Teacher Training and Teaching Method for Deaf Children

ABSTRACT:

This paper discusses the proposal of teacher training and the foundations of the method adopted to teach deaf children, from 1951 to 1961, in which Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória was the director of the National Institute for Education of the Deaf (INES). Based on Marc Bloch’s conception of history, the historical research was chosen as methodology. Speeches recorded in the Annals of the 1st National Conference of Teachers of Deaf Learners, held at INES, in 1959, and supporting texts were analyzed. The results point out that the conception of education, based on the correction of the disability, had a dialog with theoretical conceptions spread at that time, influencing teacher training, since they should teach oralization and lip reading to deaf children, according to the principles of the Pure Oral Method adopted throughout the national territory.

KEYWORDS:
Education of deaf children; Teacher training; Teaching method

RESUMO:

Este artigo discute a proposta de formação de professores e os embasamentos do método adotado para ensinar crianças surdas, no período de 1951 a 1961, quando Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória esteve na direção do Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos (INES). Com base na concepção de história de Marc Bloch, elegeu-se como metodologia a pesquisa histórica. Foram analisados discursos registrados nos Anais da 1ª Conferência Nacional de Professores de Surdos, realizado no INES, em 1959, e textos auxiliares. Os resultados apontam que a concepção de educação, fundamentada na correção da deficiência, dialogou com concepções teóricas que circulavam naquela época, influenciando a formação de professores, pois estes deveriam ensinar as crianças surdas a oralização e a leitura labial, conforme princípios do Método Oral Puro, adotado em todo o território nacional.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Educação de crianças surdas; Formação de professores; Método de ensino

1 Initial considerations

This paper is a cutoff of a research that investigated the history of deaf literacy in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil, between the 1950s and 1970s, as part of a national policy of decentralization in deaf education undertaken by the National Institute for the Education of the Deaf (Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos - INES), which culminated in the establishment of special classrooms or schools in several states of Brazil. In this text, we discuss, during the period in which Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória was in charge of this Institute (1951-1961), the proposal of teacher training and the foundations of the method adopted to teach deaf children. Teacher training was, in our analysis, one of the pillars of the deaf education decentralization project and also served as the basis for the pedagogical organization of classes that were created in several Brazilian states.

As a theoretical framework, we took Marc Bloch’s (2001) conception to understand History not as chronology, because History cannot be reduced to an encyclopedia with the narrative of great events, the achievements of great heroes, and the changes brought about by them.

The historian fulfills the task of studying and understanding human beings, the main agents of History, whatever their social, economic or political condition inserted into the social context of their time is. Since the ideas and thoughts of humans are dynamic, History cannot be immutable and fixed, as it is constituted from the action of individuals in time, their expectations, certainties and uncertainties and the conceptions of the time in which they acted.

When recognizing the possibility of counterbalancing official discourse and the refusal of an undisputed law, Bloch (2001) not only recognizes the value of official documents but also adds new values considered unofficial and marginalized by more traditional historians. “The diversity of historical testimonies is almost infinite. Everything a man says or writes, everything he makes, everything he touches can and must tell about it” (p. 79). This statement leads us to conclude that the truth is not crystallized in the document, but in the senses elaborated from the historian’s questions, because “the archaeological texts or documents, even the apparently clearest and most complacent ones, speak only when we know how to interrogate them” (Bloch, 2001, p. 79).

Thus, to understand the performance of the subjects who participated in the construction of the proposal for teacher education of deaf children, we adopted, as a methodological option, the historical research because the researcher can analyze documents and, therefore, question them in order to seek to understand the positions of the subjects who produced them.

In this sense, the corpus analyzed in this paper consists of speeches registered in the Annals of the 1st National Conference of Teachers of Deaf Learners, held at INES, in 1959. We are more closely interested in the lecture given by Ana Rímoli, director and official representative of the Campaign for the Education of the Deaf Brazilian, which highlights teacher education and its foundations, as well as the method adopted by INES for the education of the deaf. We compare the director’s speech with her own publications that deal with the education of deaf children and also the curriculum adopted in the Normal School in 1951, 1952 and 1953, referring to the first class, which gives us an idea of the linguistic and the psychological basis for the education of the deaf.

In Brazil, as it was found through searches carried out on the portal of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and in scientific journals, studies were conducted that focused on researching the education of the deaf from a historiographical perspective. The authors who used these studies adopted, as methodological options, documentary research or narratives.

Soares (1996), when investigating the narratives presented for the history of the education of the deaf in bibliographic and academic production, from the 1990s, states that, in the management of Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória (1951-1961), the projects that were realized were still idealized in the administration of their predecessors, among them the teacher training, whose scope was the decentralization of the education of the deaf and oralism as a methodological proposal and culminated with the Campaign for the Education of the Deaf Brazilian.

