EDUCATION OF DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING

Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students
Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students is specially designed instruction for children who have mild to profound hearing loss or who are deaf. Deafness can be defined two ways, audiologically and culturally. These differing perspectives on deafness often conflict, and they help explain some of the heated controversies that have affected the field of deaf education throughout its history.
Physical, medical, clinical, and educational definitions of deafness and hearing loss are similar. They are based on audiological measurements of an individual’s ability to hear sounds of different levels of pitch and loudness. Specialists compare these measurements with average hearing levels to determine the extent of an individual’s hearing loss.
People are referred to as hard of hearing if their hearing levels are low enough to interfere with basic activities—such as schooling—but not so disabling that they cannot understand speech. Those who have difficulty understanding speech, even with hearing aids, are called deaf. Cultural definitions of deafness, on the other hand, emphasize an individual’s various abilities, use of sign language, and connections with the culturally deaf community. This perspective of deafness does not compare hearing levels. Instead, it views deaf people as being as capable as hearing people, different in the language they use, but not disabled.
Deaf and hard of hearing children often benefit from modifications in their educational environments. Because most children learn the language of their parents simply by hearing it, some deaf and hard of hearing children may struggle to learn spoken languages such as English and may have difficulty speaking clearly. Difficulty with spoken language may also make learning to read and write more challenging. Many of these problems can be avoided by recognizing a hearing loss when it first appears—often right after birth, if the child is born deaf.
If specialists determine hearing loss in a child, changes should be made in the child’s environment to make language accessible to the child at a very young age. Depending on the type and extent of the child’s hearing loss, these environmental changes might include teaching the child’s parents and other caregivers to use sign language or to use cued speech, a system of manually "cueing" sounds that are not visible for speechreading (lipreading). It also might include the use of hearing aids to make speech loud enough for the child to understand it, or surgery to insert cochlear implants, devices for receiving and transmitting information about sounds to the brain. For many deaf and hard of hearing children, however, the discovery of their hearing loss is not early enough to prevent some delay in their acquisition of language. In addition, hearing aids and cochlear implants may not convey sound well enough for some deaf children to understand speech