The last sixty years have been a time of tumultuous change in the American deaf community. Two deaf figures who made a great difference during this period were Frank Bowe and Jack Gannon, who passed away in 2007 and 2022, respectively. Bowe was a prominent disability rights leader, helping to secure more rights for deaf and all disabled Americans,…

Following a well-established tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), the authors use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language…

Describes Sign in Education, a pilot program in the United Kingdom that integrated Deaf children and hearing children in a hearing classroom with a culturally Deaf teacher who taught the national curriculum in British Sign Language one afternoon a week. Explores the advantage to the Deaf community, as well as the majority culture of adopting such…

Inspired by Johnston's thought-provoking article, this article reports from the current Norwegian scene to make two main points. First, Norwegian Sign Language paradoxically appears to be better protected as well as more threatened than ever. Second, success in bilingual deaf education is not logically incompatible with a placement primarily in…

This article describes efforts at the University of California, San Diego in the Education Studies Program to develop and field-test a teacher preparation program that combines best practices in bilingual education and deaf education. The training curriculum designed for this program relies on research that finds a correlation between ASL fluency…

My response to Johnston's (2004) "W(h)ither the Deaf Community?" is theoretical in nature and sociological in perspective. I comment on how Johnston's particular concern for the possible demise of Australian Sign Language (Auslan) in Australia's currently transforming social and medical context surrounding childhood deafness is legitimate but…

According to enrollments in schools for the deaf and data from the national census and neonatal hearing screening programs, the incidence of severe and profound childhood deafness in Australia is, and has been, less than commonly assumed. Factors implicated include improved medical care, mainstreaming, cochlear implants, and genetic science. Data…

Suggests how insights from Paul Bohannon's book, "How Culture Works" (1995), could be used to address such questions as, "How do deaf people learn their culture?" and "How do deaf children learn (what) culture?" Bohannon's idea of cultural dynamics is applied to deaf culture to trace how that culture evolved, how it…