Education as a Path: For an Active, Creative, and Inventive Mastership in Deaf Education

ABSTRACT

This article aims to draw a reflection on learning and on the relationship with the schoolmaster in classrooms in which deaf students learn through interpretation processes, i.e., with the presence of educational interpreters. The article develops from theoretical contributions of French philosophy aligned with issues posed in the field of education, more specifically on the deaf education within inclusive spaces. School scenes will be drawn as articulating components of the theory; hence, analyses were developed throughout the entire textual production. Two literary works, The ignorant schoolmaster by Jacques Rancière and The inventive schoolmaster by Walter Kohan, were presented to illustrate figures of teachers who beget creative encounters with their students, in which they learn, teach, create, and build themselves. These two mastership experiments announced, aligned with the hybrid position the educational interpreter occupies in the school, were used as space for dialogue to rethink the educational process and the learning as being part of the singularity.

KEYWORDS:
Deaf Education; Pedagogical relationship; Educational interpretation

RESUMO

O presente artigo objetiva trazer uma reflexão sobre o aprender e a relação com o mestre em salas de aulas em que alunos surdos aprendem por processos de interpretação, ou seja, com a presença de intérpretes educacionais. O artigo se desenvolve a partir de aportes teóricos da filosofia francesa alinhados a questões postas sobre o campo da educação, mais especificamente na educação de surdos em espaços inclusivos. As cenas escolares serão trazidas como componentes articuladores da teoria, dessa forma, as análises foram desenvolvidas ao longo de toda a produção textual. Duas obras literárias, O mestre ignorante de Jacques Rancière e O mestre inventor de Walter Kohan, foram apresentadas como forma de ilustrar figuras de mestres que alçam produzir encontros criativos com seus alunos, nos quais aprendem, ensinam, criam e constroem-se. Esses dois experimentos de mestrias anunciados, alinhados ao lugar híbrido que o intérprete educacional ocupa na escola, foram usados como espaço de diálogo para repensar o processo educacional, e o aprender como sendo da ordem da singularidade.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Educação de surdos; Relação pedagógica; Interpretação educacional

Introduction

This study aims to theoretically discuss education as a relational act between subjects, pieces of knowledge, and languages. Our reflection specifically focuses on actions taken in the deaf education, with the presence of Translators and Interpreters of Educational Sign Language (TIESL).¹ In this article, it is relevant to present a view of the educational act as an action that occurs “along the path,” in the encounters of skills, desires, and statements between subjects. Therefore, the “between” is the mobilizing space of learning. The procedural relationship between subjects and learning shows such complexity in classrooms at all levels of education, especially in spaces where instruction is mediated by the TIESL. We emphasize that the performance of interpreters in the field of education has been much studied, but often erasing the subjective marks of the presence of these other actors in the process, their interferences, and pedagogical practices. Our hypothesis is that the complexity of the presence of educational interpreters and the paradoxes generated by this (non)place are due to the inclusion of deaf people in a school environment where instruction is not thought in sign language, sometimes promoting the erasure of the deaf difference and of the TIESL’s performance specificity itself (MARTINS, 2006). In addition, the erasure of the interpreter as a pedagogical actor may be due to the difficulty in understanding the place of interpreters in the educational process (if they act more in the mediation between languages or in the joint construction of teaching). The undefined role of interpreters leads to a distrust in the fields of knowledge and a reflection on their practice: whether such action should be subsumed under education or translation studies. Once again, we argue in favor of the interrelation between these two spaces, since their action occurs in thebetween-place and, therefore, it seems appropriate to think about joining these two fields of knowledge.

In making such reflections, we ask ourselves: How will translators and interpreters of educational sign language produce the speech of the other in their bodies without creating a bond with the deaf student? What kind of teaching does inclusive education produce by instrumentalizing learning in the objectification of the TIESL’s body? Numerous issues have been brought to the forefront of reflection when thinking about the function of the educational translator and interpreter (LACERDA, 2009; MARTINS, 2007, 2013; SANTOS, 2014; ALBRES, 2015): the role this professional plays in the classroom, the ethical care about their work and decision-making, the relationship with conducting teachers, the ways to conduct activities, whether they should be more or less close to the deaf student, whether or not the teaching should have intervention of this professional, among many other concerns present in analyses from other studies. However, it is noteworthy that the inclusive logic on which the school system is currently founded promotes certain paradoxes that are inevitable when thinking about the deaf education in this system, which is operated by the mediation of interpreters and (as mentioned above) not by direct teaching to the deaf student in his own language. When thinking about teaching as a relational act, as stated in this article, it is impossible to deny the influence that the TIESL produces on the pedagogical actions in the yearning to adapt teaching practices aimed at the hearing public to deaf students. This adequacy in teaching, from the listener logic to the deaf perspective, promoted by educational interpreters, is often posed as not being a characteristic or function of the TIESL activity. However, we understand that such practices may appear as resistive attempts in the search of more assertive and less hostile ways of promoting inclusion to deaf students who experience (or should experience) teaching through sign language. This happens because the educational interpreter accompanies the deaf student daily, thus establishing affective bonds with them (MARTINS, 2008; 2013).

