In considering issues of cultural and linguistic diversity in the curriculum, I would like to begin by borrowing the image from the title of Kenji Hakuta's well-known book, Mirror of Language (1986). I would like to take that mirror in hand, and move it off to the side a bit. In this way, we can look over our shoulders into the history which has brought us educators of deaf persons here, in a much-abbreviated parallel to Dr. Hakuta's act of reconstructing the history of bilingual education. Then, I would like to move that mirror back to the center, where it belongs. For the image of the language teacher is the reflection of a language learner, and we are well advised to gaze long and hard into that looking glass before we run to class or confront the next batch of essays or videotapes.

For those of us involved in the cultural and language education of young deaf adults, it is wise to be mindful of the larger forces which have underscored our students' schooling. These forces have revealed themselves over the years in a variety of forms, and left their mark on the social, personal, and political lives of students. At the same time, the historical accounts which we have studied in the hope of illumination have become suspect, as current scholarship reveals them to be almost exclusively hearing persons' versions of the educational progress of people who are deaf (Van Cleve, 1993; Lang, 1994).