Dear Senator: My name is Dr. Christopher Jon Heuer, and my dissertation, professional research, and work all fall within the fields of literacy, language acquisition, and Deaf Education. HB 1367 will soon come before you for review. I hope you will consider my arguments against it and oppose it. At the very least, I urge you to demand FAR more investigation into it than has been made to date, [...]

Aaron has only been hearing for a year.  He’s three.  He was born completely deaf in both ears.  After a near-death experience at birth, my husband and I knew we were very blessed to have this little boy, and were thankful his lack of hearing was the only side effect from his emergency delivery.  We found, however, that much of the hearing world saw Aaron differently than we did.  When [...]

(Illustration by Adrean Clark) Every time there is an advance in surgical audiology or genetic engineering, a wave of alarm ripples through the signing community. Doctors are intent on eradicating deafness. They subscribe to the belief that there’s something wrong with being deaf. So they make it their business to try to fix it, hoping to ultimately wipe it out from humankind. But those who are culturally deaf are worried [...]

I once worked with a 13-year old boy from an underdeveloped country during a teaching internship. He was deaf and he had no language — no English, Spanish, American Sign Language, nor a sign language native to the region he grew up in. We communicated for weeks through drawing. He moved to another American city soon after my internship finished and I lost track of him. I heard that his [...]

Henry Ford famously said that his customers could have their cars in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. How’s that for wide variety of choices, eh? Well, the same is true when it comes to Deaf education. If I was oral, and wanted my child to be raised orally, I wouldn’t have the same problem faced by Henry Ford’s customers. I’d have the choice of any [...]

I want you to run an experiment with me.  Go to Google. Type in “deafness.” Look at what pops up—the top five sites. As of right now, as I type this at precisely 9:00 p.m. on August 26th, 2010, those sites belong to: – Wikipedia – About.com – The World Health Organization – The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders – MedicineNet.com Now go to each one. Click [...]

Uninvited. Again. I’m getting tired of being uninvited. The first time this happened was when I was an eager M.A. graduate student, new to my academic discipline and flush with success from my first experience of filing an ADA complaint with the US Department of Justice. A professor in my department told me about a local academic conference in my field and suggested I attend. I filled out my application, [...]