Faced with this controversy and supported by the perspective of teaching as an encounter between signs (DELEUZE, 2008),² as well as education as a space produced in the movement, in the encounter between bodies-subjects, this text was devised with the aim of drawing reflections on the deaf education produced by the presence of the TIESL, from the philosophical lens of Gilles Deleuze. The task is thinking of difference as a mobilizer of learning in the subjects and with it, daily changes: minor changes that can only be observed when we consider the micro-movements and the speeches of subjects (the operationalized processes) in their paths. To do so, we will consider two works, namely: The ignorant schoolmaster, by Jacques Rancière, and The inventive schoolmaster, by Walter Omar Kohan, linked, as mentioned, to Gilles Deleuze’s concepts in Proust and the Signs (2008) and Sílvio Gallo’s studies (2008, 2011, 2012) in articles and works that deepen themes on education for multiplicity, around a philosophy based on difference.

The concept of mastership is deepened as a contribution to the thinking of joint learning processes, applying it to classrooms with deaf students. Mastership is here understood as a practice of conducting, uttered in the course of learning. Some events mentioned within the text are used as input to think the proposed theory and refer to the daily life of a bilingual and inclusive city school, named as a model school for the deaf, in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, at middle school level, with the presence of educational interpreters. The analyses, therefore, is presented throughout the paper rather than in a single section. This writing proposal is aligned with the theory proposed by the philosophies of difference, which tries to produce fractures in the models and even in the way of doing research, which are at times standardized in single models.

Throughout the article, we discuss the effect ofinclusion as a dangerous ideology that can lead to the logic of teaching by sameness and we point to some daily political resistance against the hegemonic perspective of deaf education proposed by erasing differences. Overall, the inclusion of deaf people has been managed for the massification of an educational system intended for a hearing public. The deaf resistance movement follows toward the rupture of this model and the re-signification of what actually inclusive practices are (MARTINS, 2008). For this reason, this text shares, through a specific scene, events and experiences observed in a research study conducted in a municipal and inclusive public school with a bilingual education project at middle school level, through the presence of educational interpreters.³ From the observations made and due to the curricular changes verified, we affirm that this school has tried to build a different form of education for deaf people with the actual presence of sign language, not as a mere school prop. It is a space that tries to produce a minor action which, in a revolutionary way, has operated, from within the inclusive perspective, a different teaching - or a heterotopia, if we activate the Foucauldian concept -, such as the conduction and construction, in the same space, of new, unknown spaces. Foucault brings the figure of the boat as an allegory for a concept he coined as heterotopia:

Think of the ship: it is a floating part of space, a placeless place, that lives by itself, closed in on itself and at the same time poised in the infinite ocean, and yet, from port to port, tack by tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies, looking for the most precious things hidden in their gardens. Then you will understand why it has been not only and obviously the main means of economic growth (which I do not intend to go into here), but at the same time the greatest reserve of imagination for our civilization from the sixteenth century down to the present day. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence (1997, p.336).⁴

The ship is at sea, but it is not the sea; it produces other places by being part of a space that seems to be a continuity. Through trips and stops, the ship enables the perception of other landscapes, produces other affections, constructs other senses, and creates other spaces. This allegory of the ship touches on two issues: what the presence of the deaf causes in a regular school and what the presence of a TIESL produces in the encounter with the signs of the Portuguese language, re-signifying them into sign language. The utterances translated by a TIESL are directed to the deaf student, who receives them from their visual meanings and experiences, very different from the perspectives of hearing students, whose world experiences are pervaded by the sound relation - and who also learn and feel teaching through and with sonority. The purpose of the text is to present the activation of resistance in the inclusion of deaf people, considering it “[...] a way of acting upon possible actions” that operate in the field of experiences, inscribing behaviors into the subjects (FOUCAULT, 1983, p.220).⁵ These actions occur as silent strategies that alter the formatted school system, producing a deaf education in which the deaf singularity prevails.⁶ Therefore, we will report the actions offered in this school and how the presence of a TIESL, with countless caveats, has been favorable for the production of knowledge in the school, from the 6th grade on, in the constructive and inventive partnership with the conducting teachers.

1 Theoretical Assumptions about the Concept of Active, Creative, and Inventive Mastership

1.1 Creation in the Philosophies of Difference: A Look at Learning with Signs

The philosophies of difference will be defined here as “[…] thinking that traverses the field of variations” (BRITTO; GALLO, 2016, p.11).⁷ In contemporary French philosophy, authors such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida focused their work on the proliferation of thinking for difference: in the multiplicity, in other spaces (or heterotopia, as we have seen with Foucault), in singularity, in deconstruction as differentiating processes. In this sense, we point to the philosophies of difference, which some of these writers have espoused as a war machine against sameness, as the space of a nomadism in thought and actions.⁸ It is worth emphasizing Deleuze and Guattari’s statement (1994)⁹ regarding the creative act in philosophy.The authors state that three “powers of thought” produce creation: science, philosophy, and art. The first contributes to the creation of truths centered on analytic functions, the second in the creation of concepts that trigger thought, and the third in the creation of perceptions, sensations, and affections. They are, therefore, different creative spaces. Thus, we will use philosophical concepts as tools that create places, or plateaus, for a given production. “First, every concept relates back to other concepts, not only in its history but in its becoming or its present connections” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1994, p.19) and, being “created, are never created from nothing” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1994, p.19).¹⁰ Still on the conceptual framework, they affirm that

