Including students with hearing loss in teacher education programs

Students with hearing loss have not historically been included in teacher education programs. At the University of New Orleans, regular and special education faculty members collaborated to provide accommodations that allowed a deaf student and a student with hearing loss to complete teacher-certification programs successfully. As a result of these collaborative efforts, students, professors, special educators, and regular educators learned valuable lessons.

Since the initial passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and reauthorized in 1997, arguments for the most beneficial placement of students with disabilities have led to the full inclusion movement. As a justification for inclusion, supporters have argued that students are more alike than different, that placement with typical peers promotes better learning and social adjustment, and that "good" teachers possess skills to teach to the needs of all students. Special and regular education professionals have yet to reach consensus about the efficacy of inclusion. However, many parents, teachers, and administrators have supported inclusion, so experimentation has continued for more than a decade (Kavale and Forness 2000).

According to Obiakor, Algozzine, and Utley (1995, 6), the goals of inclusion extend to teacher-preparation programs: "Such an inclusive policy must be multicultural, collaborative, consultative, and cooperative." Along with the effort to establish an inclusive model of teacher preparation has been the recognition of increased enrollment of people with special needs into teacher education programs. A frequent challenge among faculty members in a college of education is to examine their attitudes toward disability. Obiakor et al. (1995) have described this dilemma as "handicapism" versus disability. A person may have a disability and not be handicapped. Informal collaboration frequently consists of individual faculty members seeking assistance from other faculty members knowledgeable about various types of disabilities. This collaboration is more likely to occur when there is encouragement from an administrator in the dean's office familiar with special-needs students.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES IN DEAF EDUCATION

During the first 100 years in the history of education of deaf students in the United States, it was quite common for signing deaf individuals to be employed as teachers in residential schools for the deaf. In the late 1880s, an international conference on deaf education was held in Milan, Italy. The main focus of this conference centered on a heated debate on a preferred method of communication for deaf students. Despite the conflicting and majority view of the delegates from the United States, the outcome of the debate was a statement that the preferred and endorsed method of teaching deaf students was through the use of the oral-only method.

Until the 1950s, this stance prompted many influential professionals in the field to reject the use of sign language as a communication mode. A side effect of the significant rise in the use of the oral approach in the United States was a significant drop in the number of deaf teachers employed to teach deaf students. The proponents of this movement away from sign language, called oralists, felt that a deaf child's ability to speak and speechread (lipread) would only develop in an environment devoid of other channels of communication (e.g., sign language). Therefore, to ensure the success of programs that emphasized the development of speech, it was felt that deaf teachers, even those with fairly good speech skills, could not act as appropriate speech models nor effectively modify the speech attempts of their deaf students. At the time, Jones (1918, 21) stated, "This is no reflection on the deaf as teachers but is the result of rapid growth of speech teaching, which calls for hearing people."

A second factor in the decline in the number of deaf teachers was related to the increase of undergraduate programs training teachers to work with hearing students. As state teacher's certification became mandated for employment in regular education, and the apprenticeship model in the schools for the deaf began to fade, a fouryear undergraduate degree became the path to teacher certification. Though some deaf high school graduates progressed to the college level, many did not.

Of those who did attend and graduate from college, the majority attended undergraduate programs at Gallaudet College (now University), the world's first and only liberal arts college for deaf and hard-ofhearing students. At the time, graduates from Gallaudet College did not have the credentials to become fully certified teachers. Prior to implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the subsequent ADA legislation of 1990, there were few, if any, accommodations made for deaf students in college classes for hearing students.

Though the 20th century heralded the advent of more highly and systematically trained teachers in general, it became harder, though not impossible, for deaf individuals who wished to teach deaf students to attain the necessary credentials for employment. More recently, there has been a significant movement of deaf and hard-- of-hearing students and their teachers from residential schools to local public schools. With the adoption of inclusive practices, teachers of deaf and hard-of-hearing students are often asked to support the curriculum delivered by the regular education teachers who work directly and daily with the deaf students. As Moores (2001, 315) noted, "As growing numbers of deaf children are being taught in public school settings, education of deaf students is increasingly coming under the influence of general education. Educational trends, such as the push for greater attention to academic achievement, are having a significant impact on education of deaf students. Interest in applying the results of work with hearing children to education of deaf children is growing." The need for dually certified teachers of deaf and hard-of-hearing students (regular education and deaf education) increases as the majority of the population of students with hearing loss shifts from segregated to inclusive classrooms.