September is Deaf Awareness Month!
September 18: The Bi-Bi Education Program – Marie Jean Philip
The bilingual–bicultural (Bi‑Bi) model is an approach for deaf and hard-of-hearing students that uses a natural sign language (such as ASL) as the first language and the region’s spoken/written majority language as a second language. It ensures early access to a full language for cognitive and academic development and teaches both Deaf culture and hearing culture to foster a strong, bicultural identity.
The Bi-Bi model emerged in the 1980s and was largely pioneered by Marie Jean Philip (1953–1997), a Deaf advocate and educator. In 1985, Philip joined The Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham, Massachusetts, to help implement bilingual-bicultural policies and became its Bilingual Bicultural Coordinator in 1988.
Under her leadership, the school became the first Deaf school in the United States to officially adopt the Bi-Bi teaching philosophy. The movement gained traction in response to the perceived failure of older educational methods, such as Manually Coded English, which attempted to represent English through signs but often resulted in language deficits for deaf students.
About Marie Jean Philip: wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Jean_Philip
More about the Bi-Bi Education Model: wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilingual%E2%80%93bicultural_education