[P] philosophy presents three elements, each of which fits with the other two but must be considered for itself: the prephilosophical plane it must lay out (immanence), the persona or personae it must invent and bring to life (insistence), and the philosophical concepts it must create. Laying out, inventing, and creating constitute the philosophical trinity (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1994, pp.6-77).¹¹

For this study, we will use two basic concepts, which will guide the analysis of inclusive classrooms with the presence of deaf students and educational interpreters: 1) minor education, and 2) learning by signs. Minor education appears in studies by Gallo (2008), from reflections on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2003)¹² and Deleuze (1998).¹³ Deleuze (1998)¹⁴ argues that minor language is a catalyst for differences, variations in the larger language and, therefore, a space of resistance for producing another art. Gallo (2008; 2016) develops his study in this same vein, arguing that minor experiences can be produced in the field of education.

The minor concept is a collective creation of Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s philosophy. It is a kind of “adjective-concept,” in so far as it often qualifies a field of production. It first appeared in their work about Kafka, published in 1975. Even the title of the book, Kafka - for a minor literature, was marked in grand style. [...] a minor literature is different from a larger literature. The latter takes language as a canon and explores it according to its established possibilities; the former makes the tongue split, introduces differences, lines of escape; it makes one “stutter” (DELEUZE, 1997) the words (GALLO, 2016, pp.23-24; emphasis added by the author).¹⁵

Such perspective is paramount for studies that regard the school as a space to be investigated and invested in, especially for the education of minorities such as the deaf, who constitute a minority group in terms of power and political effect in comparison with hegemonic groups.¹⁶ However, by bringing the “minor” as a creative power, Deleuze (1998) and Deleuze and Guattari (2003) offer a tool that enables continuous actions. A minor education is an education on and for differences, without a model, without a single form. It is, therefore, an education through experience and an educational process that emphasizes the students’ unique experiences, since there is where learning happens.

A minor education is a trench (or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a burrow, the result of an animal-becoming), a space of resistance, not a program. It is becoming adrift, like boats in unknown waters. And in the repetition of these experiences, it is creating the different […] juxtaposing, in the same space, experience, adventure, politics as the emergence of the unusual in relationships (GALLO, 2016, p.43; emphasis added by the author).¹⁷

As to signs and their role in the learning processes, it is important to point out that teaching is done through productions and encounters between subjects and bodies (enunciations, language, art, among others). For Deleuze (2008),¹⁸ the concept of signs is directly linked to the Nietzschean notion of force and violence because it is precisely this new other that appears abruptly in the subject. And its strangeness (due to the novelty produced) forces the being to move towards thought and discoveries. Therefore, it produces a displacement and activates the subject for new encounters. As Roberto Machado pointed out:

It is, as Deleuze affirms, always an encounter: we encounter with signs that baffle us, that take us away and put us in the work of interpretation; for this very reason, it is not possible to control this development by a method. On the contrary, as we will see, the violent experience of signs requires no method, but rather a learning process, which will finally lead to the recognition, from the final artistic interpretation, of the functioning of a new image of thought (MACHADO, 2009, p.194; emphasis added by the author).¹⁹

It was in his work on Proust that Deleuze (2008)²⁰ pointed out the issue of the encounter with the signs as being the basis of any and all learning; he then resumed this topic in Difference and Repetition (2001).²¹ We only learn from and in these encounters, because signs are what affect us: “Sign is always the sign of a body; in fact, more than that, it is itself a body, a force or a power to affect” (MACHADO, 2009, p.195).²²The affection produced by the sign removes us from the commonplace, from sameness, and throws us into an unsuspected adventure, mobilizing in us forces of thought which, by putting us in relation with these other bodies, produce the passage from “not-knowing to knowing,” which is how Deleuze (2001) characterizes the act of learning: “[...] the living passage from one to the other” (p.166).²³

One cannot know how a sign affects each subject; for this reason, Deleuze (2001,²⁴ 2008)²⁵ states that there are no methods for learning. What presides over learning is the event of encounter, and events are governed by chance. Encounters can be planned, but nothing guarantees that they will happen; on the other hand, we often meet people, things (ultimately, signs) without any planning and then, in this encounter, relationship happens and learning takes place.

“We never know in advance how someone will learn,” Deleuze (2001, p.165)²⁶ states; thus, teaching is like the boat of which Foucault spoke and which we cited above to characterize heterotopia. Learning is heterotopic in nature: it is the production of other spaces in the same space of the classroom, the irruption of events and encounters that are made in the drift toward being there, in the presence of others, in the relationship with others. The teacher can wonderfully plan his classes, but this alone does not guarantee that learning will happen; it will take place - or not - in different ways and at different times for each student.

Thus, it is possible to see that the issue of the sign and the notion of a minor education are intrinsically related: if the latter has no models and cannot be a model, this is precisely because it is open to signs, to the multiplicity of signs and the profusion of encounters which are produced by them, opening up numerous horizons and possibilities. What signs can trigger the presence of a sign language interpreter in a classroom? What productive effects, enhancers of learning, does such a presence mobilize? Following, we will work with two philosophical examples of the thematization of the schoolmaster in an education regarded as a unique experience, in the context of a minor education as a relation with signs, which will help us to think about such questions.

1.2 The Ignorant Schoolmaster and the Inventive Educator: Learning Along the Path

One can teach what one ignores [...]