Souza (2007), Schimitt (2008) and Neves (2011) presented, respectively, the first indications of the implementation of this decentralization policy, carried out by INES, in the 1950s, in Aracaju, Sergipe (SE); Santa Catarina (SC) and Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul (RS). These researches confirmed the influence of the Institute as a managing body of public policies in the education of teachers, a place assumed to this day. The curricula mobilized in the classes of the deaf point to the reduction of knowledge to be learned focusing on oral language teaching.

In the same direction, Cardoso and Herold Júnior (2016) investigated the education of the deaf in the 1950s. They used, as their primary source, the works Introduction to Speech Didactics (1959), Deaf-Mute Education Compendium (1958) and Manual of Education of the Deaf Child (1961), published by Ana Rímoli, since, at that time, by taking over the direction of INES, she promoted important changes, among them, those related to the education of specialist teachers.

Studies have shown that Ana Rímoli’s main concern was to teach deaf children to speak, because without this ability, there would be no communication and, consequently, the deaf children would have difficulties in developing in a healthy and safe way. Therefore, according to the Institute’s director, for the success of the education of the deaf,

teacher education was of paramount importance. She argued that teachers should master theoretical-practical issues of special psychopedagogy, have a multifaceted look at students, taking into account their specificities for the adaptation of teaching. (Cardoso & Herold Júnior, 2016, p. 11).

To support the teaching and training of teachers, as pointed out by Cardoso and Herold Junior (2016), Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória started an intense dialogue with oral writers, among them, Alexander Graham Bell, Martha E. Bruhn, Herr Julius Müller-Walle, Edward B. Nitchie and Cora Elsie Kinzi. She defined the oral method as the most suitable for teaching deaf children. In this scenario, besides the linguistic bases, aligned with the oralistic conception that circulated in other countries, Ana Rímoli also established a wide dialogue with authors who studied psychological aspects of education, as we will see below.

2 Teacher education

The 1950s was central to decentralization in the education of the deaf. Together with the modernization project of Brazil, implemented by the Federal Government, with the aim of teaching the deaf how to read and write, INES made a great effort to train teachers to work in Brazilian states. Two actions, the Campaign for the Education of the Deaf Brazilian and the Normal School for Teachers of the Deaf Learner, were instrumental in bringing the deaf person into the country’s economic and social life.

The Campaign for the Education of the Deaf Brazilian, which took place in 1957, can be placed in the midst of the educational measures that began under Juscelino Kubistchek’s Government (1956-1961), whose purpose was the “eradication” of illiteracy, but, above all, the formation of industry workforce, considering the fact that this government adopted, in economic terms, a policy called by Fausto (2010) as a national developmentalist, understood as the combination of “State, national private enterprise and foreign capital to promote development, with an emphasis on industrialization” (p. 427).

In this context, INES would have the task of expanding literacy to the deaf in Brazil, through the training of specialized teachers and, therefore, the “expansion of the educational and assistance network for such children, starting the penetration within the country, through the necessary technical-administrative decentralization” (Dória, 1959). Thus, the Federal Government carried out this project through two basic actions: administrative decentralization, creating new classrooms for the deaf in some Brazilian states; and teacher education, based on current scientific bases.

According to a report presented at the 1st National Conference of Teachers of Deaf Learners, held at INES, in 1959, that year, out of a total of 84 school units that already provided education for the deaf in 12 States, 61 were provided by teachers trained at INES Through the Campaign for the Education of the Deaf Brazilian, the Institute had already signed an agreement with 31 school units. Other seven Federation units and three private schools were waiting to be included in the agreement.

With these data, Ana Rímoli, in the speech given at the Conference, sought to demonstrate to the public present the positive results obtained with the campaign still underway and the training of teachers, begun in 1951, through the Normal School, and expanded in 1957, with the Specialization Course. Rocha (2009) pondered, in her research, that these measures aligned with the Progressive Education idea, because,

with the presence of Anísio Teixeira at the head of the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP), the idea of educational reconstruction of the country, on a scientific basis, gains shape, as well as the priority in the development of actions related to teacher education. (p. 72).

Following the model implemented by Anísio Teixeira in 1954, which organized professional training centers for primary and normal education, the Institute would assume the function of being the National Reference Center, with five other Regional Centers distributed throughout Brazil, decentralizing the Amendment Teaching⁵ (currently Special Education) whose objective was to rehabilitate people with mental disabilities to later insert them into the regular school (we will return to this subject), enabling “the creation of special classes in public schools, the establishment of specialized schools, and also the granting of scholarships so that deaf students could study in private schools” (Rocha, 2009, p. 85).

