Goal: To provide a practical and theoretical framework for the activities contained on the CD
Learning is in the Details….perhaps a strange title for a sign language approach, but it is one I firmly believe is true for elementary settings. In order to engage students in the learning process, I think it is vital that, as much as possible, all the activities be tailored to fit the specific situation in which you are teaching. That as much as possible, the details of the activity should be the details of your classroom. It is my hope that you will find this CD-ROM to be a tool that gives you the resources to do that in your own setting and assists you in creating more accessible class-rooms for Deaf and hard of hearing students. See the final lesson on “Creating Your Own Units”for more specifics about how to go about this process.
The Philosophical and Theoretical Stuff
This activity packet is designed to provide support for interpreters and others who are called on to teach sign language for classrooms that seek to include Deaf and hard of hearing students. The lessons contained were developed in my experience of working at Lakewood Elementary school in Duluth, Minnesota. I found these activities to be helpful in creating a classroom environment that allowed for more independent and direct communication—and the possibility for deaf students to feel a part of the community.
Who Should Teach American Sign Language?
I want to recognize that providing support to interpreters teaching sign language is not an idea without controversy. Deaf people, through organizations like the National Association of the Deaf and the American Sign Language Teachers’Association (ASLTA) are pushing for higher standards for people who teach sign language, to ensure that the integrity of the language is maintained. Thus,there is grave concern about interpreters who may not be competent in the language passing on their own incompetencies. ASLTA’s website, http://www.aslta.org, is a good resource for exploring some of these perspectivesand concerns. ASLTA asserts clearly that teachers of ASL need to be competent both in the language and in methods of teaching. They suggest that teachers should have been using ASL on aregular basis for at least 5 years and be involved in ongoing continuing education to further their skills and knowledge in both ASL as a language and in how to teach it. These concerns of the Deaf community about maintaining the integrity of ASL through higher standards for teachers are extremely important for anyone considering teaching sign language to reflect upon. Interpreters who take on this task need to be very cognizant about their role not only in teaching that classroom, but inrecognizing the special role that American Sign Language plays in the life of the American Deaf community. I firmly believe that maintaining the integrity of the language is a responsibility that should not be taken lightly.
Yet, young deaf children desperately need to have peers with whom they can communicate directly. What is abundantly clear in the experiments with mainstreaming and inclusion is that the presence of an interpreter, even a qualified one, is no assurance that Deaf students’ experiences will be successful. Deaf and hard of hearing children need to have access to communication through a multitude of sources—and it is important that it isn’t all channeled through an interpreter.
The fact that Deaf students need to have signing peers does not necessarily mean that interpreters need to be the ones doing the teaching. Other options may exist in some situations, including bringing in a member of the Deaf community to teach on a weekly basis, or using Teachers of D/HH students who have experience both with sign language and with teaching. In some situations, these options may be workable, but often they aren’t even really options.
What I think is important to consider in discussions about who should teach sign language to young children is understanding how critical it is for students to have a relationship of trust with their instructor. As children grow, they are able to learn more effectively from people with whom they have little history or context, but for young students, it is absolutely imperative that student see this person often, build trust, and be able to create a relationship that fosters linguistic development.
Regardless of who teaches, balancing the concerns for individual students and larger concerns of Deaf people needs to be something that happens within the context of conversation with and respect for the Deaf community.
An Integrated Approach
This project grew out of my experience of the “Signing Naturally” curriculum and its functional-notional approach. This method of teaching language grows out of “Speech Act” theory, that is the theory of discourse that the principal reason for language is to do something, to get something.(One of the characters in a play entitled the “The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything,”declares: “I believe that people developed language out of a deep inner need to complain.” ) Our need to complain, our need to have the ketchup passed to us, our need to learn about each other—it is out of these needs that language arose. And so, “Signing Naturally” developed a curriculum that places students in situations that practices these different functions of language.In my own experience, I found that young children were not able to resonate with the situations of a curriculum developed for adults, but they were extremely receptive to the functional-notional approach.
So, in developing new activities within the context where I was working, I drew on the experiences of the particular classroom and created dialogues and activities based on what students were actually needing to communicate about during their day.While I hope that the activities that I have recorded on this CD will prove helpful, my real hope is that they will provide enough practice with the process that you will be able to create individual dialogues and group activities for any topic. So, that when the lessons run out on the CD, you will always be able to create new lessons that are integrated into the life of your specific classroom.
Teaching Language, Not Just Signs
As part of a workshop I gave in Wisconsin on Ethics and Role of Educational Interpreters, one interpreter explained that in teaching sign to the classroom in which she worked, she tried to be very clear that she only taught signs, not language. That is, that she was only comfortable teaching vocabulary, but not the broader aspects of language that these vocabulary items are embedded in. Her comments have stayed with me, and I think they represent an honest perspective and also a commentary on the state of materials targeted for teaching sign language in elementary settings. Most of the resources available only teach individual signs, but not the whole of language. Sadly, this misses out on the potential of young children for learning language. More and more, language immersion programs are being instituted in elementary schools to capitalize on the fact that young brains are wired for learning language. For ASL instruction to be successful in teaching language, interpreters and teachers need to be cognizant of the different linguistic levels that exist. The following is a brief summary of these strata of language–and is intended to more raise questions that push you on to further understanding of the linguistic structure of discourse. In this overview, I move from the more specific, smaller units to the broader and larger units of language.
Posted in: Learning is in the Details