Jaques Rancière

In Jacques Rancière’s The ignorant schoolmaster, the experience of the French educator Joseph Jacotot is presented in a teaching adventure with a group of Dutch students who did not speak French (his mother tongue). He, in turn, did not speak Dutch, an experience that highlights the dilemmas of a class in which language barrier could preclude the educational process. However, Jacotot bets on a minimum connection, “thing in common” (RANCIÈRE, 1991, p.2);²⁷ he bets on the use of Télémaque (Fénelon’s classic French work published in a bilingual edition) and through interpretation (of an interpreter) asks students to read, study via translation (French/Dutch), and produce, at the end of the study, a text about their readings in French. The educator proposes a teaching, enables resources, but directs the students’ doing without any control over the instructions about the text and the language. As a result, beyond what was expected and to his surprise, he finds that “[…] the students, left to themselves, managed this difficult step […]” (RANCIÈRE, 1991, p.2).²⁸ In this small excerpt of the work, some aspects of the interpretation practice in a teaching context can be analyzed: first, the importance of the “common bond” connecting teacher and student in the process, even if the linguistic situation does not favor it; second, the relationship between them is established not by the interpretation of what was to be done, but by the schoolmaster’s “desire” to deliver the work, and the “action” of the student with the object itself. The teaching relationship was not crossed by the presence of an interpreter, who had only informed what was to be done. The encounter between teacher and student took place in their relationship around the Télémaque (a possible common material accessible to both audiences, as it was a bilingual edition). Thus, we must consider the need for the encounter through a common bond between teacher and student. A situation that is questioned when the daily school routine, in the case of the deaf, occurs by the constant mediation of a subject, the educational interpreter. This work also presents resources to displace the activity of a schoolmaster (beyond what the teacher figure already refers to) as one who can teach what he does not know.

Such was the revolution that this chance experiment unleashed in his mind. Until then, he had believed what all conscientious professors believe: that the important business of the master is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring them, by degrees, to his own level of expertise. [...] In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds (RANCIÈRE, 1991, pp.2-3).²⁹

In Rancière’s analysis of Jacotot’s experience, he highlights the fact that leaving the routine and the imposition of explanation (one only learns when another, who knows, explains) evidences the possibility of an intellectual emancipation. The teacher who teaches what he does not know does so because he is intellectually emancipated and trusts that the learner is too, so he mobilizes the forces of learning in him. Although the proposal presented about the ignorant teacher in his search of emancipation brings different forms of thinking to the subjective formation, and we will not deepen such elements in this article, the way of conducting the teaching process carried out in the work seems interesting. It shifts the content perspective of a teacher who must explain the contents by ensuring, controlling what the student will absorb. This point in itself is already quite significant for rethinking the ways of conducting teacher-student relationships. For Rancière (1991) “Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. And whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns. He will learn what he wants, nothing maybe” (p.18).³⁰ This assertion moves the very school logic that is attached to the evaluation of the “learned” as the core of the process. And, apparently, the process is more important than the product, which can have various forms, depending on the interest of each participant. Yet, within this logic of teaching to make sense in the body of the other, the presence of the educational interpreter in the conduction or explanation is the linguistic bond between conducting teacher and student. However, by not being an object (instrument), this bond between an educational interpreter and deaf student narrows and the paths chosen may be diverse, instead of those orchestrated by the conducting teacher. Instruction through sign language promotes unpredictable agency. If we observe from the perspective of translation studies, we will see that the interpretation and the movement of translating one language into another characterize creative effects, proper to the target language structure, which can be other in the source language (CAMPOS, 2013), as it occurs in the transcription effects, for example, in literary/poetic texts.

However, beyond this movement, from the action of translating one language into another, involving cultural and creative elements, the link between the two characters (educational interpreter and deaf student) is necessary for the pedagogical relation to be somehow established. The teacher may ignore contents, but he somehow connects with the student in the process or along the path and, as in the example of the work mentioned, a common language must be activated for the articulation between both to happen in the conduction - which is not a single method nor is it oriented towards only one path. The classroom with TIESL is a space that enhances the need to encounter the other with signs to learn, as Deleuze (2008) presents: “Truth depends on an encounter with something that forces us to think [...]” (p.12),³¹ and this encounter takes place through the violent action of the sign on the subject. And it is exactly the violence that moves the being toward the act of thinking. If these signs are also given by language, mediated by language, the sign language brought in the translation action of the TIESL produces innumerable signs, over which the conducting teacher will have no control. The teachers, in this sense, emit various signs (images, words, songs...), whose effects on the body of the other will not be under their control.

