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

< previous page
page_157
next page >
Page 157
ployed by this college in any capacity after December 31, When asked why Baker-Shenk and Cokely were not transferred to the Linguistics Department, Dr. Schuchman said,
"Three linguistic faculty members are enough."
Dr. Trybus, commenting on the dismissal of Cokely and Baker-Shenk said, "When you need to change the direction of a program, it means you need different skills" Charlotte Baker-Shenk believes that closing the lab was, "in a sense, an intelligent thing to do" The LRL researchers were beginning to chip away at the administrators' power, so it was a wise decision on their part to get rid of us. It was politically and strategically a necessary thing to do if they wanted to maintain things the way they had been. We were becoming more powerful. The ASL movement was beginning to really take hold. Even though not a lot of change was happening at Gallaudet, a lot was beginning to happen in other places. Our ability to articulate the implications of our research was improving, and that's when it got really scary for them. We started spending a lot of time doing that. That's when we began to be labeled as biased, as going beyond the appropriate behavior for researchers.
To me the argument about scientific objectivity is a myth. It was so clear to us that as long as we did research the way the majority of them did it and came outwith their kind of results, that was called being objective. But for us, what they were doing was based on false assumptions about the language and the culture of the deaf community. Therefore, the methodology was flawed and the results didn't make any sense. So instead we were saying, "Here are our assumptions based on research that deaf people have a different language, they have a different culture, and therefore we shape our research or methodology in this form based on those assumptions."
Our results were very different from their results because our assumptions to begin with were very different, as were our methodologies, not just in terms of qualitative versus quantitative research. We knew we needed to work with con-

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: