Sharing Traditional and Contemporary Literature with Deaf Children

published or submitted for publicatio

Developing Signalong Indonesia: issues of happiness and pedagogy, training and stigmatisation

Signalong Indonesia (SI), a key word signing approach, was created to support the development of Indonesian inclusive schools. A mixed methods approach collected data about teacher’s beliefs and experiences regarding SI from the first two schools to pilot it. Thirty-two teachers completed questionnaires, followed by interviews with nine teachers. Three themes emerged: understanding the nature of SI, the stigmatisation of signers and its reporting by teachers, and the nature of happiness in inclusive pedagogy. The latter reveals, for the first time, the importance of Suka as a culturally mediated intrinsic part of Indonesian inclusive pedagogy. The findings suggest recommendations about SI materials and training, and indicate a new research area regarding inclusive pedagogies within different cultures

Learning outcomes for American Sign Language skill levels 1-4

This document describes measurable learning outcomes for American Sign Language (ASL) levels 1 – 4. A history of ASL provides the background and foundation for the document and includes an overview of teaching and learning ASL in the United States. The processes leading to the creation of the outcomes for ASL levels 1 – 4 are discussed and incorporate the development of ASL outcomes for college-level courses. Information about how the outcomes were adapted was taken, with permission, from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). The key premise of ACTFL’s “5 Cs” are: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities and are highlighted in the document. Recommendations by the American Sign Language Teachers Association (ASLTA) and stakeholders in New York State are included, along with the number and content of instructional contact hours in a supervised language laboratory. The measurable learning outcomes following ACTFL’s 5 Cs make up the majority of the document. Regardless of teaching style, and acknowledging that each teacher is unique and has his or her own teaching style, the goals and objectives for measuring student progress must be met. References, a resource section, and a reading section are included, as well as appendices with a glossary and information pertaining to ASL performance interviews

A Deaf Way of Education: Interaction Among Children in a Thai Boarding School

This is an ethnographic study of peer society in a boarding school for deaf children in the Kingdom of Thailand. The aim is to describe the students' after-hours interaction together and its function in their intellectual and social development. Deaf children tend to be institutionalized because they are unable to fully participate in the process of socialization conveyed by speech. Deafness is perceived as an inevitable loss to intellectual and social capacity. Considered to be uneducable in ordinary settings, they are sent to residential schools, which remain the predominant placement worldwide. The informal interaction among deaf students has largely been ignored or decried as impeding educational goals. Yet as their first opportunity for unhindered communication, the interaction among deaf students reveals their learning capacity and preferences. Aged six to nineteen years, the youth created educational activities to learn the sign language, in-group and societal norms, and worldly knowledge. They devised a complex social organization via a sign language that is little used or appreciated by teachers. They regulated their modes of interaction with each other according to relative skill in the sign language and mental acuity (a "social hierarchy of the mind"). This provided a pathway of gradually diversifying learning activities. The confinement to a given status group fostered teaching and learning among youth of similar skill levels ( and provided an example of Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development.") Student leadership was split into elders who wielded authority and those few youth who were skilled and creative masters of signs. These "signmasters" were generators of new ideas, storytellers and interpreters. This honored role was aspired to by youngsters, and the skills had been consciously passed down. At the same time there was pressure, by some students and teachers, to supplant creative activities with regimentation. The study recommends that educators examine the overall school environment to assure that there is a "normal" balance of activity that is similar to other children in the society, and to consider the value of deaf students' interactions and sign language as resources in the classroom

Teaching Irish Sign Language in Contact Zones: An Autoethnography

The central purpose of this autoethnographic study is to provide an account of my experiences as a deaf teacher teaching Irish Sign Language (ISL) to hearing students in a higher education institution. My cultural and linguistic background and personal history guided the way I interacted with students who found themselves confronted by a unique culture quite separate from what they had known before. By engaging in autoethnographic journal writing recorded over a period of three months, I reveal the complex social and historical relations manifested in the contact between deaf and hearing cultures in the classroom. More specifically, I consider how language conflict and different communication modes might affect teaching and learning in concrete situations. In particular, I advocate an understanding of Pratt’s (1991) “contact zone” theory to see deaf-hearing contacts not just as challenges but possibilities for new ways of understanding the experience of sign language teaching and learning

