Ben Bahan

Last updated
Ben Bahan
Born
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Gallaudet University (B.A.) Boston University (PhD.)
OccupationASL & Deaf Studies Professor at Gallaudet University
Known forASL advocacy & Storyteller

Benjamin James Bahan is a professor of ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University [1] and a member of the deaf community. He is an influential figure in American Sign Language literature as a storyteller and writer of deaf culture. He is known for the stories "The Ball Story" and "Birds of a Different Feather". He is known for writing the book A Journey into the Deaf-World (1996) with Robert J. Hoffmeister and Harlan Lane. Bahan also co-wrote and co-directed the film Audism Unveiled (2008) with his colleague Dirksen Bauman. [2]

Contents

Biography

Bahan was born to deaf parents in New Jersey and attended Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf located in West Trenton, New Jersey. Later he attended Gallaudet University where he received his bachelor's degree in biology in 1978. Afterwards, he attended The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California where he researched American Sign Language linguistics and acquisition. Then in 1981, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area to collaborate with Joe Dannis on starting a new business called DawnSignPress, for which Bahan was vice president. [2] Later he moved to Boston where he attended Boston University. There he received his master's degree in Deaf Education, as well as a doctorate degree in Applied Linguistics. During his studies at Boston University, Bahan helped operate the Deaf Studies Program in the School of Education. [3] In 1996, he returned to Gallaudet as a professor and chair of the Department of ASL and Deaf Studies.

He is currently an Executive Editor with Bauman and Melissa Malzkuhn of the Deaf Studies Digital Journal, the world's first online, peer-reviewed academic and cultural arts journal to feature scholarship and creative work in both signed and written languages. [4]

Bahan and his wife now live in Frederick, Maryland, with their children David and Juliana.

Works

"Bird of a Different Feather" [5] is an allegorical tale of a bird born into a family of eagles. The family's response to this different member of the family represents the experiences of many deaf children born into hearing families. Topics of religion, identity, and cochlear implants are mentioned. [6]

A Journey into the Deaf-World offers insights into the deaf world, the community that it is made up of, and the benefits brought to the community by the language it uses. The book also focuses to the topics of education of deaf children, how deaf people assimilated into wider society, the natural development of ASL, the pros and cons of technology for deaf individuals, what can be learned from deaf societies in other countries, and what the deaf world holds in the future. [7]

Audism Unveiled is a documentary film about deaf oppression and how it has influenced people to develop a sense of deaf community and identity. It includes many personal anecdotes from a diverse group of deaf individuals. [8]

Bahan stars in Emilio Insolera's film Sign Gene: The First Deaf Superheroes , the first superhero film about deaf mutants who have superhuman powers through the use of sign language. Bahan plays Hugh Denison, the boss of the Quinpar Intelligence Agency. The film was released in 2017. [9] [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Sign Language</span> Sign language used predominately in the United States

American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deaf culture</span> Culture of deaf persons

Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as a cultural label, especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d. Carl G. Croneberg coined the term "Deaf Culture" and he was the first to discuss analogies between Deaf and hearing cultures in his appendices C/D of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language.

Harlan Lawson Lane was an American psychologist. Lane was the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and founder of the Center for Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language. His research was focused on speech, Deaf culture, and sign language.

Oralism is the education of deaf students through oral language by using lip reading, speech, and mimicking the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech. Oralism came into popular use in the United States around the late 1860s. In 1867, the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, was the first school to start teaching in this manner. Oralism and its contrast, manualism, manifest differently in deaf education and are a source of controversy for involved communities. Listening and Spoken Language, a technique for teaching deaf children that emphasizes the child's perception of auditory signals from hearing aids or cochlear implants, is how oralism continues on in the current day.

Audism as described by deaf activists is a form of discrimination directed against deaf people, which may include those diagnosed as deaf from birth, or otherwise. Tom L. Humphries coined the term in his doctoral dissertation in 1975, but it did not start to catch on until Harlan Lane used it in his writing. Humphries originally applied audism to individual attitudes and practices; whereas Lane broadened the term to include oppression of deaf people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sign name</span> Sign used to identify a person

In Deaf culture and sign language, a sign name is a special sign that is used to uniquely identify a person.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Fernandes</span> American educator

Jane Fernandes is a Deaf American educator and social justice advocate. As of August 2021, Fernandes is the President of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She previously served as president of Guilford College from 2014 to 2021.

In the United States, deaf culture was born in Connecticut in 1817 at the American School for the Deaf, when a deaf teacher from France, Laurent Clerc, was recruited by Thomas Gallaudet to help found the new institution. Under the guidance and instruction of Clerc in language and ways of living, deaf American students began to evolve their own strategies for communication and for living, which became the kernel for the development of American Deaf culture.

American Sign Language literature is one of the most important shared cultural experiences in the American deaf community. Literary genres initially developed in residential Deaf institutes, such as American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which is where American Sign Language developed as a language in the early 19th century. There are many genres of ASL literature, such as narratives of personal experience, poetry, cinematographic stories, folktales, translated works, original fiction and stories with handshape constraints. Authors of ASL literature use their body as the text of their work, which is visually read and comprehended by their audience viewers. In the early development of ASL literary genres, the works were generally not analyzed as written texts are, but the increased dissemination of ASL literature on video has led to greater analysis of these genres.

