Manualism is a method of education of deaf students using sign language within the classroom. [1] Manualism arose in the late 18th century with the advent of free public schools for the deaf in Europe. These teaching methods were brought over to the United States where the first school for the deaf was established in 1817. Today manualism methods are used in conjunction with oralism methods in the majority of American deaf schools.
The first manual schools were in Paris, France. Abbe de l’Épée, a Catholic priest, encountered two teenage deaf girls while he visited a family in the poor part of the city. He decided to take it upon himself to educate them. He invented a technique called "methodical signing" from the signs the girls already used, with the combination of methods influenced by the writings of Johann Konrad Ammann and Juan Pablo Bonet. He created a one-hand manual alphabet to be able to fingerspell French words. [2]
L’Épée opened a free national school for the deaf in his home, on 14 Moulins Street (now called Thérèse Street). After his death in 1789, Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard took over as head of the school; [3] it was renamed Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris. The school received monetary support from individuals and grants from King Louis XVI. [4]
Laurent Clerc, a graduate from the school and pupil of l’Épée and Sicard, returned to the school as a teacher. He was teaching there in 1816 when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet visited. Gallaudet met nine-year-old Alice Cogswell who knew no form of communication system. He learned of Sicard's theories and started tutoring Alice. Gallaudet traveled to Europe in May 1815 and attended demonstrations in France led by Sicard, Clerc, and Massieu. He returned in March 1816 and persuaded Clerc to return with him to the United States.
Back in the US, they searched for funds and public support. Together, they established the first deaf school in the United States on April 15, 1817, in Hartford, Connecticut; it was named the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons. The school taught in French Sign Language and a version of de l’Épée's methodical sign taught by Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. [4] The students attending the school had some knowledge of an indigenous sign language used in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Out of the blend of Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and French Sign Language, emerged American Sign Language. [2]
Manual education remained the primary method to educate deaf people until the 1860s. People then begin to subscribe to more oralist methods of education: lip reading and speech training. In 1867, the first private oral school opened in New York City. [5] The oral movement took off in full swing at the Milan Conference of 1880 in which Alexander Graham Bell declared oral methods superior to manual methods. After the conference, schools all around Europe and the United States switched to using speech and lipreading, banning all sign language from the classroom. The deaf community was left in what some call the "dark ages". [2]
While working at Gallaudet University in the 1960s, William Stokoe felt that American Sign Language was a language in its own right, with its own independent syntax and grammar. Stokoe classified the language into five parts which included: handshapes, orientation, location, movement, and facial expression in which much of the meaning of the sign is clarified as well as the grammar of the sentence expressed. [6] Some sign languages, such as American Sign Language, have been promoted as the traditional way of communication for deaf people. [7] Manualism is combined with oralism as the contemporary technique for the education of deaf students. [8]
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America 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.
French Sign Language is the sign language of the deaf in France and French-speaking parts of Switzerland. According to Ethnologue, it has 100,000 native signers.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was an American educator. Along with Laurent Clerc and Mason Cogswell, he co-founded the first permanent institution for the education of the deaf in North America, and he became its first principal. When opened on April 15, 1817, it was called the "Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons," but it is now known as the American School for the Deaf.
Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard was a French abbé and instructor of the deaf.
Louis Laurent Marie Clerc was a French teacher called "The Apostle of the Deaf in America" and was regarded as the most renowned deaf person in American Deaf History. He was taught by Abbé Sicard and deaf educator Jean Massieu, at the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets in Paris. With Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, he co-founded the first school for the deaf in North America, the Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, on April 15, 1817, in the old Bennet's City Hotel, Hartford, Connecticut. The school was subsequently renamed the American School for the Deaf and in 1821 moved to 139 Main Street, West Hartford. The school remains the oldest existing school for the deaf in North America.
The recorded history of sign language in Western societies starts in the 17th century, as a visual language or method of communication, although references to forms of communication using hand gestures date back as far as 5th century BC Greece. Sign language is composed of a system of conventional gestures, mimic, hand signs and finger spelling, plus the use of hand positions to represent the letters of the alphabet. Signs can also represent complete ideas or phrases, not only individual words.
Old French Sign Language was the language of the deaf community in 18th-century Paris at the time of the establishment of the first deaf schools. The earliest records of the language are in the work of the Abbé de l'Épée, who stumbled across two sisters communicating in signs and, through them, became aware of a signing community of 200 deaf Parisians.
