| Presenter | Shu Wan University at Buffalo, UISA |
| Paper Title | Listening to Miracles: Dynamics in Displaying Deaf Children’s Speech in 20th Century Chinese Society |
| Abstract | Oralism, referring to teaching deaf people to speak as well as their hearing counterparts, was the major concern within the historical writing of deaf education in 20th-century Chinese society. Its historiography has been dominated by progressive and critical approaches, which respectively emphasize the evolution of teaching techniques and the deaf population's rights to sign language. Taking an alternative approach to history, the paper explores the trajectory of exhibiting deaf children's speech as a miracle in modern Chinese history in three sections. The first one began with the first deaf school in China, Chefoo School for the Deaf. Founding the school in 1897, American missionary Annetta T. Mill was eager to exhibit students' capacity for deaf children's speech to the local community in Shandong province. This activity aimed to attract new enrollees and financial support. This tradition was inherited within the proliferation of Chinese-owned deaf schools in Republican Beiping, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities. This paper's second section explores how Chinese deaf teachers were engaged in an exhibition of deaf children's speech in the 1920s and 1930s. They displayed deaf children’s speech before a wide audience on site and through broadcasting air, who were impressed by deaf children's capacity for speaking. Besides serving the purpose of raising funds, deaf children's speech shaped the perception of deaf education as both the practice of caring deaf children's and curing their "impairment." During the War of Resistance, the performance of deaf children's speech enabled deaf children to join In the post-1949 Chinese society, as shown in the last section. That the Communist government foregrounded deaf education underlines that it was entwined with the ideological meaning of deaf children's speech. Featured with the appraisal of Chairman Mao as Messiah, deaf children's speech became an integral part of communist China’s political propaganda. |
| Biography | Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. |
| Presenters | Jane Hamlett, May Brooker and Florence Pinard-Nelson Royal Holloway, University of London |
| Paper Title | Communication and Community in School Magazines at Burwood Park School for the Deaf, 1955-1996 |
| Abstract | This paper will explore how school magazines, created by pupils and staff at Burwood Park School, functioned as a means of communication and community building for Deaf pupils in the second half of the twentieth century. Burwood Park opened in 1955, offering secondary technical and art education to profoundly deaf boys. It was set up by the Guinness family, who provided the school site and buildings where the boys boarded. Burwood Park used teaching methods based on oralism. This was based on the idea that Deaf children would integrate better with hearing communities if they learned to lip read and communicate orally. The emphasis on oralism meant that sign language was not used in teaching and was discouraged outside the classroom. This could be very frustrating for some Deaf children, especially if they had been brought up signing before coming to school. In this context, school magazines, that were shared with pupils and parents to give updates on children’s progress and activities, are of special interest as they provided an additional means of communication through text. A termly magazine was begun at the school in 1955 and The Boar, a yearly school magazine, came out from 1958. In 1960, boys in Form 2 created their own news sheet, The Boar Weekly. Produced entirely by the children, it came out every week until 1986 and was restarted in 1989. This paper will present a survey of the magazines which are held in archives at the British Deaf History Museum and Surrey History Centre. We will explore how the magazine functioned as a form of communication and community building, and the extent to which it represented children’s voices within the school. |
| Biography | This paper is based on research carried out by May Brooker, Jane Hamlett and Florence Pinard-Nelson in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London for the Hidden Histories of Disability Project. The project was a collaboration with Surrey History Centre and funded by RHUL’s Civic Universities scheme. Jane is a Professor of Modern British History at RHUL and has published on the history of the family, material culture and institutions, Florence is working on a PhD on the history of gardening in schools and May has just completed the MA in Modern History at RHUL. |