Estranhos no ninho: isolamento comunicacional de discentes surdos/surda em escolas de Mamanguape à luz dos estudos culturais

Abstract

Current inclusive education policies for deaf people standardize actions whose dominant parameter is that of hearing people, submitting deaf subjects to a communicational and cultural isolation, whose expression consists of the predominant or exclusive oral communication, admitting Libras as an exception. It is assigned to deaf subjects a passive place, marginal, ―strangers in the nest‖ of the classroom, making unworkable the identities, cultures and language of deaf people, necessary to their effective inclusion in regular school. This communicational isolation is also cultural, involving families and society, which generally treat deafness as deficiency. Deprived of socio-cultural environment for learning and use of Libras, at school deaf people are kept on the periphery of social and pedagogical interactions necessary for human and citizen formation. Anchored in the perspectives of Cultural Studies and Deaf Studies, I studied this communicational isolation of three deaf boy students and a deaf girl student in their interactions with hearing people, in respective four classes of regular public schools from Mamanguape-PB. I questioned: how were the interactions between deaf students and hearing people who use oral tradition for communication in those schools? The general objective was to analyze the interactions between deaf and hearing students who constitute the socio-educational surrounding environment (family, teachers, colleagues) of these subjects in Mamanguape / PB. I aimed specifically: to evaluate the educational trajectories experienced by deaf students in their families and initial school experiences according to Libras learning in the first six years of life; to examine the interactions between deaf students and their respective teachers during pedagogical activities in the classroom in a trimester; to appreciate the socio communicational interactions in the dynamics of coexistence between deaf and hearing partners in class for a trimester. I used qualitative methodology, from participative nature, using a semi-structured interview, observation with and without my intervention (through experiences conducted by myself with students). The generated data were interpreted by content analysis, with which I problematized the inclusive practices adopted by the municipality in these schools, introducing deaf students as people with their own cultures and identities, marked by the cultural artefact of visual experience, whose difference is primarily labeled by the hearing culture as a disability. I highlighted the use of the sign language as a fundamental factor that contributes to an effective inclusion in the school context, as it is essential for equitable communication relations between deaf students and hearing people, in addition to socio-cognitive development and the valorization of other aspects of the deaf cultural identity condition. The conclusions leaded to realize there was a communicational isolation enforced on three deaf boys and the deaf girl in the school, reproducing an oral culture that does not recognize or value viso-gesture as a legitimate expression of deaf people, in order to be assumed by the hearing people at school. Without the use of Libras, the Deaf students are left at the school culture‘s margin, supported by oral practices. Therefore, the inclusive education practices of the municipal network studied here promote the communicational isolation and maintain, in effect, the exclusion of deaf subjects and their culture, despite isolated initiatives, which are mainly associated with the presence of interpreter in the classroom.