Considerations on bilingual education for the deaf community in Uruguay

Abstract

In this paper I present some theoretical discussions that we carried out in two researches that were developed in Uruguay in the Area of ​​Deaf Studies / TUILSU, of the University of the Republic. In these researches we review the current model of LSU-Spanish bilingual education and propose migrating towards a plurilingual, pluriliterate and intercultural education. The main considerations made to propose such migration are the following. The bilingual model continues to see Spanish as the most prestigious and academic language; this presents the risk of reconstructing, in the school context, the relationship of oppression of the oral language over the sign language. Likewise, bilingualism tends to consider LSU as a didactic device and not as a language in itself, which can have the consequence of holding the clinical perspective in the educational context (didactic device = artifact to compensate for a disability). The bilingual proposal maintains a writing centered perspective, according to which the only form of literate culture is through written Spanish, ignoring the role played by LSU viso-recordings in the development of pluriliterate Deaf culture. Bilingualism does not recognize Deaf Spanish as a possible variety of Spanish, persisting the oppression of standard Spanish in the form of the normo-hearing model. Finally, the bilingual proposal ignores that the Deaf community is inserted in a globalized world, so it requires an education in which they participate, in addition to national, global languages ​​and regional languages, both sign and oral languages.