A New Phenomenon at Gallaudet University Urged!

"I hemahema ia haumana, ili ka'ahewa I ke kumu"

in Hawai'ian meaning

"If the pupil is unskilled, the errors reflect on the teacher."

American Sign Language (ASL) and English bilingualism at Gallaudet University is going to be phenomenal. The philosophical discipline of phenomology began in the early 1900 with Edmund Husserl who articulated that phenomology would turn toward "the things themselves," toward the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy. It wouldn't seek to explain the world, but to describe how the world makes itself evident to awareness. It is about the way things comes to our sensorial experience as Deaf people being bilingual in ASL and English.

I believe rather firmly that Husserl's description of phenomology as a rigorous "science of experience" would establish Gallaudet University at last upon a firm academic footing--not, perhaps, as solid as the fixed and finished "mission" upon which those students pretend to communicate in both languages, but the only basis possible for a knowledge that necessarily emerges from our bilingual experience of the world around us.

Like our hearing counterparts, we the Deaf people do think subjectively. However, our thoughts and ideas could be objectively translated into language that is right next to our heart, ASL. For us to translate these thoughts and ideas into a written form of English, we need first to become aware of sounds, to understand sounds of English words sewn together to make grammatically and rhythmically coherent sentences, which is no easy feat. And, if academic bilingualism exists, it would be phenomenal at Gallaudet University.

Then comes a hard but important question: How does our subjective experience enable us to recognize the reality of other selves, other experiencing beings, other language, namely English? According to Husserl, there exists an inexcapable affinity between these other bodies and our own bodies. The gestures and expressions of these other bodies can be observed from within our individual selves. Husserl called it "intersubjectivity."

I subscribe to Husserl's notion of intersubjectivity because if suggests a remarkable new interpretation of our objective world. The conventional contrast between subjective and objective realities--deaf world versus hearing world--can be reframed as a contrast within the subjective field of experience itself. The real world in which we all find ourselves, then is not a fixed and finished "datum" from which all subject matters could be examined, but is rather an intertwined matrix of bilingual experiences, a coolective field of experienced lived in both Deaf and hearing world.

The mutual inscription of hearing people in my experience, for example, effects the interweaving of my personal phenomenon into a ever-shifting reality. And yet, as I know from my everyday experience, the phenomenal world seems stable and solid; I am able to count on it in so many ways, and I am even able to use both ASL and written English. Besidee that which I directly see of either ASL or written English, I know or intuit that there are also those features of ASL or English that are visible to the other perceivers who see me or read my writing.

When I was in Holland where I was born and raised for over 10 years, my parents told me about Gallaudet University (then Gallaudet College). It has since become the world of my immediately lived experience, as I live it...an MSSD graduate, a Preparatory class president, a Student Body Government president, a 1983 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, and now an alumnus. Gallaudet University is the world that I count on without necesarily paying attention. It is always there when I begin to reflect or philosophize.

Gallaudet University is not a private, but a collective, phenomenon--the real world in which Deaf people are bilingual in ASL and English. It was Husserl's genius that enables me to philosophize that Gallaudet University is phenomenal for different languages and cultures to co-exist through ASL-English intersubjectivity.

Morale: Someone needs to inform James Sorenson that people do not actually come to Gallaudet University for hearing tests and hearing aid checks.

--Sent from my T-Mobile Sidekick®