Deaf Flourishing 27
netherlands; reduces deaf educational developments to mere linguistic issues; ig-
nores impacts on and from the deaf community; and, as such, narrows educational
choices for children and parents.
Janne niemelä’s presentation included similar findings: 99% of Danish deaf chil-
dren receive a cochlear implant and, in contrast to the situation in norway and
Sweden, are enrolled in an oral auditory-verbal therapy program that does not offer
Danish Sign Language. niemelä (2011) referred to medical scientists’ and parents’
argument that deaf people are not necessarily concerned about the child’s welfare,
but “just want to retain their own language and culture, so it does not become
extinct.” The guidelines of the Danish national Health Board, she said, even in-
clude regulations that forbid children with cochlear implants from relying on visual
input (e.g., speechreading and sign language), prescribe the individual integration
of these children in mainstream schools, and require the designation of a hearing
contact person for deaf parents. niemelä (2011) concluded her presentation by
summarizing the dilemma: “Do we have to acknowledge that no matter what we
do, Danish Sign Language and Danish deaf culture at present are going through a
change, and the language and culture will never be the same as before—but will be
expressed in a new way?”
These presenters’ calls for international support revealed strong feelings of
threat, frustration, and exclusion from educational debates and decision making.
Denmark had been a pioneering country in bilingual/bicultural deaf education
in the 1980s and 1990s (see also Chapter 6), so the explosive character of techno-
logical developments and subsequent changes—the removal of sign language and
other visual input from early intervention programs, the closing of deaf schools,
and the encouragement of mainstreaming—suggests that attention from the inter-
national deaf community is needed, including reflection on preferred, alternative,
and possible futures for deaf people, and how leadership can inspire these futures.
McGregor, niemelä, and Jepsen (2015) refer to the classification of the status of
Danish Sign Language as “vulnerable” in the Sign Languages in UnESCo’s Atlas of
the World’s Languages in Danger project due to the limited opportunities for deaf
children today to acquire it as a first language (http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/
explore/projects/sign_languages_in_unesco_atlas_of_world_languages_in_dan-
ger.php). However, the Danish Deaf Association’s advocacy led to the constitutional
recognition of Danish Sign Language on May 13, 2014, and a Council to support its
development and documentation was established in January 2015. It remains to be
seen how these milestones may affect the educational landscape.
This situation brings to mind the phrase “conflict of voices,” which is used by
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries in their book Inside Deaf Culture to refer to the
disparity among the perspectives of doctors, scientists, and engineers working on
cochlear implants and genetic screening on the one hand and the deaf commu-
nity’s views on the other (2005, p. 177). They warn that deaf communities’ deeply
rooted fear of biotechnology could inadvertently cause a return to oralism:Surely educational programs can be developed that teach implanted children
both speech and sign language. Surely the talents of doctors and scientists
could be directed toward developing social programs that present speech