This study investigates the cultural and educational ideas of the French deaf poet-teacher Pierre Pélissier (1814-1863) who was an instructor at the Paris Deaf Institute from the early 1840s until his death in 1863. As a young man, Pélissier became interested in composing poetry and through his verse, captured many of the social frustrations facing deaf people who had to manage in a hearing world. Once he became a teacher, Pélissier devoted his energies to developing the best methods to educate deaf youth. In the mid-nineteenth-century, he found himself defending natural sign language against proponents of spoken language. Pélissier responded with a his own book (published in 1856) on how sign language could be used in the French primary schools to educate deaf children. He advocated a type of bilingual educational environment for primary schools that relied on hearing and deaf students using the manual alphabet and sign language in a shared classroom setting. Pélissier's analysis of sign language as a pedagogical method clearly challenged the prevailing social view that deaf teachers were somehow less capable educators of deaf children than those who were hearing.