Facilitating American Sign Language learning for hearing parents of deaf children via mobile devices

In the United States, between 90 and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. In most circumstances, the birth of a deaf child is the first experience these parents have with American Sign Language (ASL) and the Deaf community. Parents learn ASL as a second language to provide their children with language models and to be able to communicate with their children more effectively, but they face significant challenges. To address these challenges, I have developed a mobile learning application, SMARTSign, to help parents of deaf children learn ASL vocabulary. I hypothesize that providing a method for parents to learn and practice ASL words associated with popular children's stories on their mobile phones would help improve their ASL vocabulary and abilities more than if words were grouped by theme. I posit that parents who learn vocabulary associated with children's stories will use the application more, which will lead to more exposure to ASL and more learned vocabulary. My dissertation consists of three studies. First I show that novices are able to reproduce signs presented on mobile devices with high accuracy regardless of source video resolution. Next, I interview hearing parents with deaf children to discover the difficulties they have with current methods for learning ASL. When asked which methods of presenting signs they preferred, participants were most interested in learning vocabulary associated with children's stories. Finally, I deploy SMARTSign to parents for four weeks. Participants learning story vocabulary used the application more often and had higher sign recognition scores than participants who learned vocabulary based on word types. The condition did not affect participants' ability to produce the signed vocabulary.PhDCommittee Chair: Starner, Thad; Committee Member: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Member: Bruckman, Amy; Committee Member: Guzdial, Mark; Committee Member: Quinto-Pozos, David; Committee Member: Singleton, Jenn

Critical Literacy: Deaf Adults Speak Out

The purpose of this paper is to describe a variety of teaching and learning strate-gies that were used within a classroom of Deaf adults participating in a high school English course as part of an upgrading program. The class was conducted in a bilingual manner; that is, being Deaf and communicating with American Sign Language (ASL) was not regarded as a deficit, but as a cultural experience com-parable to and distinct from cultures based on oral languages. The students‟ knowledge of ASL was used to help them develop their skills in English literacy. The emphasis in the classroom was to empower students to take responsibility for their own learning. Teaching activities were designed to help students create meaning around larger social issues. The goal was to improve their English read-ing and writing skills, and help them relate to what was happening in the world around them and lead them into action

Crossing from Hearing to Deaf Worlds: Hearing Border Crossers as Participatory Designers in Healthcare Instruction

The Deaf population faces substantial communication barriers in accessing quality health care. Many healthcare professionals struggle to communicate with Deaf individuals because they have little awareness of how to interact with these patients in culturally sensitive ways. This study sought to understand the perspectives and experiences of hearing border-crossers -- hearing people who cross borders, figuratively, to interact and communicate with Deaf people. Hearing border crossers hold useful knowledge that will shed light in facilitating communication between Deaf patients and hearing healthcare professionals. Using symbolic interactionism as the epistemological framework, qualitative interviews were conducted with three clusters of hearing border crossers--those with deaf family members, those who work professionally with deaf people, and those who interact with deaf people in everyday community settings. Direct observations of hearing-Deaf interactions at public spaces offered further insight into hearing border-crossers\u27 experiences. Focus group data from Deaf consultants were combined with interview and observational data to include at least a partial Deaf perspective on hearing border crossers\u27 accounts. The analysis examines how hearing border crossers enter Deaf worlds, how they gain competence and negotiate difficulties, and what strategies they offer for successful interactions. The dissertation offers an instructional design planning approach that incorporates community perspectives. Ideas from this study were extended and the analysis generated the elements of a learning environment where hearing and Deaf people might interact and learn to communicate effectively. Implications from the study are developed for healthcare instructio