Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language

As scholars in Disability Studies argue, a person is disabled sometimes because of unnecessary barriers or too narrow assumptions regarding "normal." Here's an example of broader assumptions of "normalcy" than we typically see today.

In the late 1970s, Nora Ellen Groce researched the deaf community on Martha's Vineyard, a group that lived in the small town of Chilmark from approximately the end of the 17th century to the early-20th century, and probably in an isolated area of Kent, England, in the centuries before they came to New England.

Not everyone in Chilmark was deaf, but everyone knew deaf individuals either in their own family or in a neighbor's family. Whether or not they had an immediate family member who could not hear, everyone spoke sign language. Therefore, the people who were deaf were not "disabled" in that society in the way they would be ours. In fact, when surviving hearing community members were asked by the researcher if a particular deceased individual was disabled, they said no at first, and then remembered that the person had injured his hand permanently, so yes, he was disabled. But the elderly people Groce interviewed who were part of that Martha's Vineyard community did not categorize the community members who were deaf as "disabled." They were considered part of what was considered normal in that community. And because everyone spoke sign language, these individuals' could communicate equally well with everyone.

As Groce points out in her book, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard:

. . . the fact that a society could adjust to disabled individuals, rather than requiring them to do all the adjusting, as is the case in American society as a whole, raises important questions about the rights of the disabled and the responsibilities of those who are not. The Martha's Vineyard experience suggests strongly that the concept of a handicap is an arbitrary social category. And if it is a question of definition, rather than a universal given, perhaps it can be redefined, and many of the cultural preconceptions summarized in the term "handicapped," as it is now used, eliminated.

The most important lesson to be learned from Martha's Vineyard is that disabled people can be full and useful members of a community if the community makes an effort to include them. The society must be willing to change slightly to adapt to all. (108).

This story, and Groce's argument, has implications for writing pedagogy. If everyone in a class uses multi-modal invention and revision strategies (more talk, more sketching, more sculpting and moving and use of spatial concepts), the end-goal of a rhetorically-sophisticated, appropriately edited text might become both more challenging and more accessible to everyone.