With Walter Omar Kohan’s (2015)The Inventive Schoolmaster,³² the relationship between teacher and student is of the order of life. It operates significant changes beyond the programmed ones, and in this sense, it aligns itself with Rancière’s perspective (1991)³³ on the action of the teacher. With this inventive teacher, the journey, that is, permanent change, and the experiences of places other than the consolidated ones, is a relevant point in the training of the teacher, who learns in the spaces and with the subjects less thought of as potential to education. In Kohan’s work, it is with Thomaz, the black man, the foreign student in the group, that Simón Rodriguez (the “inventive teacher” of the title) learns that “He will have to live, starting from the encounter with Thomas, a new life” (KOHAN, 2015, p.7).³⁴ Through the reading, one perceives another conception of the educator as one who reinvents himself in the process, who creates with the students and realizes that knowledge is built through walking the path and discovering it. In this sense, the approach, the contact, the “eye contact” is the primary part of teaching. In situations of deaf inclusion through educational interpreters, this act of language of the body, of the encounter, cannot be erased. Otherwise, we have the risk of also erasing the singularity of the deaf and their creations through sign language. “Simón Rodríguez invented a singular figure of the educator, that we can call a wandering educator, or a teacher-errant or errant-teacher” (KOHAN, 2015, p.23).³⁵ In the invention of another way of being a teacher, the author presents us with possibilities of thinking about teaching and learning that are given through types of constructed relationships. Teaching with two conducting subjects (conducting teacher and educational interpreter) is not a common thing, and that is why it raises so many concerns about what must be done and what cannot be done. Moreover, teaching without the search of control, in this wandering and drifting towards what students will grasp, out of the signs issued in the classroom, is not the most trivial experience in the field of education. Thinking about teaching as affection, that is, as a relation with the other, is undoubtedly establishing other dialogues about training, school and the school process. Regarding both works presented:

Rodriguez shared Jacotot’s pedagogical concerns for the excluded. Both contemplated education for the rejected and illiterate of society… Both deeply believed in the unconditional capabilities of all individuals, and the conditions that would actualize each person’s potential must be generated with as little external governance as possible (KOHAN, 2015, p.66).³⁶

Although these works bring different conceptions of education and school process, in this article they are used as an open space to think about the construction of teaching and mastership processes that value the path. These processes bring the possibility of the student as an active participant and evidence teaching as unpredictable, precisely because the encounter with the violence of the sign and the effects it generates are neither predictable nor measurable. If we let go of the control of the process, we may realize that many teachers are not ignorant or inventive schoolmasters and that there are innumerable educators in these two senses who have no teacher training. Given this, and arguing for the relationship established between the educational interpreter and the student, the opening to a unique teaching method through sign language does not mean - and does not intend - to erase the figure of the conducting teacher but to announce that singularities produce encounters and that the TIESL will not be an instrument at all, since in the classroom he produces knowledge and mobilizes its production. In addition, this relation influences (for better or worse) the learning of the deaf student. Thus, arguing for a partnership between TIESL and the conducting teacher seems to be an important step for the deaf student to learn in an inclusive context.

2 Interpretation and Mastership in the Action of Translators and Interpreters of Educational Sign Language

Conducting Teacher: Today, in our physical education class, we will stay in the classroom for an oral test. (The teacher, holding a sheet with 15 questions, starts the questions by going to the group of listening students. He asks the first question quickly, reads the answers and tells the group to indicate the matching answer).

TIESL: (Feels restless and goes to the conducting teacher) Remember that I told you that this evaluation activity does not favor the deaf students because until I interpret each item, and then they have to look at what the answers are, it takes much longer than in oral language. It is not productive. It is a proposal that may favor the hearers, but not the deaf. You see?

Conducting Teacher: No problem, you can stay with them in the second class, instead of going to the court, you can stay longer for them to answer the questions.

TIESL: (Feeling annoyed, questioning the teacher again) But teacher, still this activity does not favor the students’ work and they will not want to miss the break.

Conducting Teacher: (thinking a while)Calm down, it’s going to be alright. Go and try the activity with them.

TIESL: (She goes back to the students and they look at her without understanding what is happening. The interpreter puts the evaluation paper on a table in front of her and starts a conversation with the deaf students in that room about the contents of that evaluation. She does not simultaneously interpret the teacher's speech because the students, on the first try, interrupt her with questions and doubts. She cannot do as the teacher expects and stays until the end of the class in a single question out of the 15 proposed. When the school bell rings, she looks at the researcher and says): I do not know if I should do this, but at least the students participated better in the activity, right? What do you think is the right thing to do in these cases, when the teacher does not understand the issues of deaf students?

Researcher: (Smiles without a precise answer for that moment, hugs the TIESL, and leaves thoughtfully!).³⁷

The scene described above will be used as a guiding thread for the following discussion, as it shows the unpredictability of daily life and the decisions that are made in the face of events. By directing a certain activity to the deaf students, which is not the one proposed by the teacher, the TIESL does it from what she observes and is taken adrift by the relationship produced with the deaf students. The perspective of an education with the other and not according to the other (teacher or any previously established model) is the highlight of the perspective proposed in this article, in consonance with the theories hitherto presented, evidencing that “[...] we never learn how, but always with someone” (GALLO, 2012, p.4; author’s emphasis),³⁸ through the encounters with signs that, in the multiplicity of sayings, are linked to the other’s singularity. These others are the intercessors that potentiate learning and the encounter with the new by the learner (in the creative process). However, the act of learning itself is always individual and unique.

