How deaf people are "cured" and other lessons learned at MPGU

I recently spent a day at the Moscow State Pedagogical University trailing a group of hard-of-hearing students. This was my first view into higher education for the deaf in Russia. In Moscow there are two Universities where deaf and hard-of-hearing students study in significant numbers (I am lead to believe that deaf and hard-of-hearing students can in theory study at “any” University, but this doesn’t happen much from what I can tell). I arrived in time for pronunciation/articulation class. The group of students was mixed first and second-years. I was surprised by the overall tone of the classroom, which was informal and even absurd at times. The professor worked with the students individually, testing their ability to recognize and replicate certain sounds. This left the rest to sit around for over an hour with absolutely nothing to do (in this case, they talked to me in sign). The professor used the informal forms when addressing the students and tried to be relevant to the students- with spiky hair, some slang and also encouraging them to use sign with me, but failed to connect with them. As she berated one student for having a poor quality hearing aid, another student (in sign) parodied her and added that this teacher was so old she was going to die soon. I think this particular girl had a vendetta against this teacher who had taken a very strong stance opposing her new tongue piercing.
The sign/speech conflict was very obvious in this class. The majority (students) favored sign and using it freely to discuss non-academic matters while the authority figure (teacher) did not know sign and functioned as if speech were the currency of the class. The students made fun of her for speaking with a book covering her mouth (to test hearing and not lip reading). The exercises came from a book that was yellowed, long ago marked up with pencil and faded. While everyone seemed to agree on the necessity of this activity, no one seemed to get much out of it.
As the class proceeded, the route pronunciation drills were replaced by questions about hearing aids- the professor questioned each student at length about her hearing aid, often demanding to have the hearing aid removed for examination. She denounced every last one as inferior, incorrectly calibrated and made of the wrong sort of stuff. The students complained that each professor does the same thing, each representing a different hearing aid firm in Moscow looking for business, suggesting that this professor was no exception. The professor claiming that her firm really is the best using various qualifiers- such as we have the latest Western technology, etc. While I am well acquainted with the firm she was talking about and do believe it to offer the best hearing aid support in Moscow (half the staff is deaf, the only firm where this is true), it was clear the students were in a difficult place, trying to choose the best hearing aid service they could afford based on incomplete information- amounting to the reputation of the professor backing that particular firm. I was absolutely befuddled as to why they were discussing hearing aids for over an hour here in pronunciation class in the middle of the semester. It seemed this sort of discussion should happen on an individual basis early on with a neutral party with the students best interests at heart.
I got acquainted with some of the students during this time and was impressed by their camaraderie, always remarkable among Russian students but even more tangible in this group. They functioned as one body in a sort of struggle with the professor. Sasha, a friendly second-year student shocked me by telling how he is a card-carrying member of Spravidlevaya Rossia (Just Russia) and even volunteered once in their office. If you know anything about how apolitical Russians and particularly Russian youth are, you will appreciate this. This is the second openly politically active young Russian I have ever met. So linking political activism and deafness seems to have some basis after all!
The next class turned out to be audiogram interpretation (an audiogram is a graph-like diagram showing hearing level). This class was taught by an eccentric ex-nuclear physicist. During the fifteen-minute break before class he expounded his “research” into curing deafness. Yes, that’s really what he said. Once he read a non-scientific article about how cat meowing causes bones to heal and from this devised a treatment plan involving vibration therapy (weekly application of vibrator to external ear drum, progressing from 10 to 50 minutes) and electro-reflexology (some current applied to different parts of the body). I hardly knew whether to take him seriously until he actually took out his contraptions. The notion of “fixing” deafness is in itself offensive to my deaf-culture sensibilities not to mention the non-scientific nature of this therapy which has undergone no testing nor been published in any real journal. The man was deluded enough to believe he had invented that thing that all these generations of Soviet deaf-educators have been searching for- the thing that “saves” and “cures” deaf people- turning them into hearing people, in this case quite literally. The problem of scientific proof didn’t seem nearly as important. (I will say that he claimed to have observed improvement in hearing in the few people he had tried it on, but I was not convinced, and he has yet to send me his data). Despite teaching hard-of-hearing students for years, he lives in complete isolation from the deaf community and was quite shocked to learn that Deaf people (non-hearing with Deaf identity) were offended by this invention. He now knows how deaf people feel about this treatment, but cannot understand why, chalking it up to the utterly mysterious, unknowable “deaf” worldview- something hearing people can never hope to understand. Few people take part in his experiments- many of them are his students, which he seems to coerce into participation by giving them the use of a high quality hearing aid during the course of the “treatments”.
The class began without the interpreter, leaving me to act as interpreter (laughable situation, but as it turned out he was repeating the previous lecture, so the students already had it all written down). For most of the lecture the teacher faced the chalkboard and drew graphs of audiograms while speaking. The mirror that I’d been told would hang in the front of the classroom to aid in lip-reading was absent. The students sat spread around the front of the room conversing in sign language (RSL without articulation) about various things (mostly figuring out who I was and what they were going to do that weekend) not related to the class. After a bit the interpreter arrived. She interpreted not into RSL, but KSL with articulation- a version of Russian sign language invented by hearing people which maps directly onto spoken/written Russian. I never noticed more than one student looking at her at a time, strangely they all prefer to look at the professor despite obviously not being able to understand him. The topic of this class led right back to the hearing aid conundrum, which once again engaged the students. This professor was eager to raise the stakes in the hearing aid superiority contest, claiming his hearing aids would allow them to listen to music. It was actually physically painful for me to watch the hopeful expressions in the students faces at the prospect of hearing music for the first time. The professor seemed to have no doubts in his ability to deliver on this. He claims that he is creating a group of specialists who will know how to demand better hearing aids from the government. Of course, he says, sign is a sort of supplementary language, but not able to express all ideas. His obtuseness towards deaf culture became obvious when he stood in the middle of the classroom oblivious to the fact that he was standing in the middle of a sign conversation (between a student and an interpreter) who had to execute various body contortions to continue their conversation.
After many interruptions, this class managed to finally end and I chat with two hard-of-hearing second year guys (one being Sasha, repeat from pronunciation class). They are involved in an organization for hard-of-hearing children, building self-esteem through sports and other activities. This is the first evidence of something like grass-roots hard-of-hearing community I’ve seen among the young. More research will follow.
I left feeling very alien. It seemed I had walked along the border between hearing and non-hearing and found it to be an almost impenetrable wall of misunderstanding. I would say the atmosphere in this University “hyper-deaf-conscious”, in fact thinking about anything except being deaf seemed impossible. For three hours my hard-of-hearing alter-ego had been told that being unable to hear was the most important thing in the world and that my number one priority must be to somehow restore my hearing. This was to be done most effectively by buying a better hearing aid- but I was told conflicting information about which was the best to buy and at any rate I didn’t have the money for it. I like to think their other classes have some other content, because I think a few months of this would drive me hopelessly insane.