Pierre Pelissier as educator

In the early 1840 Pierre Pelissier became more directly involved in the educational issues of his day and was a temporary teacher at the Paris Deaf Institute. Pelissier had waited five years to secure a full-time teaching position at the institute. This delay was not a reflection on Pelissier's teaching qualifications but rather an indication that relatively few teaching positions were available to deaf people at the national institute in Paris. In 1843 the school employed eight male teachers, of whom four were deaf. Pelissier was the only " temporary" deaf teacher among these tour instructors (the others were Ferdinand Berthier (1803-1886), Alphonse Lenoir (1804-1887), and Eugene Allibert. In 1862, the year before Pelissiers death, the Paris Deaf Institute had eleven teachers for an all-male student body (the girls had been transferred to the national school in Bordeaux in 1859). Among this group were four deaf teachers: the very senior BerthieoLenoir, who had both been teaching at the Deaf Institute since the late 1820 and Pelissier, along with Victor-Gomer Chambellan (1816-1906), who had started teaching in Paris after the transfer of the female student body. Thus, while the overall number of teachers had increased between 1843 and 1862, the opportunity for deaf men to become instructors at the Paris Institute had not grown at all.

Pierre Pelissier represented new blood among the deaf faculty at the Paris institution during the 1840s and 1850s. At least in his early days as a teacher, Pelissier's methodology was distinctly tied to his former mentor, Abbe Chazottes.

In a collection of brief writings on deaf people and their experiences that Pelissier had edited in the mid-1840s, the poet-teacher reaffirmed what he thought was the correct pedagogical method for teachers to use with their deaf students, giving full credit to Chazottes for these ideas. He observed that " one learns languages by usage and by imitation.... In order to speak a language, you must, on the one hand, know the meaning of the words that make up the vocabulary and on the other hand, you must know how to make use of these words according to the rules that pertain to the words".

Pelissier was convinced that, in order to learn another language more quickly, a person must make use of the language that he or she already knows. Although deaf youths came to school with a language that was " little developed", according to Pelissier, this knowledge should nonetheless serve as the basis for further language growth. Natural sign language had to be employed as the bridge between the world of written French and signed language. In his opinion, the emphasis on written language rather than spoken French was logical. Since deaf people were unable to use their voices as hearing people do (Pelissier referred directly to his own experience), they would never be able to carry on conversations with hearing people. This would be the case, he maintained, even if they could master the sounds of spoken French because they " will never hear the answers that people make using a loud voice". Pelissier recognized that it was a matter of setting priorities for the instruction of deaf students. Why spend endless hours trying to teach them to speak when that time could be used to increase their intellectual and moral capacity? To Pelissier, this viewpoint was simply a matter of practical sense.

However, long before Pelissier's arrival at the Paris institution, discussions about language acquisition had been charged with ideology and emotion, especially during the 1820s and 1830s. Two key players in the debate had been the schools physician, Dr. Jean-Marc Gaspard (jard (1774-1838), and one of the school's administrators, Baron Joseph-Marie de Gerando (1772-1842). Both men were convinced that spoken language was the best way to " cure" deafness. Although a resident with his own apartment at the deaf institute for more than thirty years, itard never made an effort to learn French sign language. With the directors approval, he routinely carried out experiments on deaf students in order to advance his theories about congenital hearing loss. Gerando, a philosopher and government minister who was interested in the concept of a universal language, could not bring himself to acknowledge sign language as a valid language, one that could stand on its own. At the Paris institute his presence as a policymaker on the school's governing board would affect this negative perception of sign language.

When Pelissier arrived at the Paris institution in the early 1840s, any views that he had about teaching and the use of language were certainly part of a more contentious debate about how deaf people could use their natural sign language while still learning enough French (generally written French) to function in the hearing world. In contrast to the Baron de Gerando, Pelissier rejected the idea that sign language was an enigmatic method of communication. According to Pelissier, a deaf student could understand " everything [by the use of signs] that he sees.... This is the first chapter for his education."

While (in Pelissier s view) all deaf education had to begin with sign language, it was also necessary to encourage a good rapport between the hearing and the Deaf communities. To promote better relations, he favored the use of fingerspelling, which he believed hearing people could easily learn. Pelissier optimistically thought that forming words with a manual alphabet would become just another " habit" in the way people communicated with each other. Implicitly he seemed to understand that interaction between hearing and deaf people was important, if only to quell the many prejudices against deaf people that lingered in French society. Even though he could not deny these problems, he was still optimistic about deaf people's chances to make better lives for themselves in French society. He believed that more schools for deaf children would be built in France and that ultimately France " [would] not forget [its] deaf people". For a poet who had often lamented the terrible isolation of deaf people, Pelissier still clung to a larger ideal of improvement that was likely connected to the benefits of education in his own life.

It was against this backdrop of increased hostility toward sign language that Pelissier produced the first book written by a deaf man to explain how sign language could be used in primary schools to educate deaf children.

The primary instruction of the deaf and dumb, accessible to everyone, with sign language illustrations was Pelissier's approach to popularizing sign language and making it understandable to even the most inexperienced person. His way of looking at education for deaf children was both practical and, to a certain extent, grounded in more abstract philosophical principles. Years earlier, at the beginning of his teaching career, he had evoked the epistemology of seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke when he described the deaf child as a tabula rasa when first arriving at school. For him, deaf children were capable of every kind of achievement but needed the proper training to attain academic success. The vocation of the teacher of deaf youth was, not surprisingly, to take these children who otherwise would have fallen on " rocky soil", according to Pelissier, and plant them in better ground, where, " watered by the rain, they would become one day a tree bearing flowers and fruit".

(A.T. Quartararo. The Poetry of a Minority Community: Deaf Poet Pierre Pelissier and the Formation of a Deaf Identity in the 1850s. – Sign Language Studies. – Washington: Spring, 2008.)