A deaf child: childhood in the establishment of an educational space that occupies the difference

Abstract

This text aims to discuss childhood and deafness as inventions of our time which creates in children the survivor condition. The main objective of this paper allowed us to think about a pedagogical space (according to Masschelein and Simons, 2014), which engages in the deaf difference within early childhood education. Based on life stories of two deaf children and their representations in the educational space, one can realize that their life conditions are conducted and intrinsically linked to how they are made and designed according to the law and to the documents of the deaf community as well. The obsession with children's body deaf subject is based on the idea of normalization allocated to these subjects since it is considered that early education is critical to driving any possibility of their subjectivities: both deaf subjectivity and the listener subjectivity. And from these reflections, this paper assumes that perceive the child as a survivor of these borders, enables us to build pedagogical space in order to take into account the materiality that constitutes this subject from its triple power (movement, speech and thought) and capacity of its exhibition.