Power in Deaf Pedagogy and Curriculum Design: Multimodality in the Digital Environments of Deaf Education (DE2)

Abstract

Deaf people are a heterogeneous global minority singularly linked by technology. I posit that deaf people wield the cutting-edge of innovation by developing or repurposing digital technologies in deaf education as a means to leverage the affordances of visuospatial sign languages and multimodal communication. Throughout, I investigate a nexus of historical, cultural, social, political, and ideological struggle where deaf people use their own power and self-determination to counteract harmful forces like oppression and exclusion. To do this, I synthesize the digital environments of deaf education (DE2) and articulate a theory of deaf educational power centered on the interdependence of digital knowledge modes and the deaf users driving their development. I situate modes as a fundamental unit of analysis. Multimodality is related to power and ethics in education and assists in critically analyzing DE2. Multimodal theory illustrates how pow- er is used in DE2 and shows ecological relationships between pedagogical ethics and knowledge co-construction by deaf students and educators. In sum; deaf people use multimodal technologies to construct deaf-centric educational power. Three major findings are categorized: (1) the purposes for which DE2 are designed, (2) the practices constitutive of DE2, and (3) disciplines represented in DE2 research. Two exemplars from category 3 are shown and analyzed. Both interrelate Deaf Culture, sign language, and digital education technologies. One is situated in a deaf student protest about language and communication access. The second is rooted in the multilingual characteristics of an international consortium related to deaf science epistemologies. Overall, I elucidate a social history of technology in deaf education to show that DE2 is a globalized phenomenon transcending geopolitical boundaries.