Ideologic signs in Deaf education discourse

The chapter deals with the ideological implications of discourse strategies for deaf education in Argentina. The emerging bilingual-bicultural discourse (BBD), introduced in educational discourse in 1985, has questioned existing values, and struggled to impose new ones based on the socio-anthropological perspective. However, the analysis shows that oralist education discourse – the dominant discourse (DD) in the field – refuses to accept the bilingual-bicultural model of deaf education, and that there is a greater reluctance to recognize its bicultural component, presenting even more difficulties than the linguistic one. In Bourdieu’s terms, deaf education cannot change its habitus. I will thus argue that the discursive formations of deaf education are in fact quite similar across time, since the first law approved in 1895 to more recent laws and documents and even in teachers of the deaf representations. The neo-oralist discourse involves the naturalization of bilingual-bicultural discourse concepts that have been ambiguously appropriated by the DD in order to maintain the status quo, that is, oralism.