<meta property="og:title" content="The Right to Communicate" />

All students need to be able to communicate and be understood in school. Students who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, or blind or low-vision, need information in accessible formats so they can read, understand, and communicate with their teachers and peers. Students who are learning English need to be able to communicate at school in their native language and receive supports for their disabilities in their native language. Because of a lack of understanding about different types of disability, lack of support for language education, and poor screening of children’s learning needs, language and disability have often intersected in ways that deprive children of the right educational support.

For people with sensory disabilities, written and spoken communication needs to be compatible with their specific disabilities (i.e., not being able to see or hear). At times, non-disabled people have advocated on behalf of d/Deaf or blind students, but they didn’t always pay attention to the students’ needs or desires. Sighted people attempted to help blind people learn to read by developing systems of print they could read with their fingers. They often made decisions based on financial considerations or personal interests rather than what worked best for blind people. In the 20th century, blind people pushed for more influence over how they would read. They advocated federal funding for braille books and talking books. As new technologies - like websites and digital materials - develop, blind people today advocate for standards and tools that make information legible to screen readers (which read text aloud).¹

Deaf people have also had to fight for language access and have worked outside the educational system to keep sign language alive. Early educators combined manual instruction (sign language) with oral instruction (lip reading and articulation - or speaking out loud) to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people learn. Many deaf people were born with little functional hearing or became deaf before learning language, so sign language was their first language. For these deaf children, oral instruction was difficult or impossible. Yet from the 1860s on, educators of the deaf slowly banned sign language instruction in favor of only oral forms of communication. Deaf people created social clubs and socialized with deaf peers, developing what many believe to be a unique culture and identity,² and one that many deaf people don’t see as a disability.³ (We use Deaf to refer to those who identify with that culture, and deaf for describing those who might not identify with that culture.⁴)

After a linguist published a study on sign language in 1960, educational and cultural attitudes toward sign language slowly started to change.⁵ In 1998, J.H.S. 47, the school for the Deaf, finally changed its policy to teach in sign language.⁶ Deaf students still have difficulty accessing interpreters and other supports needed to learn in inclusive classrooms today.⁷

Teachers and administrators have also frequently labeled students as disabled because they did not speak English. They have also evaluated students for disabilities in English, rather than in their native language - which meant that those students’ disabilities may have been misunderstood or misdiagnosed. As a result, many Black and Puerto Rican children didn’t get the education they deserved. Advocates like Evelina López Antonetty fought back against these practices. She founded United Bronx Parents (UBP) and organized Puerto Rican and Black parents to fight bias against Spanish-speaking students and families and push for bilingual education.

The American Foundation for the Blind, “History,” accessed July 31, 2023, https://ww.afb.org/about-afb/history. ↩︎
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). ↩︎
Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne, “Culture as Disability,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1995): 324–48. ↩︎
Thomas K. Holcomb, Introduction to American Deaf Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
Susan Goldin-Meadow and Diane Brentari, “Gesture, Sign and Language: The Coming of Age of Sign Language and Gesture Studies,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40 (January 2017), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15001247. ↩︎
Felicia R. Lee, “New York to Teach Deaf in Sign Language, Then English,” The New York Times, March 5, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/05/nyregion/new-york-to-teach-deaf-in-sign-language-then-english.html. ↩︎
Khallid Alasim, “Participation and Interaction of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in Inclusion Classroom,” International Journal of Special Education 33, no. 2 (2018): 493–506. ↩︎