Rocha (2010, p. 80) also observed that the creation of the Normal School, for the specific purpose of training teachers for the deaf, was the first initiative aimed at “decentralization, regionalization and internalization of the education of the deaf nationwide”. The installation of the campaign was the culmination of the project. In addition to administrative support for decentralization purposes, the Campaign for the Education of the Deaf Brazilian was responsible for promoting all means to support and disseminate initiatives necessary for the education and care of the hearing impaired.

The curriculum of the Normal School, lasting three years, was composed of a general part, common to the Normal Course of the Institute of Education of Rio de Janeiro, and another specific, directed to the education of the deaf and based on the biological and psychological conceptions of deafness, with the following subjects: Portuguese and Phonetic Language, Histology, Physics, Amendment Teaching, Phonation, Special Didactics and Pathology of Hearing. In 1952, INES invited the Argentinian teacher Angela Liza de Brienza to teach Phonetics and Special Didactics, which, in a way, contributed to demarcate the method adopted by the Institute at the time.

In addition to the Normal School, as mentioned, the two-year Specialization Course began in 1957 to accelerate the decentralization of Amendment Teaching in Brazil. To this end, it received “primary teachers from the various Federation Units. Its primary purpose is to enable teachers already graduated and with at least two year-practice at common teaching in the special teaching of the deaf” (Dória, 1959). In the curriculum, presented by Ana Rímoli, concerning the 1st and 2nd grades, there is a predominance of disciplines about speech acquisition, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1
Curriculum of the Teacher Specialization Course.

1st grade

Language psychology History of education of the hearing and speech impaired Didactics of Elementary, Complementary and supplementary Education for the hearing and speech impaired a) Training of the reading of speech b) Speech teaching c) Auditory training Acoustics and sound physics Anatomy and physiology of hearing and speech Sociology Phonetics for the hearing and speech impaired Drawing Didactics and Applied Arts Choreographic Gymnastics - Recreation and Games Orpheonic Singing

2nd grade

Psychometry and other measurements Methodological Principles of Research Practice of Elementary, Complementary and Supplementary Education for the hearing and speech impaired Hearing and speech pathology Logopedia Comparative Education Notions of applied law Choreographic Gymnastics - Recreation and Games Orpheonic Singing Optional subjects: Hearing and Visual Hygiene and English (updated)

Source: Adapted by the authors from INES archive.

If, on the one hand, Ana Rímoli defended a training for teachers based on scientific bases; on the other hand, she highlighted the redeeming function of education, that of saving deaf children from their misfortune was a mission to be fulfilled, since from her perspective: “It is love that will be the miraculous ‘open sesame’, through which the student and teacher will understand each other slowly, gently and progressively narrowing the distance between them” (Dória, 1959). Luckesi (1994) considers that this view underlies a redemptive conception of education strongly linked to the idea that, through education, excluded people could be inserted into cultural processes. In this sense, the teacher of deaf children should save them from ignorance, misery and marginality, by restoring what they lacked: speech.

To exemplify her statement about the purpose of education, Ana Rímoli links Theology and Pedagogy by relating the redemption of sinners through Jesus Christ to the redemption of the ignorant through education, as well as sinners can be saved and live in harmony with God, the marginalized could be educated and live in harmony within society. To confirm this relationship, she pointed out that the teachers dedicated themselves “to one of the most beautiful endeavors that Christ bequeathed to men on the face of the earth” (Dória, 1959).

Thus, Ana Rímoli’s speech was permeated by the use of terms related to feelings, such as enthusiasm, affection, understanding, patience, perseverance, inner strength, trust, renunciation and service. In this sense, the training that would help teachers to teach deaf children should be scientifically based, but would also need to prepare them for a mission that would require noble sentiments to carry out their redeeming mission.

At that Conference, the then director of the Institution, Ana Rímoli, in her speech, added: “Any teacher has the duty to know and teach Portuguese, our native language, to the hearing-impaired child with greater depth and breadth” (Dória, 1959). In this sense, we inferred that the director envisioned that the training to work with deaf children could be extended to all teachers, even anticipating their inclusion in the regular school.

3 Organization and background of teaching method

Ana Rímoli also advocated, in her speech, the kind of teaching adopted by INES, placing it in the field of Amendment Pedagogy. With regard to this Pedagogy, Milton Acácio de Araújo, Professor of History of Amendment Education and lecturer at that Conference, proposed that the event ratify the creation of appropriate education and teaching standards, reaching “all the schools of the Amendment Teaching, taken in the broad sense of the term, in order to benefit all persons with any physical and sensory disabilities or social maladjustment” (Araújo, 1959).

