Abstract

OVIEDO, Alejandro. A HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A BILINGUAL MODEL IN THE SCHOOLS FOR THE DEAF IN VENEZUELA BETWEEN 1985 and 1996. ETD - Educ. Temat. Digit. [online]. 2022, vol.24, n.4, pp.826-847. ISSN 1676-2592.  https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v24i4.8669157.

The objective of the study was to reconstruct the emergence, development and abandonment of the bilingual- bicultural model in Venezuelan public schools for the deaf between 1985 and 1996. Although this process has been previously addressed by some academic publications, all of them are limited to the points of view of teachers linked to the university sector. The novelty of the present article consisted in its reconstruction based on the direct testimonies of protagonists of the model who occupied different roles in it: a manager of the educational sector, a teacher, a mother of a deaf child, a deaf person who visited the school during the application of the model, and a Venezuelan Sign Language (LSV) interpreter. Accordingly, new perspectives were expected to enrich the current understanding of the model. Indeed, the analysis of the data collected in individual interviews contrasts the limited scope of the model in achieving the intended school transformations with its enormous impact on the power relations of the languages involved: within the Deaf community, LSV went from being the low variety to becoming the high variety in relation to signed Spanish. The latter implied the empowerment of the Deaf identity. That change originated in the model, but transcended it beyond its abandonment in 1996.

Keywords : Bilingual-bicultural education for the deaf; Sign languages; Curriculum for deaf schools; Linguistic planning; Venezuela.

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