Teaching deaf culture in American Sign Language courses: Toward a critical pedagogy

Critical pedagogy and social justice education have gained increasing attention in recent years in many subject matters, and world language education has been no exception to this trend. There are a number of works dedicated to critical pedagogy in world language education. At the same time that such concerns have gained attention, another parallel development has been taking place: the increasing number of courses and programs in American Sign Language (ASL) that are being offered as foreign language options at both the secondary and tertiary levels. In this article, we discuss a curriculum development project to bring these two developments together. Specifically, we are interested in the creation of a curriculum for a beginning ASL course that both introduces students to ASL as a foreign language and which provides an introduction to the Deaf culture-and which does so through the lens of critical pedagogy and social justice education.