You’ll get nowhere by latching onto some parallel movement, you have to make a move yourself. If nobody makes a move, nobody gets anywhere. [...] Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without them nothing happens. They can be people-for a philosopher, artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists-but things too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators […] you're always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own. And still more when it’s apparent (DELEUZE, 1995, p.125).³⁹

Learning seems to be collective because it is an effect of the multiplicity of encounters with things, words, bodies: these are the intercessors qualified as such. The daily actions at school, and presented by the scene above, refer both to the unpredictability of actions in the face of the unexpected and to the need to make choices and take a stand in the face of events. In this sense, learning is violence because it takes inertia away. Learning to be an educational interpreter and to make both translational and ethical choices refers to the logic of this open space, this ocean of “inclusion” and the own “dangers” set in this context. Therefore, the educational adjective given to the interpreter announces specificities that should be directed to this sphere and dilemmas that are presented exactly by the possible experiences brought around this place. Learning is itself interpretation, as we are faced with multiple interpretations in classrooms, and the educational interpreter interprets discourses for himself and enables multiple interpretations to the other (deaf).

Based on Deleuze (2010), learning is taken as synonymous to interpretation (learning = interpreting) of signs that are emitted by someone and become body-sense when there is (is created) a meaning interpreted by the recipient. “Everything that teaches us something emits signs, every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or hieroglyphs” (DELEUZE, 2010, p.4). Therefore, there is a complicity in this action of the double emission-reception of signs in the construction of learning [...] (MARTINS, 2013, p.153).⁴⁰

How can we say what is say right and wrong in the face of such unique actions that reveal the orchestra of several voices (conducting teacher, educational interpreter, deaf students, hearing students? As pointed out previously in Deleuze (2001,⁴¹ 2008),⁴² the proliferation of signs and the encounter with them is what mobilizes learning: encounters with students, linguistic productions, and bodily productions, all of which are open spaces that can produce undefined meanings.

Then again, the mode of Deleuzian exposition concerns the effects that certain activity causes (in this case, the differential sense that the sign carries with it); and the effects of the sign upon us are surely much more bound to the free and open half of the experience of its unidentified sense than to its relation to the object that emits it (MACHADO, 2009, p.197).⁴³

We are talking about the concreteness of the school and the classroom, a space made by many people, many skills, mandatory contents, expected (or idealized) roles for each of the characters that make up this whole dynamics. In addition to all these points, we still have the question of whether the educational interpreter should be considered a professional that acts in the educational or translational studies. A TIESL is a hybrid between these two places - as knowledge and studies in the field of education (teaching and learning) are not enough, because the linguistic knowledge on sign language and the nuances of the translation strategies for meaning transition between discourses from one language into another also compose the activity done by this professional. That must be considered. Given this, we reaffirm the need for a dialogue between these two fields of knowledge. The transversality of these skills is extremely rich for the training of the educational interpreter. This dialogue is endorsed by the affirmation that

Translation does not consist, then, simply of transferring a monosystematic code to another of the same type, but of a process of equivalence search between sometimes extremely complicated deviations from these codes, which become polysystematic. Hence, the translator is said to be never only bilingual. He must be multilingual in order to be able to carry out his task and master the various modes of expression, to the point of allowing himself to juggle, which is often indispensable in the exercise of his profession (THEODOR, 1976, p.20).⁴⁴

Translation choices, necessary deviations, “the necessary juggling” for rendering from one language into another already emphasize choices and numerous possibilities, aligned with the immensity of uncontrolled possibilities in the teaching conduction. For that reason, the activity of TIESL turns out to be quite challenging.

I do not know if I'm right or wrong, but at times I realize the importance of taking a different stand with the students, of directing the teaching, you know? Students ask questions and have doubts that the teacher sometimes cannot understand because he is unaware of the language issues of the deaf student and especially the difficulties they bring from previous years when they did not use Libras at school. I explain their doubts to the teacher and then restart, sometimes in a different way, with the deaf students. It is easier this way (TIESL, A. The bilingual inclusive school, 2016).⁴⁵

This minor and unique relationship that “bridges” an educational interpreter and a deaf student is important to the path and trails of learning and reveals sign language marks as producers of a knowledge specific to the experience of deaf people. Again, the deaf pose a challenge in schools by revealing once again that it has been functioning based on the logic of the equal or the rule of the majority: the Portuguese language, the teaching for listeners, the learning relations though the logic of sound (since literacy years). The parallel trails around an education through sign language, in a different logic, by the visual experience, are undoubtedly announcements of daily resistances and practices that mark an education for the differences. The resistive actions occur in fragments of unique experiences but oxygenate common practices.

Final Remarks or Possible Dialogues with This Text

In this final section, we have made the movement of aligning dangerous and disturbing questions that we try to bring along the theoretical production discussed in this article: 1) that the teacher stands as a character who walks with the learner in his misdirections; that wandering and noncontrolling are part of the process of learning and, therefore, educational interpreters and their activities produce effects on deaf students by simply sharing moments and possible encounters in the classroom on a daily basis; 2) that interpretation is sense-making and, therefore, learning is given by the creative-interpretation - and, in this sense, bringing translation studies into the field of education seems promising; 3) that the TIESL is placed in the in-between place by the hybrid nature of the fields presented, by the mediation he/she must do between languages, cultures, and by issuing (verbal and nonverbal) signs that operate in the unpredictability of what the deaf student will take for himself and perhaps learn; 4) that learning happens in the encounter with signs, in the abrupt violence that the new produces in thought, and shifts the subject from the conformt of the known to a new place. Thus, learning is movement.

