Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page This was a two-year graduate program for people who wanted to teach the deaf. What did they really need to know, I kept asking myself. What would they have to do in the classroom to be effective Certainly all the audiology stuff they were getting from the Department of Audiology was utterly useless. Why deaf people need audiology, anyway, is a little hard to determine if you ask me, because if they have been deaf since infancy or childhood and can get as far as Gallaudet, they really don't need to be given a complete description of the inner, middle, and outer ear all the causes of deafness the nature of congenital deafness the kinds of syndromes that lead to it which ones are carried dominantly and which recessively; which are sex-linked and things of that sort.
Then, of course, the Department of Audiology insisted that only hearing students were qualified for its Master of Science program, because graduates had to be able to hear the tones putout by the audiometer. Occasionally a deaf or severely hard-of-hearing student would challenge that point and say that they could always read the meters showing the level of the sound coming out. That was the kind of crap these future teachers were getting.
So I began to wonder if sign language syntax would be that much more useful if they weren't good teachers, if they didn't understand the way their students would learn, if they didn't understand the ways to make it possible and pleasant and relevant for their students to learn. At the time that Stokoe was planning the course, his son,Jim, sent him a copy of How Children Learn by John Holt. The book, a guide to creating a student-centered classroom, so impressed Stokoe that he "threw out the syllabus" He had his students read
Holt's book instead, then observe deaf children being taught and write a term paper. One of the papers, written by Judy
Williams, was published in Sign Language Studies and reprinted in Sign and Culture.
But Stokoe's class was an exception at Gallaudet. For the most part, he says, deaf graduate students were made to "jump through hoops."

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