To justify the need for greater regulation in this area, the teacher presented the number of people with disabilities enrolled in the characteristics mentioned, lacking assistance and education, therefore targeted by the Amendment Pedagogy. Among them, total, partial and speaking deaf, 500,000; deaf people who did not speak, 80,000; language impaired, 50,000; and blind deaf-mute, 400. Also the prostitutes, the beggars, the imprisoned; in summary, all the socially excluded could be assisted by the principles of Amendment teaching. The purpose of this kind of teaching would be to restore, through education, the abnormal to normality or those with some deviation.

Thus, the deaf child is seen as abnormal compared to other children considered “normal” because they do not have the “defect” of deafness and are healthy. Still in his speech, Araújo (1959) stated: “The medical-pedagogical problem of the physically and sensory disabled today is seriously faced by all countries that understand the need to recover them, in view of the psychological correction and readaptation to work”. In this sense, the central purpose of the education of the deaf - his/her readaptation to work - was in line with the nationaldevelopmental policy adopted by the Federal Government.

In her speech, Ana Rímoli also pointed out the need for special treatment for each case, according to the “abnormality”. The purposes of the treatment would be, besides the formation of productive labor, the moral and religious formation and for the social life, as the following excerpt shows:

applying the special treatment indicated in each case from the educational point of view to attain the moral and religious formation and the capacity for work and social life of boys and girls. They seek to overcome psychic difficulties, inhibitions and disorders of all kinds, resulting from mental retardation, lack of vision or hearing and phonation. (Dória,1959).

Thus, the Amendment Teaching, according to Ana Rímoli, directed to people considered with problems and deviations, should be specialized, with specific strategies for each case. Based on these ideas, she stated that the teacher should know the potentialities of his/her students, with a view of “helping these creatures who cannot dispense the help of a teacher specialized in their career, thus bringing them to normal life in the society to which they belong and eliminating rickets from their personality and mind” (Dória, 1959). Therefore, what would be the basis for this teacher specialization?

According to Ana Rímoli, in modern education, the content taught in the common school, organized in disciplines, differed from the traditional model, as it is based on the “interests, attitudes, discernment, intellectual control of their environment, through attitudes and living experiences” (Dória, 1959). Thus, the teacher of deaf children, in addition to taking into account these principles, would have the task of teaching them to speak a language they had never heard and, in parallel, develop their intelligence. In this sense, this teacher should have language skills and, as mentioned, have an idealistic, dedicated and missionary character to mobilize the most modern speech teaching methods and prepare this child for a full and autonomous life.

The specialized school, in Ana Rímoli’s opinion, would be the school of deaf children; and the ordinary school, that of hearing children. Regarding the deaf child, she considered that the biggest challenge of the teachers was the degree of deafness, because, according to her point of view,

the greater the disability, the greater the language difficulties. The reason is obvious; the child learns to speak by imitation; hearing impaired, unable to hear or to hear poorly the human voice, will have no language patterns to imitate. (Dória, 1959).

For this reason, Ana Rímoli argued that oral language could not be learned in a natural way, since it is the result of a phonetic capacity, which does not exist for the deaf child. In her book entitled Compêndio de educação da criança surdo-muda (Compendium of Education of the Deaf-Mute Child), used as a reference for teacher education, she thoroughly analyzed the mental structure of a child who, as he/she did not hear, could not have access to the symbolic world, and even understanding the facts, through vision or imitation of the actions of the people living around him/her, he/she did not think logically, because “logical thinking depends on new dispositions of the ‘units of thought’, which are our words” (Dória, 1958, p. 37). Without that, according to her, the thought of the deaf, uneducated child would always be generalist, inaccurate and vague. “Children without words are also children without real thinking” (Dória, 1958, p. 37).

In another publication, entitled Manual da educação da criança surda (Handbook for the Deaf Child Education) (1961), Ana Rímoli deepened her conception of language by stating that language and speech differ as language is defined as the idea we have about things that exist; in this way, the idea is what we have about what we are going to say, and speech is the sound and acoustic way we use to convey this idea through words. With this distinction, a listening child will not have language compromised, as the “very frequently received auditory sensations prepare the child’s mind for repetition, for the reproduction of the sounds he/she hears, through his/her innate capacity for imitation” (Dória, 1961, p. 52). Thus, we see that the development of any individual occurs through this tripod: hearing, thinking and speaking.

Thus, Ana Rímoli advocated for deaf children the same right to develop thinking and expression through specialized oral language learning, with “adequate, systematically prepared exercises for speech acquisition and development” (Dória, 1961, p. 52). From this perspective, word learning is not a purely physiological and phonetic process.

