From other documents:

Ultimately, everyone wants to find where they belong. Society often dictates this. This is just as true for
people with disabilities as it is for everyone else. Unfortunately, people with disabilities have more often
than not been the outcasts of society, and this still exists today.
Most were either kept at home or sent to institutions because they were seen as a burden not
only on the family but on society as a whole. My disability history begins in the 1980s.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a series of movements called the Disability Rights
Movement that focused on ending discrimination towards people with disabilities and providing equal
opportunities as well as access to schools and work places. Prior to this decade, the majority of people
with disabilities were excluded in society. The process of institutionalization was still the mainstream
means of caring for children with disabilities. This meant sending the child to just thatan
institution, which was usually a thinly disguised hospital or sanitarium for crazy people. Since
disability was thought of as a burden, the phrase out of sight, out of mind became the mantra when it
concerned persons with disabilities. These places were often abusive to the people in their care.
Parents who didnt want to send their children to these places had to fight to get what their
children with special needs deserved. They were often the only family in a school with a child with
disabilities and had to search elsewhere for families in similar situations to create their own community
of support. The point being, neither schools, nor the workplace, were obligated to provide
accommodations for persons with disabilities. These people were not considered people and could be
turned away without a second glance. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1980s and 1990s,
people with disabilities began demanding their rights to an equal education, as well as proper
accommodations in the workplace. In this era it became more common for persons with disabilities to
have a voice in society as well as being acknowledged as people. These movements were finalized in the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which

were passed as laws in 1990. I was three years old at the time. What these movements and acts have
done, is enabled all persons with disabilities to be socially successful.

My life changed when I was seventeen. My high school only offered American Sign Language
(ASL) for three years, so I started taking it my sophomore year. We had been learning about the history
of Deaf Culture and learned about all the technological advances, such as Closed Captioned television.
My dad was working from home at the time and the current secretary in the home office wore hearing
aids like I did. I came home one day, and my mom met me at the top of the stairs saying that Dads
secretary had found out how to put the words on the television.
You mean the captions? I asked incredulously. I remember turning towards the television,
which was on, and seeing the words of what was being said scroll across the screen. Everything I had
learned in class that day had become real. Now I wanted to re-watch everything I had ever seen with the
captions so I could finally understand those places in the movies that I could never catch before. Maybe I
wouldnt have to memorize the dialogue just to understand the conversation.
I had seen the Winona Ryder version of Little Women a thousand times--had practically
memorized the whole movie, but I had also memorized the exact places where I missed something. As
usual, everyone else was reluctant to watch it again, but I pleaded, saying Id never seen it with the
captions before. No one knew my real reason for doing so. As usual, whenever my family watched a
movie after dinner, I took my place in the purple chair closest to the television, and watched an old
favorite made new, because this time, I could see where I had gone wrong. Completely absorbed in the
movie and the dialogue, every time I would read what I had missed, Id say, Oh! Thats what they said!
I didnt realize just how loudly or how often I said that phrase, because that was what clued my family in
to what I had really been missing all those years.

New:

