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Cultural Diversity in China 2016; 2(1): 29–51 Cultural Diversity in China 2016; 2(1): 29–51 Research Article Open Access Xiaoxing He* “Disabled” Education Reform and Education Reform’s “Disability” A Case Study of an NGO’s Deaf Education Program in China DOI 10.1515/cdc-2016-0005 welfare, blindness prevention and treatment, health care, Received June 30, 2015; accepted August 10, 2015 disaster relief, and rural poverty relief and development. Amity and Nanjing University have many collaborations Abstract: This article focuses on a prominent NGO in and much communication in social activity and research, mainland China, the Amity Foundation, and its programs partly because of their geographical proximity but more for deaf education reform in recent years. Through analyz- because of the resonance of their ideas. The author himself ing primary sources, such as round table minutes, it pre- is a participant in the bilingual education program that sents a vivid process in special education reform and the Amity is leading. Seeing some observations, interviews, engagement and influence of this NGO, as a critical social and records of the operation of this program while parti- force, in education and its reform. The idea that the Amity cipating in it provoked some preliminary thoughts on Foundation advocates and propagates – that is, deafness education reform, especially deaf education reform. as a distinct cultural or cross-cultural existence that edu- cation reform should fully acknowledge – is embodied in the “bilingual bicultural” education program for the deaf in many provinces of mainland China. Many of this pro- Language and Culture: Bilingual gram’s materials can help us to deeply understand the social and sociological meanings of education reform. Deaf Education Program Keywords: disability education reform, round table, NGO, Amity is a proponent and practitioner of deaf education bilingual and dual culture reform. Challenging traditional approaches, it advocates progressive Western deaf education philosophy – bilingual – The Amity Foundation (hereafter “Amity”) is a very active and bicultural education philosophy in order to change NGO, founded in April 1985 and with headquarters on the old appearance of deaf education. Traditional deaf “ ” Hankou Road in central Nanjing, right next to the Gulou education is called compensation education and aims campus of Nanjing University. It was one of the first NGOs at providing deaf children with special, additional educa- formed in China’s early reform era. With the participation tion plans and services to lead them to a normal life, to of people from various social sectors, Amity is mainly expand the opportunities and rights that they have lost engaged in poverty relief, development, and other social because of their disadvantaged position. However, Amity enterprises. The foundation includes a blindness preven- goes one step further. It promotes the social status of deaf tion and special education department, an education people, elevating them from a negative existence of receiv- “ ” department, a medical care and health department, a ing compensation to a more positive position, with more rural development department, and a public welfare agency. Its strategy of promotion gives prominence to sign department, among others. It has run many philanthropic language as a language in deaf education, as well as to programs in more than two hundred counties and cities in concerns in deaf culture. As a corresponding educational thirty-one provinces and autonomous regions of mainland practice, Amity launched a deaf education reform program. China and has made many efforts to propel social devel- This program began in 1996, when Amity initiated the “ opment, especially in education, social services, social collaborative Deaf Children Bilingual Bicultural Education Experiment” (Shen, Wu, and Chu 2005, 10). Bilingual and bicultural were thus coupled together in the early stage of *Corresponding author: Xiaoxing He, Department of Sociology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, 163 the program. However, as the program progressed, lan- Xianlin Avenue, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, E-mail: [email protected] guage moved further and further ahead of culture. In the © 2016, Xiaoxing He. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. 30 Xiaoxing He: “Disabled” Education Reform and Education Reform’s “Disability” end, language played a solo role in the program. In 2004, agendas and methods for deaf education from preschool with the support of the Norwegian Signo foundation, Amity through the compulsory education grades (through age began to collaborate with the Jiangsu Provincial Special fifteen) and to ensure deaf children’s right to receive Education Special Committee, initiating another round of basic education in their own language. Schools in the deaf education reform. The title of this program was Zhong program taught in sign language and developed bilingual Nuo Shuangyu Longjiaoyu Hezuo Xiangmu (SigAm bilin- and bicultural education agendas to guarantee that the gual deaf education project) – without the three characters first group of students in the program received instruc- that spell shuangwenhua (bicultural). In other words, bicul- tion from the beginning to the end of their compulsory tural, which appeared in the title of the 1996 program, was education according to the plan designed for the missing from the title of the 2004 program. program. Zhang Ningsheng, a well-known special education The word bicultural, however, does not appear in the expert and a consultant for the bilingual deaf education title of the China-Norway collaborative bilingual deaf edu- program, has coedited a book titled Introduction to Deaf cation project. That “deaf culture” does not appear in the Culture. He recalled, when explaining why he wanted to name was probably not the intention solely of Norway. compile this book, that he “had already recognized [the Professor Stein Ohna of the University of Stavanger, also value of] deaf culture after [studying] dual grammar. a consultant on the project, summarized the SigAm experi- Because bilingualism walks side by side with bicultural- mental program (SigAm 2004–9) from the perspective of ism” (Zhang et al. 2010, 1). He also wrote, “The overall Norway in his article “Communication and Participation in environment of opening and reform allowed me to have Chinese Deaf Schools: Experiences from a China-Norway contact with several programs of international collabora- Collaboration Project on Sign Bilingual Education”: tion on ‘bilingual biculturalism for deaf children.’ We clicked almost right away” (2). We can tell from Zhang’s Bilingual biculturalism is a well-known concept in international memory that Amity was not the only organization with a deaf education. But it has to be reinterpreted in the context of Chinese education. The project introduction pamphlet of Amity bilingual cultural program. Related international colla- clearly defines this concept: “Bilingual biculturalism refers to the 1 borations were really flourishing. sign language of deaf people in China and Mandarin Chinese, However, language and culture, which had walked and the corresponding deaf culture and culture of people with together along the way when it came to Jiangsu in 2004, normal hearing [respectively].”… ’ finally parted ways.2 Indeed, rather than saying that they The theoretical foundation of Norway s management of SigAm comes from social culture theory. Social culture theory empha- parted ways, it would be more accurate to say that lan- sizes that human knowledge and institutions are created and guage threw culture far behind or even was afraid of maintained in the dynamics of a specific cultural and historical being associated with it in any way. background. In order to help understand human activity as a It was not Amity’s intention not to put longwenhua process of construction and reconstruction of social structure, it (deaf culture) in the title of the 2004 program. Amity is an is necessary to explain the tools that actors use, in which lan- advocate and promoter of bilingual biculturalism. In the guage plays a crucial role. What do we do with language? What does language mean to us? These are questions that are really introduction to the Sino-Norwegian bilingual deaf educa- worth analysis. (Ohna 2009, 62) tion program on its website, one can still see a clear stance of bilingual biculturalism: advancing recognition “What does language mean to us?” Through this of Chinese Sign Language as the mother tongue of deaf question, what the Norway side wanted to say was that people in China.3 The program aimed to create teaching the concern was the cultural features of language rather than its instrumentality. Ohna recalls in this article (62–63), based on his field notes taken during his parti- 1 “ Zhang also points out that some adventurous and reform-minded cipation in the first year of the project, educators and researchers began several experiments in this regard after the concept of ‘bilingual and bicultural education’ was intro- after a few years’ preparation, SigAm began in May 2001. At the duced into China.” However, a number of these experiments in our early stage, the project carried out two very important activities: country have stayed at the bilingual level and not really realized holding a conference in Nanjing to introduce to the Norway side bicultural education (Zhang 2010, 8). the situation of deaf education development in China; and hold- 2 Nonetheless,
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