Cultural Identity and Diversity in Deaf Education

Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. Her primary research interests are in visual cognition, bilingualismbiculturalism, and deaf education. The perspective that deaf people' should be regarded primarily as a cultural and language minority group rather than as individuals with an audiological disability is gathering support among educators, linguists, and researchers involved in deaf education. There has been a small revolutionaryshift in deaf education away from the medical model of deaf people as disabled to the sociocultural model of deaf people as a minority group with its own language and culture (e.g., Johnson, Lidell, & Erting, 1989). Several books have been published discussing the sociocultural context in which deaf people live and its relevance for deaf education (e.g., Lane 1992; Lane, Hoffineister, & Bahan, 1995; Lucas, 1995; Padden & Humphries: 1988, Wilcox, 1989) including a recent book (Parasnis, 1996a) that provides an in-depth examination of the concept of deaf people as a bilingual, bicultural minority group in the United States and its implications For understanding their psychosocial and educational experiences. In general, there is a growing interest in the field of deaf education in treating deaf children as bilingual, bicultural minority children and in strengthening their self-identities through articulation of their membership in the deaf community . However, there is no clear consensus on what functional roles the deaf community and American Sign Language (ASL) can play in the psychosocial development of deaf children or how relevant these