The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from Thomas kuhn it is an analysis on the history of science. Its publication meant the popularization of the term paradigm.
The answers that Kuhn provides in his book were a great change, as the prevailing formalist model was challenged by Kuhn's historicist approach, according to which, science develops following certain phases.
For Kuhn, a scientific revolution is an episode of non-cumulative development in which an old paradigm is replaced by a new one that is incompatible with it. It is at this point where we are interested in focusing on deaf education in our country.
According to Kuhn, different stages must be distinguished:
Pre-Scientific Stage: There are certain problems to be solved. However, there is still no consensus.
Achievement Stage: Someone in the community makes a discovery that is particularly successful in solving unsolved problems.
Conversion Stage: The community is convinced of the achievement, abandons the previous position and "converts" to the new framework.
Normal Science Stage: Once the new paradigm is adopted, no one will question it in the community.
Stage of the First Anomalies
Crisis Stage
Emergency Stage
New Stage of Achievement
New Conversion Stage
New Stage of Normal Science
Next, we will make a brief review of the development of deaf education in our country through history taking into account the stages of the Kuhnian model.
It is believed that the beginning of a true educational policy for the Argentine deaf occurred in 1882 with the International Pedagogical Congress where the organization of special education begins to take shape in Argentina and Latin America.
The Dr. Jose Terry writes a work on the deaf-mute, his instruction and his education, which is read in the Congress of 1882 and as a result of this the subject arouses interest.
With his work, Terry is the first to impose an idea on the methodology to be used with what he had just observed and appreciated in Italian institutes.
In 1886, the National Institute for the Deaf and Dumb In Buenos Aires city. Luis Molfino inaugurates the Normal school attached to the Institute, where the first Argentine teachers in the specialty begin to be trained.
Although from 1894, the Institute began to be directed by an Argentine, the influence of Italian educators remains strongly linked to the education of the deaf in our country. Education that only admits from its beginnings in the common and compulsory school a single methodological alternative: oralism.
Now, returning to Kuhn, we must point out that in his book he develops his proposal in relation to the physical and chemical sciences, and very little to the social sciences. However, we want to highlight the importance of this historicist approach since it allows us to analyze the development of any discipline in the light of the stages already explained..
In accordance with the past, we will begin by saying that there was a specific problem regarding the methodology to be used in the training of the deaf and that the community did not yet present a consensus. Then, a certain person, José Terry, decides to write about the problem and provides a possible solution to the problem. The community "converts" and adopts that "paradigm" (oralism). This paradigm becomes the only way to approach the problem.
In the long history of deaf education, the emphasis has always been on teaching Spanish. The use of sign language was totally prohibited and punished. Finally, children do not adequately handle either of the two languages, which affects their cognitive development.
However, and given that paradigms lose validity historically, Kuhn explains that when anomalies are multiplied to the point that they can no longer be ignored, the paradigm becomes useless so that a new form of validity becomes necessary..
With the discovery of sign languages In the 1960s, certain linguistic concepts restricted to oral languages were redefined by recognizing that the languages used by deaf communities were natural languages transmitted in a non-oral modality.
The Argentine Sign Language It is the natural language of the deaf community in our country. However, Spanish is a necessary language for the deaf due to the prestigious place it occupies in society, thus becoming their second language..
It should be noted that the Argentine Sign Language is not an arbitrarily invented system, but rather a natural language resulting from the history of a given community. Deaf people develop their own cultural parameters, thus becoming a linguistic minority.
The deaf person is, then, a necessarily bilingual person who recognizes that Spanish allows him to exchange with the community in which he is inserted but at the same time he needs his natural language to socialize as a full person. Since the 1960s, deaf people have fought in the world for the recognition of their languages and their rights. Sign Language becomes the target language and the source language in situations of linguistic contact between hearing and deaf people.
Today the deaf community has more than 2 million people according to a survey carried out by the UNLP and it is believed that an average of 10 deaf people are born in Argentina per day.
In this second part of the development of deaf education we can observe the stage of anomalies and crises; Oralism can no longer give an answer to this new conception of the deaf child, by recognizing LSA as the natural language of the deaf, and the results obtained up to that moment are not favorable either. Debates on the legitimacy of the LSA begin.
Finally, what happened in stage two is repeated, but now in a different historical context. The community of educators and pedagogues "are converting" to the new paradigm with the arrival of the LSA. Consensus is reached and a new “paradigm” is established, the bilingualism.
This new approach consists of a bilingual-bicultural education that implies the use of two languages: Argentine Sign Language / Spanish and two cultures: deaf and hearing teachers. This new proposal implies a passage from the clinical to the pedagogical in which not only the methods are modified but is rather a restructuring of the way in which the deaf is conceived today.
To conclude, we will begin by asking ourselves: is the current educational paradigm about bilingualism or about “pseudo” bilingualism? The set of recorded changes does not appear to be accompanied by significant changes in the training programs for hearing teachers. Teachers must be trained in the use of sign language during the career, both in a technical and cultural domain.
In practice, we can observe how teachers and professors turn to private institutions to become competent in the use of the LSA, since in the career they have very little training in this regard. On the other hand, taking into account the concept of "zone of proximal development" of Vygotsky and their contributions to learning in deaf children, we know that sharing a language enables the other (peer or adult) to really act in that zone of proximal development and to offer deaf students a scaffolding where they can exercise their cognitive functions more and more. autonomous.
It is not a question of changing the language and who teaches, but of guaranteeing understanding. A deaf adult would immediately notice when a student does not understand and would use extreme resources to achieve a full understanding of what is taught. So, we ask ourselves: is accepting deaf adults as peers of hearing teachers in the classroom becoming a utopia? Without this requirement, it is difficult to imagine a full future of Bilingual-Bicultural schools in our country.
Finally, returning to the Kuhn model, we can conclude that Kuhn began his training by focusing on the history of science. Thanks to this study, he discovered that science is also a historical product, hence the word "revolution" in his work, a typically historiographic and social concept, hence the concept of paradigm. Kuhn tries to break with that classic image of science that conceives it as one that treasures the truth.
Now we only have to ask ourselves: Are the social sciences really still in a pre-science stage as postulated by Kuhn himself in his book?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GAETA, R and GENTILE, N. (1999). Thomas Kuhn: from paradigms to theory evolutionist. Bs. As: Eudeba.
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KUHN, THOMAS S. (1989). What are scientific revolutions ?, and other essays,
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