When youre hard of hearing you miss a lot, and you cant always tell what it is. For me, it was
the connecting words and phrases that gave meaning to conversation. Without those, figuring out what
someone was talking about was hit-or-miss. Up until that point in my life I had always chalked up not
understanding to my hearing loss, but I didnt understand what I was missing. I just knew that I missed
stuff. Later on, when I started college as an ASL major, I learned that I truly was in the middle because
of my hearing loss. I did not fit into the Hearing world because I did not catch all of the conversation; but
I also did not fit into the Deaf world because I used my residual hearing, I didnt grow up using sign
language, and I didnt go to schools for the Deaf. Realizing my state of between a rock and a hard
place was frustrating; I wanted to know where I belonged. I wanted to have a place in society to fit in,
and if neither world would accept me because of my hearing status (or lack of it), then where did I
belong? This need for a place of belonging manifested itself again as I started this process last year. I had
noticed that, aside from the copious work on regular hearing people, work concerning the Deaf was
gaining in popularity. I had been excited about this because that community was finally getting
recognized and represented how they wanted to be. While this representation touched on a part of
something I could relate to, it was not completely my experiences. As I began this project, I asked myself
these questions: wheres my story? What about the hard of hearing? Wheres my groups
representation? Where is my group?
It was these questions that solidified what I was going to speak on for this project. My story
needed to be told; but more importantly, it was a way to represent my group, my tribe: the hard of
hearing. The topic I have chosen for my thesis is the disabled identity and how literature, education, and
society impact that identity. I plan to draw mostly from personal experience, but I will also be using
specific information from my research over the semester in each of the categories. I will be covering the
answers to the questions of what the ideal education is for a student who has a cognitive disability as
well as a hearing loss, how those who have a hearing loss are portrayed in literature, and others.

I came into this process knowing that I wanted to do something on hearing loss. After
brainstorming a list of choices, I narrowed it down to Special Education, specifically of the d/Deaf and
Hard of Hearing (HH). After searching ERIC for articles on the topics of deaf education, bilingual
education, and special education, I came to the conclusion that my own group, that of the hard of
hearing, was absent from the scholarly world. This was proved after entering search words such as
hearing loss, hard of hearing, and hearing impaired turned up few to no results. The results that did
show up involved post-secondary education, but not secondary education. I knew I could use my own
personal experiences as a hard of hearing person growing up in mainstreamed education, but the
literary focus was missing.

People dont often realize just how much a disability affects your life; especially if they dont
have one. This is not to say that parents with disabled children cant relate, but in raising children with
disabilities, they see how hard life is for their child. In general, people who do not have someone in their
family who has a disability or know someone with one, often think how horrible a person with
disabilities life is because they cant walk, hear, see, etc. This type of thinking is not only ignorant, but it
points back to how people with disabilities have been treated and thought of over the years.
Like everyone in society, people with disabilities want a place to belong. Unfortunately, the
majority of history concerning people with disabilities has been one of exclusion and isolation. Most
were either kept at home or sent to institutions because they were seen as a burden not only on the
family but on society as a whole. In her book A Disability History of the United States, author Kim E.
Nielsen states that Disability has been soaked in shame, dressed in silence, rooted in isolation. Such
shame, silence, and isolation have been built into the institutions, the laws, the perceived and
unperceived elements of U.S. history. It permeates our lives. (138) unfortunately, this attitude still
exists today. While changes have been made, there is still a lot left to think about and learn. Up until

the 1980s and 1990s, the disabled were sent to live in institutions, feeding a stereotype that disabled
people were burdens on society and that it was better to have them out of sight, out of mind. All of
this changed in the 1990s when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, along with IDEA
(Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). These acts stated that disabled persons had to have access
to the workplace and proper accommodations in an educational setting. Whether the passing of these
acts has ended discrimination against persons with disabilities, some say is debatable. Since these laws
came into being, disabled persons have been a part of society, but there is still the question of
belonging. All people want to see themselves represented in society as a whole; this includes disabled
persons. In some cases, depending on the disability (usually physical), the representation is there, but
feels more like being under a microscope, than an accurate depiction of life experiences. Thomas Couser
states in his article Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation, One of the social burdens of
disabilityis that it exposes affected individuals to inspection, interrogation, and violation of privacy. In
effect, people with extraordinary bodies are held responsible for them, in two senses. First, they are
required to account for them, often to strangers; second, the expectation is that their accounts will
relieve their auditors discomfort. (604)