When in dialog with American structuralist linguists, who also conceived language from a cultural perspective, Dória (1961) stated that the development of thinking through the learning of new words should be a meaningful process and based on children’s experiences, because: “Language is a physiological act in which many organs of the human body participate and presupposes the voluntary activity of the spirit; it is a social act that responds to a need for communication between men, says J. Vendryes” (p. 56). In this regard, learning to speak words should integrate a joint process between the need to learn symbols and the need for communication, making this process more meaningful.

Influenced by Sapir (1954), Ana Rímoli states, with regard to speech, that “[...] the development process is not effected by mechanical methods, since the objective and the understanding of the meaning greatly assist in the process of speaking well” (Dória, 1961, p. 54). Thus, although the child is biologically able to speak and for this he/she uses the places of articulation, learning a language is a cultural process that should make sense. For example, she says that, according to Sapir (1954),

the word ‘house’ is not a linguistic fact if we only see in it the acoustic effect produced by the vowels and consonants that constitute it, pronounced in a certain order; neither the motor processes and the tactile sensations resulting from the articulation of the word, nor the hearing perception of this articulation by the listener, nor the visual perception of the word on the handwritten or printed page, nor the motor processes and the tactile sensations that are part of the act of writing the word, or the memory of one or all of these experiences. Only when these and other experiences are associated with the image of a house do they begin to take the symbol, word feature of the language element. (Dória, 1961, p. 54).

In this context, for the deaf child who does not hear, learning to “use verbal symbols, to associate sounds and ‘word pictures’ with ideas [...]” (Dória, 1959) would assume a central place in the whole schooling process, prioritizing, for this, the repetition and memorization of words with full meaning, because the teaching process outlined by the child “is a process of ‘imitation’, whereby the child learns to speak imitating, acquiring mechanical language skills ‘from outside to inside’ and not from ‘inside out’” (Dória, 1961, p. 226). This premise will be the foundation of the method used in the oralization of deaf children.

In her speech, Ana Rímoli pointed out that in order to develop the psychological dimension of deaf children and, therefore, to reinforce their mental structure so that they can broaden their knowledge, they would have to learn language in its double aspect: “through the motor shape of the words on the lips, on the speaker’s face, and expressed verbally through meticulous and crafted construction of the phonemes of our language”. Ana Rímoli concluded by saying that “nothing can be taught without being spoken by the teacher, that is through language” (Dória, 1959).

Therefore, the teacher of deaf children should teach them how to articulate language or speak words and understand them in the speaker’s face, or learn to read speech, according to the principles of the Pure Oral Method. When analyzing the importance of oralization for the education of deaf children, Dória (1958) points out in her book:

Education (of those who were born deaf or deaf before learning to speak) or reeducation (of those who deafened after learning to speak) is to promote the full development of the maximum possibilities of the deaf child for their smooth and complete adaptation to society in which they live, through the processes of oral reading or lip reading, as others say and the teaching of speech, basic factors of the so-called oral method, in the language of amendment pedagogy. (p. 72).

Therefore, the Normal School for teachers of deaf learners should provide elements that would subsidize the teachers in the deaf children oralization, so that they could learn to speak the official language of the country, thus confirming the conception of language linked to vocalization. Without speech, there is no language and without language the deaf child will not be prepared “to respond to the orofacial expression and to express their own thoughts and feelings” (Dória, 1958, p. 18). In pedagogical and social terms, the schooling of deaf children would only be possible with the initial learning of oral language, because:

Language translates thinking; to have language there must be thinking; now, it is well known that the mind only works or acts in terms of the problematic situation. It has to be stimulated by curiosity so that thinking occurs and mental processes become active. The objective principle of every child in general is based on this. What should be said then about the deaf child?. (Dória, 1958, p. 108).

The conception of language as an expression of thinking, as Bakhtin (1992) points out, postulates that the individual psyche constitutes the foundation of language, the latter seen as a stable system, ready to be learned. So if we take the history of the literacy of the hearing children, we will see that they needed to appropriate the language to express themselves well. In the preparatory period for literacy, for example, hearing children were also trained to properly produce smaller oral language units, such as syllables and phonemes, through auditory discrimination activities.

In this sense, it was necessary, as a requirement for literacy, to learn to distinguish sounds. Of course, the lack of hearing had other negative and positive implications from the point of view of those who sought to teach the correct, erudite language. Deaf children could not hear these sound segments, but they could learn to pronounce them “correctly” because they were not users of a language that needed corrections from the point of view of traditional linguistics. In this context, the specialized teacher should know all the fundamentals of language, namely the psychological, sociological, phonetic, linguistic, semantic, physiological and neurological, constituting as true instruments in teaching the student with disability.

