Deaf People in Higher Education: perceptions of deaf students, deaf students and hearing teachers about the educational process

Abstract

nlike different clinical approaches to deaf people, Deaf Studies understand them as socio-historical-cultural beings who construct their perspectives on the world through visual experiences. From this view, we developed a research that aimed to analyze the perceptions of a deaf student, a deaf student and two hearing teachers in the Pedagogy Degree course on the educational processes developed with deaf people. This study, carried out in a private higher education institution, which adopted the inclusive education policy, can be characterized as qualitative-descriptive in nature. Through interviews with participants and research participants, we were able to demarcate a closer relationship with their educational experiences, always relating them to the researched context. Taking content analysis as a reference, we organized the data into categories, subcategories and record units, emphasizing the convergences and divergences existing in the interview transcripts. The data revealed that the educational process of the deaf student and the deaf student was conditioned to the presence of a Libras interpreter, and, in their absence, to the gesture-visual strategies of some teachers. Therefore, we understand that a change in the epistemological conceptions in force in the educational field is necessary, in the direction of overcoming standardized views of the human being, establishing a linguistic policy that considers the inseparable relationship between language and culture and rediscussing the formation of teachers, taking inclusion as a phenomenon that involves the entire educational system.