Bimodal-Bilingual Teacher Training in Sweden

Abstract:In 1981, Sweden was the first country in the world to entitle deaf pupils to a bimodal-bilingual education. However, drawing from interviews with key past Stockholm teacher trainers and on our own efforts to update teacher training, we note that sign-bilingual teacher training in Sweden has been ad hoc to this day. The interviewees' accounts highlight that deaf education is essentially about language access, that sign-bilingualism is core to the educational inclusion of all deaf pupils, and that only audism stands in the way of this. We argue against the Swedish national policy presumption of special need, pointing out that deaf pupils have an inalienable entitlement to sign language in much the same way that the right to speak Swedish is an inalienable part of being Swedish and not a need that only some Swedish people have. This makes national recognition of sign language a necessary precondition to deaf pupils' full educational inclusion. Policy should then likewise guarantee the sign-bilingual competence of teachers seeking to work with deaf pupils, this being a matter that necessarily conjoins educational and language (minority) rights as the two flipsides of one single coin.