Hollywood is Starting to Understand Deaf People. When Will Our Schools?
This guest blog post is written by Cassie Franklin, BSW, MS, a fierce momma bear of twin tweens, one hearing and one deaf. She has over 20 years of experience supporting access for deaf people as they navigate barriers in education, one layer at a time. Cassie also loves coffee, cats, and community.
Deaf actress Lauren Ridloff has been lighting up the big screen as Makkari, an Avenger in Marvel Studios’ hit film Eternals. A deaf superhero character and a role model for deaf children, she is fully herself.
Unlike the experience of many deaf people in the hearing world, Makkari is not told by her fellow Avengers to try and communicate in a way that fits the larger society, to communicate in a way that would be foreign to her. Rather, they work as a team to make communication happen — together.
Eternals. CODA. Sound of Metal. A Quiet Place. There have been several recent movies in which deaf actors and characters are honored for who they are and their experiences.
How has Hollywood become more progressive than our schools? Thirty years ago, I was a deaf child in a mainstreamed classroom. Today, my daughter is a deaf child in a mainstreamed classroom. There are decades between our experiences, yet deaf education for mainstreamed kids has not changed much.
Why can our cultural icons and touch points spotlight deaf success, but our schools cannot?
First-Hand Experiences
I am a late-deafened, third-generation deaf woman. My immediate family is all hearing, so talking and signing together is how we communicated. I was a stubborn, challenging kid, one who struggled to find an identity and always felt in the middle of both the deaf and hearing worlds.
When I was growing up, I wanted to go to the same school as my big brother and the neighborhood kids. I have clear memories of going to the local school when I was in Kindergarten and my brother was in 5th grade. Yet the following year, I was put on the short, yellow school bus for a 30 minute drive to a school out of district. It was hard for me to lose that bond with my brother, and it was hard for my mom — as a single mother — to have to wrangle with two different school schedules in two different districts.
This is where my trauma begins, this first-hand experience of being confined to an oppressive educational system in a culture that continues to fight from within on best practices for deaf education.
Burdens on Students, Not on Systems
Oppressive systems force deaf children to learn how to survive in an ableist and audist society. Instead of dismantling these systemic barriers, we focus instead on pushing outcomes of resilience and grit.
We put our deaf children through this in order to justify the continued existence of systemic barriers. We require them to fight for access even in situations where diversity and inclusion are emphasized. We demand that they ignore their own feelings of trauma and oppression in the pursuit of success.
Why are we putting the burden on the student and not the system?
In my experience, I had only two choices as a deaf student: attend the regional deaf program in a school outside my home district or go to the state deaf school. It took an incident with a teacher of the deaf in the regional program before I was finally allowed to attend my local school.
There I was, the only deaf student in my school with my very own “signer”. Yet it was an uphill battle everyday to stay — with many Individual Education Planning (IEP) meetings, with ongoing challenges to my right to be there, with many messages of “this is not possible”, with hearing professionals telling my mother they knew better.
Unbelievably, the oppression came not only from the school but from the community as well. My mother received phone calls and letters from parents insisting that my services and my presence would negatively impact their hearing child’s education. My signer would be a distraction from learning for the hearing students, they said.
They also complained that, since I talked with a deaf accent and relied on signing for access, I couldn’t possibly be smart enough to be in that school. My presence was scary to them, and they assumed that my being there would dumb-down the rigor of learning for the whole classroom.
Fast Forward 20 Years
I’m sitting in my deaf daughter’s IEP meeting, which evokes strong memories of my own previous meetings. She’s late-deafened, a twin tween with a hearing pair. Through this experience, my deaf husband and I get to see how the educational system works (and doesn’t work) for both of my children. The twins want to stay together in the same school.
My husband and I watch our deaf daughter go through the same emotions, development, hurdles and the search for belonging to fit in that we did growing up. She is still limited to a handful of choices. When we show up at their school, my husband and I are the only deaf people in the room. We notice the tension and defensiveness when we flash our academic credentials and tell these people we are not just “deaf parents”, but also highly qualified professionals who know a great deal about options for deaf children.
The process of developing my daughter’s IEP is so frustrating and is a constant reminder of how little has changed since my own experience.
The focus continues to be on what she needs to do to fit into their system and not what is best for her learning. My husband and I are often met with rambling hearsplaining of how it is not possible for their system to provide her what we know she needs. It hurts, the fact that we are deaf parents who have been through the same situations as our daughter and thousands of other deaf children are still being ignored, as if our experiences and trauma are just par for the course.
Challenges to Access and Equity
The feeling of past trauma comes to the surface when the IEP team starts to name specific things my daughter must do to make her own education accessible.
For example, they put the responsibility on her to find out what is announced over the PA system. Anger bubbled up inside me and I interrupted the meeting.
“Absolutely not. She will not have this goal in her IEP. This is an example of how the school should be making their PA announcements accessible for ALL students, and this is something YOU need to figure out on how this will happen.”
Everyone was quiet for a few moments until someone asked “and how do we do this?”
My husband and I had to shift hats from being our child’s advocates and parents to educating the team on where to find resources to make PA announcements accessible for all.
A Ripple Effect
Oppressive systems don’t only impact deaf children. They have a ripple effect on their families and guardians, siblings and friends.
My daughter’s classmates will learn that deaf people must constantly ask for access and accept that as normal. They should see a school working together to provide information in various ways that meet the needs of all students. My hearing daughter should not have to experience secondary trauma from an oppressive system.
Systems change starts in the very smallest and most important ways: with each other.
For example, during our last meeting, we found an ally in one of her classroom teachers, who is seeing past all of the trauma and anxiety to bring out the best in our daughter, and making sure her twin feels involved as her sister, not a helper. She now emails us the small positives she sees in our daughter and asks us questions about how to make her classroom environment more inclusive for all. I’m grateful for this small change. It may start with just one person, but we need many more if we’re going to change the system.
I recognize my privilege in having a forum to tell my story. I recognize I live in an area that provides more opportunities to students than others may have. Truth is, there are so many families who have the same stories and experiences. I encourage us to find spaces that are safe for deaf families to share their stories and find their allies.
Only by sitting with each other’s experiences can we dismantle the system, together.
Only then will what we see on the silver screen also be true in real life: Deaf people living authentically as themselves as true superheroes.