Ana Rímoli defended a teaching that prioritized the sensitive education, the use of the senses. In this case, the most appropriate would be the globalized method, in which teaching starts from a general plan for the specific. The teaching would take place in an interdisciplinary way, according to the children’s experiences and interests, breaking with the classic division between the subjects, because the main objective was not to teach, “Portuguese, Science, numbers, etc., but intends to develop in the student interests, attitudes, insight, intellectual control of his/her environment, through attitudes and living experiences” (Dória, 1959).

This assumption would also be adopted in the teaching of the oral language, since the child, when uttering words, does so with complete meaning. Therefore, the teaching of the oral language should be contextualized and based on sentences or words. According to Ana Rímoli: “This point of view coincides with the linguists’ current conception that the linguistic element is the phrase and not the word, and with the observation of childhood psychologists, regarding the use of the word with a perfect meaning” (Dória, 1959).

Providing examples and suggestions in the form of a roadmap and reaffirming the need for teaching deaf children to use meaningful words or phrases, the following example on the teaching of speech reading is significant as it gives us a vision of the goals that deaf children should achieve in their schooling:

• Minimum vocabulary script for initial series

• 1. Greetings: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, see you tomorrow, see you, see you later and goodbye.

• 2. Teaching numbers: (1 to 24) of the times, dates and combination of all.

• 3. Money: notion, value and application in purchases, pharmacy, butchers, warehouse, bakery, cake shops and greengrocers.

• Minimum notions to understand:

• a) Pharmacy: cotton, alcohol, soap, medicine, injection, syrup, tablet […].

• 4. Simple orders: do it, walk, jump, run, lie down, get up, go up, go down, look, come, let’s go, open, close, say, laugh, see, write and read, erase.

• 5. Teaching the rhythm of words and changes that occur in speech movements, with varying positions of the face and body (using the learned material).

• 6. Practice of stories

• (1) Employing short sentences on a particular subject

• (2) Modifying vocabulary

• (3) Using simple words

• (4) Asking questions

• 7. Beginning of analytical practice of phonetic elements: vowels.

• 8. Comparison of time of vowel duration.

• 9. Analytical practice of phonetic elements: diphthongs and consonants, paying attention to the visibility of the p - b - m phonemes; f and v; d and c; s and z; z and j; c and g; etc. Use word lists to analyze and observe this point. (Dória, 1961, p. 137-139).

As the child developed these lexical broadening and phonetic analysis activities, the teacher should propose more complex activities with longer stories, narrations, and so on. Repetition was a principle to be observed so that the child would not forget all the words learned and memorize the movements of the face of his/her interlocutor.

Drawing or visual images should be widely used so that the child could construct the mental image of the object to be learned. Posters or picture cards should contain only the image of the object so that the background does not confuse the child in associating the word with the drawing. “Any background in the figures confuses and destroys the clear idea that one is trying to build” (Dória, 1958, p. 84). Finally, the book proposes a series of games/plays with the purpose of assisting in the teaching of speech reading, as the child learned while playing, besides fixing the contents already learned. Only after he/she developed mental processes of word comprehension, could she take the next step, the learning of speech, being the central point of that learning.

Success in the task of teaching the deaf child to speak would only be possible if a set of factors were observed, as speaking did not only involve making sounds. The teacher should observe “the breath, the articulation, the emission, the intonation or tone, the intensity, the timbre of the voice and the music of the sentence” (Dória, 1958, p. 108). In addition, the child should also be included in contextualized activities, initially by learning easy words. This was a mechanical and repetitive process, as the child would only advance the lexicon if he/she spoke the word correctly.

Only then would the focus of teaching shift from the broader context, the word, to the more specific context, the phonemes. The right words would be part of a notebook that would become a material to be consulted and revisited for mnemonic purposes. Other suggested materials were posters with drawings, words and print letters to associate the spoken word with its written form. The choice of words to be taught should follow the interest of children, from family or school contexts. When presented, they should not be alone, but inserted into sentences, according to the characteristics of the Intuitive Method, as the text below shows:

This is a ball, Paulo It is a big ball. It rolls. See, the ball rolls like this (show). Now, throw the ball, Paulo. Throw the ball to me. Oh, you threw the ball. (Dória, 1958, p. 231).

In this example, the word “ball” should be repeated several times until the child memorizes it. This systematized work aimed to provide conditions for the child to broaden the lexicon of new words, without forgetting the learned ones. Mobilizing the concept of maturation, Ana Rímoli argued that, until the child reaches the ideal level to speak or pronounce meaningful words, she would go through a period of maturation in which, through the other senses, the ability to observe, concentrate and imitation, with the teacher’s help, would be able to articulate simple and meaningful words.

