ABSTRACT
While the term “medium” when used in reference to schooling in Nepal typically refers to the named linguistic code said to be primarily employed in instruction, this chapter focuses on multimodal communicative practices in Nepali schools for deaf students to explore how this sense of medium intersects with another common sense of the term in English: the physical channels through which particular semiotic modes are conveyed. Drawing on ethnographic data from a school for deaf students in Kathmandu in the 2000s, it shows how interpretive differences across instructors, parents, school administrators, funders, and state evaluators created slippage between various senses of medium, such that different stakeholders could simultaneously interpret the primary medium of these classrooms to be Nepali or Nepali Sign Language (or collapse this distinction), with a range of pragmatic effects resulting from the complex and various indexical baggage associated with each named code.
