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Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The Rebirth of a Legacy
Gallaudet University Press Brings Back the
Classic Narrative on Deaf American History
Author Jack R. Gannon describes the impetus for his original groundbreaking
volume Deaf
Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America, stating, “The seed for
this book was planted on a train ride from Washington, D.C., to West Trenton,
New Jersey, in the winter of 1977. Gary Olsen and I were on our way to present a
National Association of the Deaf and Gallaudet College-sponsored leadership
training program for deaf adults at the Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf
in West Trenton. Gary was at that time chairman of the NAD Centennial Committee,
and he was in the process of making plans for that forthcoming event. Among his
many ideas, he said, he wanted a book about deaf America to record that century,
and he was looking for someone to write it.”
Originally
published in 1981, Deaf Heritage, the seventh volume in the
Gallaudet Classics
in Deaf Studies series, is now back in print. This
17-chapter montage
of artifacts and information forms an utterly fascinating record from the early
19th century to the time it was published, making it the first story of
the Deaf American experience from a Deaf perspective. Mervin D. Garretson,
Special Assistant to the President of Gallaudet College in 1981 and past
president of NAD,
commented at that
time: “It is hoped that Deaf Heritage is but a beginning of a
continuing compilation and closer examination of the impact of deafness on
persons, their achievements, and their traditions. This valuable chronicle
should prove helpful as a text in courses on deaf culture, in
orientation-to-deafness seminars, in teacher and counselor preparation programs,
as a reference source, and simply as interesting literature.”
Read more in Gannon’s
new preface
to this 2012 edition, and receive
20% off the regular price by typing “JUN2012”
in the box labeled “use promo code” next to the checkout button. You may also
order by mail.
 “Deaf
Americans have identified healthcare as the most difficult setting in which to
obtain a qualified interpreter,” observes a reviewer in a recent issue of
Reference & Research Book News, “and this volume is part of an accelerated
effort to increase the number and quality of healthcare interpreters.
Approaching from the direction of health care, language, or education,
contributors explore such topics as using authentic interactions in discourse
training for healthcare interpreters, using demand control schema to structure
experimental learning, online possibilities for healthcare interpreting
education, educating interpreters as medical specialists with Deaf health
professionals, contributions of the National Council on Interpreting in Health
Care to professionalizing healthcare interpreting between spoken languages, and
a European perspective.”
Read more about this new volume, the fifth in the
Interpreter
Education series, in the editors’
introduction, and
order In Our Hands: Educating Healthcare Interpreters
online
or by
mail.
 Primary
Movement in Sign Languages: A Study of Six Languages was also noted
by Reference & Research Book News: “[Donna Jo] Napoli, Nicholas Gaw,
and Mark Mai began investigating whether it was possible to identify sign languages
by their prosody, and if so, whether such identification could be used to typologize
sign languages. Having settled on direction of movement as the one prosodic factor
to track, they found that it was indeed possible. Looking further they found that
the sign languages — originally five in the study — formed different groups
according to different criteria. Based on their findings, they distinguish
between origin-bound languages — which remain in the geographical region of the
sign language they evolved from — and diaspora languages, that have moved away
and interacted with indigenous sign languages in their new range.” You can read
more in the
introduction.
Order your copy of Primary Movement in Sign Languages
online
or by mail.
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