The history of deaf people and deaf culture make up deaf history. The Deaf culture is a culture that is centered on sign language and relationships among one another. Unlike other cultures the Deaf culture is not associated with any native land as it is a global culture. By some, deafness may be viewed as a disability, but the Deaf world sees itself as a language minority. Throughout the years many accomplishments have been achieved by deaf people. To name the most famous, Ludwig van Beethoven and Thomas Alva Edison were both deaf and contributed great works to culture.
Born in 1747 in the Touraine region of France, Pierre Desloges moved to Paris as a young man, where he became a bookbinder and upholsterer. He was deafened at age seven from smallpox, but did not learn to sign until he was 27, when he was taught by a deaf Italian.
Ferdinand Berthier was a deaf educator, intellectual and political organiser in nineteenth-century France, and is one of the earliest champions of deaf identity and culture.
Dutch Sign Language is the predominant sign language used by deaf people in the Netherlands.
Deafhood is a term coined by Paddy Ladd in his book Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. While the precise meaning of the word remains deliberately vague—Ladd himself calls Deafhood a "process" rather than something finite and clear—it attempts to convey an affirmative and positive acceptance of being deaf.
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.
Jean Massieu was a pioneering deaf educator. One of six deaf siblings, he was denied schooling until age thirteen when he met Abbé Sicard, who enrolled him in the Institute national des jeunes sourds de Bordeaux-Gradignan, the Bordeaux School for Deaf Children. There he learned to read and write French, and later helped develop the first formalized French Sign Language. This French Sign Language was later adapted into American Sign Language. He taught at the famous school for the deaf in Paris where Laurent Clerc was one of his students. He began work after a scandal in Paris in Rodez and dedicated his life to educating deaf children. Later he founded a deaf school in Lille, France.
Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris is the current name of the school for the Deaf founded by Charles-Michel de l'Épée, in stages, between 1750 and 1760 in Paris, France.
Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian was one of the first hearing educators in France to achieve native-level fluency in French Sign Language. He wrote an important book titled "Mimographie," which was published in 1825, which utilized a method of writing signs.
Charles-Michel de l'Épée was a philanthropic educator of 18th-century France who has become known as the "Father of the Deaf".
The first school for the deaf was established in France during the 18th century, in 1771 by Charles-Michel de l'Épée. L'Épée was the leader in establishing sign language for the deaf and is notable as the "father" of deaf education. He founded the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris. French Sign Language was developed and heavily influenced by L'Épée working with deaf people who were already using their own home signs and combining those signs with new signs, which, in this time period, became known as L'Épée sign language. This French sign language became a major foundation and influence on all international sign languages, especially on American Sign Language, which still retains much of the historical signs and signing grammatical structure that originated from France. The American School for the Deaf, in West Hartford, Connecticut, was the first school for the deaf established in the United States, in 1817, by Thomas Gallaudet, in collaboration with a deaf teacher, also from France, named Laurent Clerc with support from the well-known Hartford Cogswell family. Alice Cogswell was the very first student to attend this school in 1817.
The Training Institute of the Deaf in Berlin-Neukölln was founded in 1788 as a school for the deaf. Some German schools had been founded by educators trained in France by Abbé de l'Épée. The common view at the time was that the deaf were uneducable; they were even feared and shunned. L’Épée's school, students, and disciples helped to change that view. The Paris school, which had been founded by the Abbé Charles Michel de l'Épée in 1771, was using French Sign Language in combination with a set methodically developed signs. During l’Épée's lifetime, many schools were founded throughout Europe that were modeled on his teaching methods. Other German schools, such as the institute, were founded on the principles and methods of Oralism. Oralism is the idea that the Deaf should learn to speak in order to appear normal with the non-Deaf world, it became predominate in German schools. In 1811, this school became a training institute for teachers. Students from all over Prussia were sent here to receive training.
The establishment of schools and institutions specializing in deaf education has a history spanning back across multiple centuries. They utilized a variety of instructional approaches and philosophies. The manner in which the language barrier is handled between the hearing and the deaf remains a topic of great controversy. Many of the early establishments of formalized education for the deaf are currently acknowledged for the influence they've contributed to the development and standards of deaf education today.
