Nurturing Deaf Flourishing Sustainably 237
emotional geography in which cultural practices are produced, insight into the for-
mation of deaf indigenous notions of development that “emerge from the wild”
illuminates the complex and creative negotiations of an alternative worldview in
post-development times.IDENTIFyING AND VALORIZING DEAF
INDIGENOUS LEARNING IN DEVELOpMENT WORK
The recognition of diverse and contextualized perspectives may be valuable and
even crucial in the process of community development. While in the former
section I concentrated on concept formation and knowledge exchange, here
I explore how communities benefit from transnational exposure while being able
to (re)vitalize indigenous linguistic and cultural practices and build sustainable
solutions to challenges.
In the chapter titled “Indigenous Knowledge and Learning Development” in
Community Psychology: Analysis, Context, and Action, Diale and Fritz (2007, p. 309)
focus on the field of psychology, arguing that it needs to “look at communities
in a manner that will allow it to see what is available to enhance learning and
development.” When Dr. Lutalo-Kiingi used the tree metaphor to visualize the
Ugandan deaf community’s progress from awareness raising to action to actual-
ization, he also connected with a Cameroonian indigenous notion, providing a
tool for the community to build a vision. Women for Change, a Zambian NGO
working with women in rural areas, used a similar “development tree” to describe
progress through stages of awareness until the community was able to reach other
trajectories (Sikazwe, 2002):[The development tree] is a very strong tool for communities to use in
assessing their own level of development. It is also a simple monitoring and
evaluation tool for self-assessment by groups and individual group members
in their daily activities. When they fail, they can trace the path back and see
where they could have missed the link. They can, therefore, learn from their
mistakes and correct them. (p. 144)The Ugandan tree is slightly different due to its integration of research, which contrib-
utes not only to growth, but also to the community’s capacity for self-evaluation and
monitoring. Sikazwe (2002, p. 144) describes this last stage as “[the community] enjoy-
ing the fruits of their successes as well as sitting high up in the tree where they can look
out and see everything around them.” Research is an important tool for critical re-
flection on one’s process of development; this has also been the motivation for study-
ing sustainable development in Uganda and disseminating it among the community
through a wide range of media (Lutalo-Kiingi, personal communication, 2014).
While working in Cameroon and Uganda, I tried to employ ethical practices,
identifying deaf indigenous notions of quality of life and flourishing and rec-
ognizing local ways of learning. In this section I attempt to further illustrate
the complexity, dynamics, and the rich potential of development metaphors
that emerge as “concepts from the wild” that are shaped by cultural mindsets,