The Deaf community over time has worked to improve the educational system for those who are Deaf and hard of hearing. The history of Deaf education dates back to Ancient Egypt where the deaf were respected and revered. In contrast, those who were deaf in Ancient Greece were considered a burden to society and put to death. The educational aspects of the deaf community has evolved tremendously and still continues to grow as the science of linguistics, educational research, new technologies, and laws, on local, national, and international levels are steadily being introduced. Strategies, however, remain controversial.

Robert J. Hoffmeister is associate professor emeritus and former director of the Center for the Study of Communication & Deafness at Boston University. He is most known for his book, Journey into the Deaf World. He is also known for supporting the American deaf community and deaf education.

Ella Mae Lentz is a Deaf American author, poet, teacher, and advocate.

Samuel James Supalla is an American Sign Language performer, filmmaker, and linguist.

The history of deaf education in the United States began in the early 1800s when the Cobbs School of Virginia, an oral school, was established by William Bolling and John Braidwood, and the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, a manual school, was established by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. When the Cobbs School closed in 1816, the manual method, which used American Sign Language, became commonplace in deaf schools for most of the remainder of the century. In the late 1800s, schools began to use the oral method, which only allowed the use of speech, as opposed to the manual method previously in place. Students caught using sign language in oral programs were often punished. The oral method was used for many years until sign language instruction gradually began to come back into deaf education.

Chuck Baird was an American Deaf artist who was one of the more notable founders of the De'VIA art movement, an aesthetic of Deaf Culture in which visual art conveys a Deaf world view. His career spanned over 35 years and included painting, sculpting, acting, storytelling, and teaching.

Language acquisition is a natural process in which infants and children develop proficiency in the first language or languages that they are exposed to. The process of language acquisition is varied among deaf children. Deaf children born to deaf parents are typically exposed to a sign language at birth and their language acquisition follows a typical developmental timeline. However, at least 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who use a spoken language at home. Hearing loss prevents many deaf children from hearing spoken language to the degree necessary for language acquisition. For many deaf children, language acquisition is delayed until the time that they are exposed to a sign language or until they begin using amplification devices such as hearing aids or cochlear implants. Deaf children who experience delayed language acquisition, sometimes called language deprivation, are at risk for lower language and cognitive outcomes. However, profoundly deaf children who receive cochlear implants and auditory habilitation early in life often achieve expressive and receptive language skills within the norms of their hearing peers; age at implantation is strongly and positively correlated with speech recognition ability. Early access to language through signed language or technology have both been shown to prepare children who are deaf to achieve fluency in literacy skills.

Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written with a lower case d. It later came to be used in a cultural context to refer to those who primarily communicate through sign language regardless of hearing ability, often capitalized as Deaf and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. The two definitions overlap but are not identical, as hearing loss includes cases that are not severe enough to impact spoken language comprehension, while cultural Deafness includes hearing people who use sign language, such as children of deaf adults.

Ted Supalla is a deaf linguist whose research centers on sign language in its developmental and global context, including studies of the grammatical structure and evolution of American Sign Language and other sign languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deaf rights movement</span>

The Deaf rights movement encompasses a series of social movements within the disability rights and cultural diversity movements that encourages deaf and hard of hearing to push society to adopt a position of equal respect for them. Acknowledging that those who were Deaf or hard of hearing had rights to obtain the same things as those hearing lead this movement. Establishing an educational system to teach those with Deafness was one of the first accomplishments of this movement. Sign language, as well as cochlear implants, has also had an extensive impact on the Deaf community. These have all been aspects that have paved the way for those with Deafness, which began with the Deaf Rights movement.

References

  1. "How Gallaudet University's architects are redefining deaf space". 2 March 2016.
  2. 1 2 "- Benjamin J. Bahan, Ph.D. - Gallaudet University". Archived from the original on 2012-01-03. Retrieved 2011-12-13.
  3. Lane, H., Hoffmeister, R., & Bahan, B. (1996). A Journey into the Deaf-World. San Diego: DawnSignPress.
  4. "Cochlear Implants".
  5. Supalla, Samuel James; Bahan, Benjamin J. Bird of a different feather; Supalla, Samuel James, 1957-. For a decent living; DeBee, James R; DawnSignPress (1994), Bird of a different feather : For a decent living : student workbook, DawnSignPress, ISBN   978-1-58121-054-5 {{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. "ASL Literature Series: Bird of a Different Feather". Archived from the original on 2017-03-28. Retrieved 2012-11-12.
  7. "Google Shopping".
  8. Bahan, B., Bauman, D. (2008) Audism Unveiled. San Diego: DawnSignPress
  9. "IMDB". IMDb . Retrieved January 11, 2018.
  10. "Sign Gene by Emilio Insolera arrives at cinema". ASVOFF. 10 September 2017.