Given these general considerations, one remark should be highlighted here: it is possible to see unique actions, infrequent but potent in strength, in which the deaf experience constituted by sign language and visuality is enjoyed, even if in spaces in which “oppression” or a seemingly oppressive system comes into play. The punctual action of choosing a different path from that expected by the conducting teacher in the scene presented is a small illustration of the creative power proved by daily life. The sensibility of looking at the other’s process and allowing oneself to do something other than what is prescribed marks the inventive and ignorant tone of an interpreter’s action. We hope that more ignorant teachers should see in their students the possibility for emancipation through their active action in the learning process. Perhaps these reflections and the uncertainty of what is to be done, and what is the exact role (prescription) of the educational interpreter, reveal the need for uncertainty in the educational act itself: an open space, an ocean of possibilities that branch out into numerous encounters between subject/bodies/skills, always towards creation.

• 1
  We will use the terms ‘TIESL’ and ‘educational interpreter’ as synonyms in this work.
• 2
  DELEUZE, G. Proust and Signs: the complete text. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. British Library, 2008.
• 3
  The mentioned research was carried out (from 2015 to 2017) in a municipal school in the interior of the State of São Paulo, named as a bilingual and inclusive model school. The proposal of this institution is partially innovative because, in the earlier grades, it offers classrooms with direct instruction in sign language by bilingual teachers and only after that experience, i.e., at middle school, deaf students will be taught through a translation process in the presence of a TIESL. However, the performance of the interpreters has been promoted with continuous training, and there are moments when the conducting teacher and the interpreter exchange teaching roles in the classroom. Therefore, we consider this to be a different proposal from the common one (of inclusion) in which sign language occurs in the space of specialized attention rather than in the classrooms. However, neither the full research nor its results will be discussed in detail here, but it will be presented in scenes as an element to articulate theory. In addition, details on the structure of the bilingual model school for the deaf will not be presented here either.
• 4
  FOUCAULT, M. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. In: LEACH, N. (Ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge,1997. pp.330-336.
• 5
  FOUCAULT, M. The Subject and Power. In: DREYFUS; H.; RABINOW, P. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second edition with an afterword by and an interview with Michel Foucault. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
• 6
  Deaf singularity refers to deaf practices and experiences given by sight, by sign language in the cultural relationship between the latter and the deaf subject. It is a view not conveyed by the clinical discursiveness that considers almost exclusively the biological question and the lack of hearing, taking deafness as disability, instead of widening the specific and unique claims of these subjects.
• 7
  Original: “pensamento que atravessa o campo das variações.”
• 8
  In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (2005) thought of the war machine of nomadic peoples in struggle against the state, invention of sedentary people (see Tratado de Nomadologia, vol. 5 of the Brazilian edition, and Treatise on Nomadology, vol. 2, USA). Here, we conceptualize the philosophy of difference itself as a war machine in the struggle against institutionalized thinking and education, which reproduce the same and create nothing new. DELEUZE. G.; GUATTARI, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
• 9
  DELEUZE, G.; GUATTARI, F. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• 10
  For reference, see ^{footnote 9}.
• 11
  For reference, see ^{footnote 9}.
• 12
  DELEUZE, G; GUATTARI, F. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. London: University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis, 2003.
• 13
  Deleuze and Guattari problematized the minor literature. Sílvio Gallo, from the “minor” concept in the book Kafka: for a minor literature (for reference, see ^{footnote 12}), brought the perspective closer to the field of education, creating a concept by displacement: that of a minor education. In this work, we will do the same movement to think the minor action in education from a minority language, Libras - Brazilian Sign Language, in the process of teaching the deaf, acting in the class difference that is originally produced and designed in and for the Portuguese language.
• 14
  DELEUZE, G. Essays: Critical and Clinical. London. New York: Verso, 1998.
• 15
  Original: “O conceito menor é uma criação coletiva da filosofia de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. É uma espécie de ‘conceito-adjetivo’, na medida em que ele aparece, quase na totalidade das vezes, qualificando um campo de produção. Sua primeira aparição foi na obra que os filósofos escreveram sobre Kafka, publicada em 1975. E a aparição foi já em grande estilo, no título do livro: ‘Kafka - por uma literatura menor’. [...] uma literatura menor é diferente de uma literatura maior. Essa toma a língua como cânone e a explora segundo suas possibilidades estabelecidas; aquela faz rachar a língua, introduz diferenças, linhas de fuga, faz ‘gaguejar’ (DELEUZE, 1997) as palavras.”
• 16
  Being a minority, with a minor status, deaf communities are in a position to create since they are outside the dominant places of circulation. Thus, to fight for inclusion in the dominant spaces means to move out of the minority and creative position in order to occupy a place of reproduction of the same among the “greatest.” For that reason, the daily resistance and the production of pedagogical actions of the interpreter within an inclusive context, by operating on the unexpected (standard), work as minor actions.
