Immigrant deaf students of color (IDSOC) are often left out of the academic, professional, political, and national conversations regarding general and deaf education in the U.S. There is little research on how IDSOC navigate classroom discourse in the U.S., though the number of IDSOC is steadily increasing in the past three decades (as inferred from Stone-MacDonald, 2018). If you consider that 80% to 90% of teachers of the deaf are White hearing women who are very likely not prepared for the linguistic and cultural diversity in their classrooms (Cannon & Luckner, 2016), I argue that the school system is consequently failing IDSOC because issues related to race, disability, and immigration and thus unique to this particular student population are not being addressed. I ask, “how do IDSOC navigate discourses in U.S. Deaf Education classroom spaces, and how do their intersectional identities impact their experiences?” The objectives of this research study involve shedding light on the experiences of IDSOC in the classroom, which have not yet been understood. This centers the voices and lived experiences of IDSOC and make more possible their role as potential critical partners in their own education and to better engage teachers, school staff, and families in greater and better representation ofIDSOC in classroom narratives.
In this study, I addressed three questions about discourse practices in relation to intersectional identities and languaging: 1) How do IDSOC use the different language/s they know when negotiating between home and school discourses?; 2) How do the intersectional identities of IDSOC influence their everyday experiences interacting with teachers and peers in deaf schools/programs? and 3) How do IDSOC and their teachers perform and negotiate classroom discourse and address discourse tensions? To answer these research questions, I employed a qualitative case study design utilizing interviews, school observations, and writing samples of a group of IDSOC and the professionals who serve them.
I employed the theoretical framework of disability critical race theory (Annamma et al., 2013), intersectionality (Crenshow, 1989), and raciolinguistic ideologies (Alim et al., 2016) to address the multilayered issues faced by IDSOC. In order to fill this dearth in research on the education of IDSOC from the perspective of the students themselves and how language ideologies manifest and have consequences in terms of discourse and academic outcomes, I propose to utilize these theories to analyze classroom discourse among IDSOC and the adults they encounter in the classroom and to highlight the experiences of IDSOC from their own perspectives.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46712 |
| Date | 11 September 2023 |
| Creators | Lim, Joan Anna C. |
| Contributors | Lieberman, Amy M. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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