultures. The document seeks to dispel common misconceptions and provide context on the experience of Deafness as not a disability but as a difference. It concludes with a brief look at what is currently happening in the Deaf community.
Thomas H. Gallaudet – Graduated from Yale in 1805. He was only 17. in 2 years earned his masters degree also from Yale and in 1814 he graduated from Andover Theological Seminary as an ordained Congregational minister. Unfortunately poor health forced him to move back in with mommy and daddy in Connecticut. Mason Fitch Cogswell, a successful and well-to-do physician with a nine-year-old daughter, Alice, who had become deaf at age two from meningitis He happened to be neighbors with Gallaudet who took an interest in the girl and tried to teach her. This gave both the men the idea to start their own School for the Deaf.Laurent Clerc – a Parisian teacher deafened in early childhood. He became a teacher at the school. He offered to return to Hartford, Connecticut with Gallaudet and help him start his school because in Europe people refused to help Gallaudet learn how to teach Deaf people.
Oralists thought that the use of sign language encouraged deaf people to only socialize with other deaf people and avoid the hard work of learning to communicate verbally. They thought that sign language marked deaf people as different from hearing people—it set them apart, discouraged assimilation, and invited discrimination. They worried also that it encouraged deaf people to marry one another and that this was causing a significant increase in the prevalence of deafness. By 1920, 80 percent of deaf students were taught without sign language. In most schools, deaf students continued to use sign language outside of the classroom in spite of efforts to forbid or discourage its use. Outside of the schools, sign language remained for the great majority of deaf people the dominant means of communication
Amos Kendal - donated two acres of his estate in northeast Washington, D.C. to establish a school and housing for 12 deaf and six blind students. The following year, Kendall persuaded Congress to incorporate the new school, which was called the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind. Through an act of Congress in 1954, the name of the institution was changed to Gallaudet College in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.Edward Miner Gallaudet – superintendant of the school, brother of Thomas H Gallaudet, became president of the collegeDeaf President Now – The students at Gallaudet rallied until they were given their first deaf president, and at the same time received a deaf president to the board of trustees
ASL- is its own language. It has its own structure and does not directly translate to EnglishPidgen- The area between ASL and EnglishSigning Exact English Simcomm is short for "simultaneous communication” – The Act of Speaking while Signing. Extremely Difficult. SimComing compromises both languagesTelephone- A telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) is an electronic device for text communication via a telephone line, used when one or more of the parties has hearing or speech difficulties. Other name for TDD include TTY (telephone typewriter or teletypewriter. Mostly now Deaf people communicate on a device that resembles webcam chatting.