Gallaudet University is a private federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. for the education of the deaf and hard of hearing. It was founded in 1864 as a grammar school for both deaf and blind children. It was the first school for the advanced education of the deaf and hard of hearing in the world and remains the only higher education institution in which all programs and services are specifically designed to accommodate deaf and hard of hearing students. Hearing students are admitted to the graduate school and a small number are also admitted as undergraduates each year. The university was named after Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a notable figure in the advancement of deaf education.
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.
Signing Exact English is a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English vocabulary and grammar. It is one of a number of such systems in use in English-speaking countries. It is related to Seeing Essential English (SEE-I), a manual sign system created in 1945, based on the morphemes of English words. SEE-II models much of its sign vocabulary from American Sign Language (ASL), but modifies the handshapes used in ASL in order to use the handshape of the first letter of the corresponding English word.
Samuel M. Blatchford was an American attorney and judge. He was most notable for his service as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from April 3, 1882 until his death in 1893.
Melba Newell Phillips was an American physicist and pioneer science educator. One of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, Phillips completed her Ph.D. in 1933, a time when few women pursued careers in science. In 1935 Oppenheimer and Phillips published their description of the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, an early contribution to nuclear physics that explained the behavior of accelerated nuclei of radioactive hydrogen atoms. Phillips was also known for refusing to cooperate with a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee's investigation on internal security during the McCarthy era that led to her dismissal from her professorship at Brooklyn College, where she was a professor of science from 1938 until 1952.
Louise Ten Broeck Tracy was the founder of the John Tracy Clinic, a private, non-profit education center for the deaf that began in 1942. She was married to the Academy Award-winning actor Spencer Tracy.
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.
Thomas Braidwood (1715–1806) was a Scottish educator, significant in the history of deaf education. He was the founder of Britain's first school for the deaf.
Mary-Claire King is an American geneticist. She was the first to show that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1. She studies human genetics and is particularly interested in genetic heterogeneity and complex traits. She studies the interaction of genetics and environmental influences and their effects on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, inherited deafness, schizophrenia, HIV, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. She has been the American Cancer Society Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington since 1995.
Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) is a school for the deaf that teaches students using listening and spoken language, also known as the auditory-oral approach. The school is located in St. Louis, Missouri. CID is affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis.
Willy Conley is an American deaf photographer, playwright, actor and writer.
A dialogue journal is an ongoing written interaction between two people to exchange experiences, ideas, knowledge or reflections. It is used most often in education as a means of sustained written interaction between students and teachers at all education levels. It can be used to promote second language learning and learning in all areas.
Claire L Ramsey is an American linguist. Ramsey is an Associate Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego. She is an alumna of Gallaudet University and is former instructor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska. Ramsey's research has focused on the sociolinguistics of deaf and signing communities in the US and Mexico.
Lottie Louise Riekehof was an American Sign Language interpreter, author, and a pioneer in the field of professional sign language interpreting. She wrote one of the first curriculums for interpreter educators, and trained interpreters and interpreter educators all over the world.
Edith Mansfield Fitzgerald (1877–1940) was a deaf American woman who invented a system for the deaf to learn proper placement of words in the construction of sentences. Her method, which was known as the 'Fitzgerald Key,' was used to teach those with hearing disabilities in three-quarters of the schools in the United States.
Caroline M. Solomon is an American academic whose teaching focuses on bringing deaf and hard-of-hearing students into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Having experienced first-hand the problems for deaf students in classrooms without sign language interpreters, Solomon, who teaches biology at Gallaudet University, has designed databases to help students and teachers network with organizations and interpreters familiar with educational bridges for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. She is a co-creator of a database that formalizes the lexicon of signs used for scientific and technological terms in American Sign Language. Her innovations to teaching techniques were recognized with the Ramón Margalef Award for Excellence in Education of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography in 2017.
Mervin "Merv" Donald Garretson was an American educator, leader, and deaf community rights advocate. His works were primarily directed towards changing mainstream opinion about deaf culture and about the deaf community.
Gertrude Scott Galloway was an American educator and administrator working with deaf children. She was the first female president of the National Association of the Deaf. She is among the first deaf women to head a school for the deaf in the United States. Galloway was an advocate for deaf women throughout her life.
Nora Ernestine Beust was an American librarian, educator, and writer. She taught library science courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and worked in the United States Office of Education, as a specialist in school libraries and children's literature.
