Community cultural wealth and deaf adolescents' resilience

Abstract

Adolescence is the period when a child's identity is developing and evolving. During the identity development period, deaf students could also build resilience as deaf individuals living in a society where the majority is hearing. This chapter, which focuses primarily on academic success, discusses the protective factors that ethnic minorities acquire from their cultural communities. These protective factors seem to support minority groups in building resilience. With this concept in mind, could the same factors apply to deaf adolescents' psychosocial and resilience development? Clearly, cultural capital and community cultural wealth plays a huge role in these areas of development and there is some empirical support in relation to this notion. These findings appear to support a theoretical framework which could be helpful in designing deaf adolescents' resilience-building programs. The authors propose that deaf-centric aspirational, family, social, linguistic, resistant, and navigational capitals can be learned from the deaf community, role models, and teachers and parents. The availability of such resources could promote resilience and foster academic success in deaf adolescents. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.