• 17
  Original: “Uma educação menor é trincheira (ou, para dizer como Deleuze e Guattari, toca, resultado de um devir-animal), espaço de resistência, não um programa. Colocar-se à deriva, como barcos em águas desconhecidas. E, na repetição destas experiências, criar o diferente [...] justapor, no mesmo espaço, a experiência, a aventura, a política como emergência do inusitado nas relações.”
• 18
  For reference, see ^{footnote 2}.
• 19
  Original: “Trata-se, como afirma Deleuze, sempre de um encontro: encontramo-nos com signos que nos desconcertam, que nos arrebatam e nos colocam no trabalho da interpretação; por essa razão mesma, tampouco se poderia controlar esse desenvolvimento por um método. Ao contrário, como se verá, a experiência violenta dos signos não requer método, mas sim um aprendizado, que levará, enfim, ao reconhecimento, a partir da interpretação artística final, do funcionamento de uma nova imagem do pensamento.”
• 20
  For reference, see ^{footnote 2}.
• 21
  DELEUZE, G. Difference & Repetition. London; New York: Continuum, 2001.
• 22
  Original: “O signo é sempre o sinal de um corpo; na verdade, mais do que isso, é ele mesmo um corpo, uma força ou uma potência de afetar.”
• 23
  For reference, see ^{footnote 21}.
• 24
  For reference, see ^{footnote 21}.
• 25
  For reference, see ^{footnote 2}.
• 26
  For reference, see ^{footnote 21}.
• 27
  RANCIÈRE, J. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Redwood City, California: Stanford University Press, 1991.
• 28
  For reference, see ^{footnote 27}.
• 29
  For reference, see ^{footnote 27}.
• 30
  For reference, see ^{footnote 27}.
• 31
  For reference, see ^{footnote 2}.
• 32
  KOHAN, W. The Inventive Schoolmaster: Simón Rodrígues. Boston: Sense Publishers, 2015.
• 33
  For reference, see ^{footnote 27}.
• 34
  For reference, see ^{footnote 32}.
• 35
  For reference, see ^{footnote 32}.
• 36
  For reference, see ^{footnote 32}.
• 37
  Original: “Professor Regente: Hoje, em nossa aula de educação física, ficaremos na sala para uma avaliação oral. (O professor, segurando uma folha com 15 questões, inicia as perguntas direcionando-se para o grupo de alunos ouvintes. Faz a primeira pergunta rapidamente, lê as respostas e pede para o grupo ressaltar a correspondente). TILSE: (Fica inquieta e vai até o professor regente) Lembra que conversei com o senhor que essa atividade avaliativa não favorece aos alunos surdos, porque até eu interpretar cada item e depois terem que olhar qual a resposta demora muito mais tempo que na língua oral. Não é produtivo. É uma proposta que pode favorecer aos ouvintes, mas não aos surdos. Entende? Professor Regente: Não tem problema, você pode ficar com eles na segunda aula, ao invés de irem para a quadra, podem ficar mais tempo para resolução das questões. TISLE: (com ar de incômodo questiona novamente) Mas professor, ainda assim essa atividade não favorece a construção dos alunos e eles não vão querer perder a quadra. Professor Regente: (fica pensando um tempo) Calma, dará certo. Vai tentando a atividade com eles. TILSE: (Volta para frente dos alunos e eles olham para ela sem entender o que está acontecendo. A intérprete coloca o papel de avaliação em uma mesa a sua frente e inicia uma conversa com os alunos surdos, daquela sala, sobre os conteúdos daquela avaliação. Não interpreta simultaneamente a fala do professor porque os alunos, na primeira tentativa, interveem com questões e dúvidas. Não consegue fazer como o professor espera. Fica até o final da aula em uma única questão das 15 propostas. Toca o sinal para o lanche, olha para a pesquisadora e diz): Não sei se deveria fazer assim, mas pelo menos os alunos participaram melhor da atividade, né? O que você acha que é certo fazer nesses casos em que o professor não entende as questões dos alunos surdos? Pesquisadora: (Sorri sem uma resposta precisa para aquele momento, dá um abraço na TILSE, sai reflexiva!)”
• 38
  Original: “[...] nunca aprendemos como, mas sempre com alguém.”
• 39
  DELEUZE, G. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
• 40
  Original: “Baseando em Deleuze (2010), o aprender é tomado como sinônimo de interpretação (aprender = interpretar) de signos que são emitidos por alguém e que se faz corpo-sentido quando há (cria-se) uma significação interpretada por quem o recebe. “Tudo que nos ensina alguma coisa emite signos, todo ato de aprender é uma interpretação de signos ou de hieróglifos” (DELEUZE, 2010, p.4). Portanto, existe uma cumplicidade nessa ação da dupla emissão-recepção de signos na construção do aprender [...].”
• 41
  For reference, see ^{footnote 21}.
• 42
  For reference, see ^{footnote 2}.
• 43
  Original: “Mais uma vez, então, o modo de exposição deleuziano diz respeito aos efeitos que certa atividade provoca (no caso, o sentido diferencial que o signo porta consigo); e os efeitos do signo sobre nós se ligam certamente muito mais à metade livre e aberta da experiência de seu sentido não identificado do que à sua relação com o objeto que o emite.”
• 44
  Original: “A tradução não consiste, portanto, simplesmente na transferência de um código monossistemático para outro do mesmo tipo, mas de um processo de procura de equivalência entre desvios, por vezes extremamente complicados, desses códigos, que vêm a ser polissistemáticos. Daí dizer-se que o tradutor jamais é apenas bilíngue. Tem de ser plurilíngue para poder levar a cabo a sua tarefa e dominar as várias modalidades de expressões, a ponto de permitirem-se malabarismos, muitas vezes indispensáveis no exercício de sua profissão.”
• 45
  Enunciation from data collected in interviews with TIESLs.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Sep-Dec 2018

History

• Received
  04 Dec 2017
• Accepted
  14 Aug 2018