Discovering Asian deaf heritage: a curriculum project for deaf and hard of hearing Asian-American students

As a gradual rise in the population of Deaf and hard of hearing Asian students occurs across the United States, classroom teachers of the Deaf are facing this challenge of educating a "unique" and "racial-ethnic" student population and may be somewhat inadequate to serve as role models for Deaf Asian students. Redding (1997) states that identity and role confusion are confounded by a lack of appropriate role models and negative attitudes/stereotypes about minorities in the mainstream society. Thus, issues of inequality, lower academic expectations of minority students, and lack of understanding about multicultural issues and needs of students present a need for a variety of resources to help the teachers to better meet the needs of these Deaf students. Furthermore, students and teachers have the additional challenge of communicating with parents whose first language may not be English. The combination of several factors has a significant effect on the student's self-esteem and identity development process. The curriculum will discuss the overall development of Asian Deaf Identity, including various models and theories, as well as cultural issues in education, particularly a significant lack of a curriculum that recognizes diversity, and addresses needs assessment and sociocultural access. With the issues in consideration, we need to seriously probe how we could serve the Deaf and hard of hearing Asian students effectively in a classroom to build on their self-esteem as Asian-American and to help them to move along with their identity development process. These students need to develop skills and knowledge to figure out who they are and where they come from. These students may well be receiving inadequate support from teachers and families in the areas of identity development. As a result, the Asian Deaf student's linguistic and academic developments are significantly altered (Plue, 1998/1999). The social, educational, and communication inaccessibilities may cause the student to become behind academically, ...