It is necessary to emphasize that, from 1930, the psycho-pedagogical aspect had a strong influence on the education of people with disabilities. In this regard, Jannuzzi (2004, p. 130) confirms that sensory education and the “concentration of the various branches of education around the interests of children” are principles of the education proposed by the pedagogue Helena Antipoff⁶ in the teaching of students with disabilities aligned with the principles of the New School. In this sense, we can infer that the devaluation of teaching specific subjects for deaf children may also be linked to this fact.

Comparing the regular primary school curriculum with the specialized school curriculum, Ana Rímoli said that if, in the regular school, subjects were presented through activities and experiences, even more in the specialized school they should be given “objective and energetic” treatment, based on the principles of repetition and objectification. For this, a careful planning of this work would be essential, since the deaf child, unlike the hearing child, develops more slowly. The deaf child, in her opinion, would have to go another way because he/she would first of all have to “learn to speak and, comparatively with other children, will be slow in acquiring this form of behavior” (Dória, 1959).

In her view, this “disability” was the natural cause of the disadvantage that will always accompany speech about the deaf child. This assumption marked adapted or reduced teaching, the need for more time in school routine and special education. At that time, as an example, she presented the schedule practiced at the Institute’s Elementary School, as shown in Table 2:⁷

Table 2
. Class Schedule at the Imperial Deaf-Mute Institute.

Morning - 7 am to 11 am
7:30 am - Entry, check attendance and inspection 8 am - Speech Comprehension Training 8:20 am - Speech Mechanics 8:50 am - Preparing for Playtime 9 am - Break 9:30 am - Audiovisual Training 10 am– Math 10:50 am - Preparation for lunch Lunch - Rest
Afternoon- 1:30 pm to 5 pm
1:30 pm - Entry and accommodation 1:45 pm - Oral and written language (with general knowledge): a) reading, b) copying, c) handwriting, d) dictation 2:45 pm - Snack Preparation 3:30 pm - Continuation of oral and written language with audiovisual training 4 pm - Drawing or manual work 4:30 pm - Free activities and preparation for dinner Tidiness and cleanliness of the classroom 5 pm - Dinner

Source: Adapted by the authors from INES archives.

Mathematics and general knowledge occupy an insignificant space compared to oral language activities, confirming that this was the privileged knowledge in the teachinglearning processes at the beginning of literacy. Regarding this aspect - the teaching of oral language -, we believe that Vygotsky (1997) helps us understand Ana Rímoli’s concern with this learning. According to this author, deafness, seen exclusively as an organic deficiency, would not be severe, since it does not produce delays in the child’s general development, but the lack of speech due to deafness or the inability to master language “engender one of the most painful complications of all cultural development” (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 27), that is, they cause problems for the cultural and biological development of the children. In a way, this author relied on technologies created to provide the cultural development of children with disabilities. In the case of deaf children, he mentions a mimic-gestural speech that, at the moment, was not thought in Brazil to solve the language problem, because teaching to speak would be the most painful path for deaf children.

Another aspect addressed in the lecture refers to the classification of students for the formation of homogeneous classes. According to Mortatti (2006), with the launch of the book Testes ABC para verificação da maturidade necessária ao aprendizado da leitura e da escrita (ABC tests to verify the maturity necessary for learning reading and writing), in 1934, written by M. B. Lourenço Filho, Intelligence Tests began to be applied to literacy classes in Brazil, “as a way of measuring the level of maturity necessary for learning to read and write in order to classify the literate, aiming at the organization of homogeneous classes and the rationalization and effectiveness of literacy” (Mortatti, 2006, p. 9).

In the context of Special Education, Jannuzzi (2004) stated that this practice was widely used in the 1930s to classify and separate children who did not follow school content as most peers in regular classes, because the definition of intelligence was tied to school performance. The test served to diagnose the difficulties and confirm the abnormality of the children. Following the classification of the Intelligence Test developed by Binet, children were separated into special classes. In Ana Rímoli’s speech, we do not see a clear indication of the Intelligence Tests used; however, she states that

the grouping into one class of elements that are more capable of faster assimilation (either due to the higher intelligence level or due to the residues considered to be of hearing) with less capable ones of slower assimilation (because they have a lower IQ or because they are profoundly deaf) making the class homogeneity impossible, it will result [...] in loss of educational performance, since it depends on it. (Dória, 1959).

Thus, we observed that, among deaf children, there were forms of classification that tried to differentiate them: by biological criteria, based on the degree of hearing loss (partial or profound), considering whether deafness happened before or after language acquisition, the form or mode of occurrence of deafness (gradual or sudden) and chronological age; by cognitive criteria, such as intelligence level; by psychological criteria, such as emotional balance and personality; and by social criteria, such as the environment, whether at home or at school.

