A ESCOLA PARA SURDOS E AS SUAS METAS

repensando o currículo numa perspectiva bilíngüe e multicultural

Abstract

The bilingual education of the deaf, from a political perspective, can be defined as an epistemology3 of opposition to the hegemonic discourse and clinical practices that has been characterizing the education and schooling of the deaf during the last decades. Such a definition, although imprecise, suggests that the bilingual education of the deaf is something more than the mastering, at some level, of two languages. There should be, attached to it, a debate on the topics of identity, multicultiralism, power/knowledge relations, etc. The bilingual education of the deaf has been generating this kind of debate, although not yet proposing it explicitly. If the contemporary tendency is to run away - intentionally and/or naïvely - from all the discussions not strictly related to the languages in deaf education, there is a danger of turning the bilingual education into just another “special”pedagogic device, just one more grand educational narrative, just another utopia to be soon abandoned. In short, bilingual education can be transformed into a positivistic “methodology”, without any sense of historicity or political meaning.