A Hands-On Method: Deaf Education in France

I love learning. I love getting my hands on new information, meeting new people, and experiencing completely different stories. I absolutely, without a doubt, love to learn.

But I absolutely hate school.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find that even after eating crepes in front of the Eiffel tower, seeing the Mona Lisa, and walking through the luxury that is Versailles, the days we visited schools was my favorite part of our time abroad. 

I know. I'm just as confused as you are.

We had the opportunity to be involved in classes both on an elementary and middle school level, so children anywhere from the ages of six to fourteen. Each experience was different, but enriching because of the kids we got to meet and the education we got to experience.

Back to the Basics: Elementary School

The elementary school classrooms we got to observe were at the Ecole Elémentaire Condorcet, a bilingual elementary school in Paris. The school was not a Deaf school specifically, it simply had a program for Deaf students attending the school that allowed them to learn LSF in a completely Deaf classroom, so we met many hearing students that attended the school but knew some sign language, to our surprise. They all asked if we were Deaf, and upon finding out that we were hearing students from America, the sign "America" made its way through the student body, hearing and Deaf alike. They followed us around the schoolyard, running and hiding if we happened to look their way (which, to be fair, is how I'd react to Americans too). 

Once we made it into the classroom, we were tasked with activities meant to teach the students some of the basics of ASL: numbers, letters, colors, et cetera. They all learned incredibly fast and were eager to point out similarities and differences between ASL and LSF. My personal favorite was when we demonstrated the number "thirteen" in ASL, to which one of the students excitedly gasped and exclaimed "Ca va!", a similarity we had never noticed before. We all got a good laugh out of that. They were also all in a mad dash to sign their names to us, as well as the names of their best friends, their dogs, their parents, their brothers, their teachers... you get the gist.

What was amazing to me was that no two kids were the same: the class had just as many kids with cochlear implants or hearing aids as they did without. Some were verbal, some weren't. What they all had in common, however, was that they were all intelligent, happy, and had a solid group of friends in a safe and educational environment, something that can, unfortunately, be rare for a Deaf child to find in a mainstream school such as this one. This classroom followed the same approaches to learning as any mainstream class would: moving from basic math, grammar, and topics to gradually more difficult conversations. The only thing that was different was their use of LSF as opposed to spoken French. 

Stuck in the Middle: Middle School

If there's anything I learned while abroad, it's that middle schoolers are international cultural phenomena. They're all very energetic and a little weird, but in an endearing way. They all play the same games (the minute we met them they started trying to play the circle game with us) and the boys were just as loud and rambunctious as I remember, with the girls serving as a mature force to counterbalance them.

We had the opportunity to visit and tour the old city of Lyon with these students. We got an incredible tour, entirely in ASL (which they had been learning) and got to ask and answer plenty of questions regarding everything from American culture, to ASL versus LSF, to whether or not one of our classmates had a boyfriend (she did). 

Photo of Lyon  I took during our very professionally led tour

We then got to visit their classrooms, which were  bilingual-bicultural classrooms in a mainstream school, so all of their classes were entirely in LSF, just like the elementary school we had previously visited. We were each assigned different classes, and I ended up attending a LSF class where students reviewed classifiers, which is, as everyone knows, the most fun aspect of any signed language. 

I hate classifiers, in case you couldn't tell.

But the class was fun, and much like my own at university. They discussed when and were certain classifiers were meant to be used, then the students were shown a comic of a man being pulled over by the police. They were tasked to record a video of themselves retelling the comic using LSF and the proper classifiers. It felt so much like we were in one of my classes that I experienced a brief panic that I had forgotten my laptop.

As I said, despite all of the monuments and incredible locations we had visited, this was my favorite experience of the trip. Seeing how much these students thrived in such an enriching environment made me reflect on how far France had come with their treatment of Deaf individuals, though they have a long way to go. It was also funny to see how similar they were to American students, all the way down to hating school lunches and playing nose-goes to decide who refills their water pitcher. Overall, it was an incredibly enriching experience I'll never forget.