Ana Rímoli concluded her thesis towards the ideal model in the education of deaf children, stating that, added to all these requirements, is “the teacher’s aptitude for the career and its proper preparation - a factor that interferes with performance - as it is easy to verify” (Dória, 1958).

4 Final considerations

From what we know about the history of deaf education, we know that oralism, as a pedagogical method, was widely adopted at INES, since scientism supported the relationship between Medicine and Education, validating research that focused on the cure of deafness, abnormalities or disabilities. With Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória taking over as director of the Institute, a significant change set the tone of the new government that was now established: the National Institute of Deaf-Mutes is renamed National Institute for the Education of the Deaf, confirming that the term “mute” no longer applied to the new educational model toward oralization.

In this context, on the one hand, disciplines linked to the correction of hearing impairment are incorporated in the teacher training curriculum, in order to enable teachers to do this hard work, that is, to “teach” the deaf to speak. On the other hand, we also find traces that, besides the influence of Medicine and Psychology in the discourses on the education of the deaf, there was a wide dialog with the theoretical perspectives, related to the literacy field, regarding the methods of literacy and courseware. Based on the methods intended to teach oral language, the documents show the marks of schoolwork, in direct dialog with the conceptions of the time, making us refute the hegemonic discourse that during this period deaf students were circumscribed in a purely clinical and therapeutic view.

We can conclude that the education of the deaf in Brazil was not constituted in the absence of the contemporary utterances. On the contrary, the discourses produced by the subjects show a project that, over time, had a dialog with previous conceptions, produced new concepts, and finally created a discontinuous and complex movement. We believe that the documents mobilized made us see a conception of education based on correction through the teaching of speech.

It is necessary to point out, as Rocha (2009) affirmed that the presence of Ana Rímoli, the first woman who directed INES, stood out mainly for the investments made around the education of deaf children, not only in terms of professional performance, but also for the works published on this theme and for the creation of a Specialized Course for the Education of the Deaf. In this paper, we highlight the training of teachers and the method adopted, seeking to deepen and broaden knowledge in the field of historiography of the education of the deaf.

Regarding these two aspects, we can conclude that INES, in the management of Ana Rímoli de Faria Dória (1951-1961), in line with the national-developmental policy, sought to build scientific bases for the formation and education of deaf children, without losing sight of the redeeming purpose of education and thus the missionary intent of prepared teachers to teach children.

Despite the criticisms that we can make today, the movement that occurred at that moment, it is necessary to emphasize, as Vygotsky (1997) points out, that the school and its methods have always been thought based on the existence of an intellect and organs evaluated as normal and from steps that lead to the construction of increasingly elaborate knowledge. Thus, the fact that there is, among other movements, a strong concern to adapt teacher education and teaching methods to the reality and conditions of deaf children seems to us an important advance that even contributed to break with a hospital-medicinal pedagogy (term used by Vygotsky, 1997) not only for deaf children.

• 5
  In Brazil, in the 1950’s, the term used for the education for people with disabilities was “ensino emendativo”, which will be translated here as Amendment Teaching.
• 6
  Helena Antipoff, a Russian psychologist and pedagogue, was invited, in 1929, by Francisco Campos, Secretary of Education of Minas Gerais, Brazil, to join the group of professionals of the Minas Gerais School of Improvement, as a result of the Minas Gerais government’s Reform of Primary Education, through Decree-Law no. 7,970 of December 15, 1927. A scholar on education of the disabled, she was responsible for the creation of the first Pestalozzi Society in Brazil.
• 7
  “Regular courses for the deaf - 1) Pre-primary - Made in three years for children from 5 to 7 years old, and the children are distributed meeting the modern pedagogical requirements (with park-type toys) in 2 shifts. The field of socialization is as wide as possible, with a large number of walks and festivities. Particularly striking in this sector is the existence of a rhythmic band, whose primary purpose is to help the handicapped, regarding the problem of rhythm, whose importance assumes high proportions in complementing the education that is given to children. 2) Primary - In the field of primary education, children between the ages of 8 and 13 are taught for 6 years, including their curriculum (in the last two years) pre-vocational guidance, working full-time for students. As a teaching method, INES necessarily adopts the pure oral method” (Opinion no. 19, Of March 20, 1959, p. 3).

Referências

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  21 Feb 2020
• Date of issue
  Jan-Mar 2020

History

• Received
  01 Aug 2019
• Reviewed
  25 Oct 2019
• Accepted
  03 Nov 2019