What these movements and acts have done, is enabled all persons with disabilities to be socially
successful.
Social success, to me, is defined as being able to express oneself and communicate, make
and maintain relationships, set boundaries within those relationships, be sensitive to the needs of
others, and be able to respectfully disagree with others, and also to handle stressful situations. As
for the world itself, some people would say that social success is being abled, this obviously does
not fit with persons who have disabilities, and yet everyone deserves to have a place within
society regardless of their ability. First of all, what does it mean to be abled? This definition

stems from history as someone who is normal. In this case an abled person has full
command of their five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch), as well as functions and
develops both mentally and physically at the same rate as his or her peers. Abled children hit the
developmental milestones when they are supposed to and go through the phases of life as theyre
supposed to. This definition, does not describe me, nor does it describe many others.
How, then, do persons with disabilities define social success? The Deaf Community
decided to create their own group of like people in order to succeed in a majority Hearing world.
Their world is full of people who all know sign language in one form or another and who all to
some extent grew up with or around Deafness. The community is close, many of its members
having attended schools for the Deaf as children. Social success to the Deaf, then, is having a
sense of community. Likewise, hearing people share a sense of community through music, radio,
film, and social media.
But what if you are hard of hearing? You are not completely d/Deaf, nor are you completely
hearing. In which group would you fit? The answer in neither, at least, not completely; having a
hearing loss makes you invisible (to an extent).
This is the case with the history of those who have a hearing loss. In the past, children with
hearing losses were sent to Deaf schools with their Deaf peers to learn Sign Language. When Deaf
schools became Oral (lip/speech reading focused), it was the hard of hearing students who garnered the
most praise because, with their residual hearing, they were able to grasp the concepts of speech better
than their Deaf peers. This fostered resentment between the Deaf and the HH because the HH became
the favorites at the Deaf schools. As a result of this resentment, hard of hearing people today wishing
to be a part of the Deaf Community have more often than not attained fringe status. hard of
hearing people have traditionally been encouraged to and often do identify with Hearing values and
culture though oral and mainstreamed educationhard of hearing people, as a natural result of their

auditory and communicative (through speech) capacities, frequently are quite capable of traveling in
both worlds and are, therefore, suspect in their loyalties to Deaf culture and individuals. (125)
Another source that shows all the aspects of hearing status is portrayed in the stage production of
Tribes by Nina Raine. It is the story of Billy, a deaf British man and his dysfunctional family, and how he
learns sign language, and becomes a part of the deaf community through his girlfriend Sylvia, a hearing
woman who becomes deaf herself, and how his family comes to terms with accepting his deafness.
I had the opportunity to see this production in Chicago on February 14, 2014. I was not sure
what to expect, but I loved everything about it. The actor who played Billy was indeed Deaf, and ASL was
uses on stage. The production was also interpreted into ASL for the Deaf members of the audience.
What was new for me was that the play was also captioned and an audio loop system set up. For the
captions, there was a small screen one of the set walls that displayed the dialogue. The audio loop
system is a giant wire that acts as a large microphone/FM system that amplifies what is placed inside it.
In this case, the loop enclosed the stage. For the hard of hearing who wear hearing aids on a daily basis,
the only thing to do to access this audio loop was to switch the setting from M (microphone) to T (telecoil). I made this switch as soon as I stepped into the auditorium, and when I did, not only could I hear
music, but I could hear every word the actors spoke as if the entire play were being performed right next
to my ear rather than five feet away. I loved this production for many reasons, but the foremost one,
was that it brought up and talked about every single debate topic there was between the Deaf and
Hearing communities. It also touched on language and how language is important to both groups,
despite the differences in its presentation.
One of the things that enable d/Deaf and hard of hearing individuals to be successful in a
hearing society are technology. For the d/Deaf, this includes video phones, flashing doorbell and alarm
systems, and Sign Language interpreters. For the hard of hearing though, the technology is different.
There are hearing aids, which amplify sounds but dont always make the sounds clearer, audio loops,

closed captioning, FM systems which attach to hearing aids, and for movie theatres, there are
headphones that sync with the T-coil switch, as well as caption glasses (a pair of glasses with a box on
the bridge that displays the captions in 1980s computer font green).