Draft Caption Notes - The Deaf Society · educating Deaf children than it is for hearing children....

Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013

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Draft Caption Notes

20130708_Deaf Society of New South Wales

This document is a draft caption note of a live session. Best endeavours were used to capture an accurate record. However, due to the instantaneous nature of captioning a live event, Bradley Reporting accepts no liability for any action arising from any errors contained in this draft record. The transcript cannot be published without the permission of Bradley Reporting, which has the discretion to withhold make this record material available.

MARC MARSCHARK: I really do thank Kate, the Deaf Society for

having me, Bec and Rebecca, for giving me the correct language

tonight. I also need to thank all the people who support my

research, our research partners around the world, the schools that I

work with. These are just the schools that I do research with, not

the ones that actually pay people to do things for them.

I was asked to talk about how Deaf children learn, and this question

of: are we on the right path? As Kate mentioned, one of the punch

lines for tonight is that there is no single right path for Deaf kids.

Marc Marschark, Ph.D., is a Professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, where he directs the Center for Education Research Partnerships. He also has appointments at the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh and the School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. His primary interest is in relations among language, learning, and development. His current research focuses on such relations by deaf children and adults in formal and informal educational settings. He founded and edits the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education and co-edits the Perspectives on Deafness and Professional Perspectives on Deafness: Evidence and Applications series, published by Oxford University Press. His books include Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, How Deaf Children Learn, and Educating Deaf Students: From Research to Practice.

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When I think 'Deaf kids' I include my university students. They get

younger every year. They look like they're about 12. I was actually

asked to repeat in essence one of the presentations that I did last

week - this week? Jetlagged. Where I was before, Brisbane. I

decided you would be really bored, so I kind of mixed things up a

little bit.

The first half I'm going to talk kind of generally about educating

Deaf children and alternative paths, and then in the second half I'll

talk about how it is that Deaf children learn. The other thing I

wanted to mention was if I were you I would want to come up here

and stand on this spot to ask a question. So, we will have plenty of

time. I'll be here, you know, afterwards. We'll have more than half

an hour, I think. So, if you don't want to come up here and ask

questions you can always ask me at the break and then I'll come up

and answer the question for you. If you don't feel like it, that is fine.

Okay.

KATE: Excuse me, but could you move just a little bit. Sorry. I

know. I know. Perfect. Perfect. You're too tall, Marc.

MARC: I thought in Australia because you're upside down you were

going to be taller than us. You're not.

Anyway … I thought I'd start by going ahead and answering the

question that Kate asked me: are we on the right path? I think the

answer is very clear: yes and no. By the end I hope you'll realise

the yeses and the noes, and I'm planning to come back to that.

Every picture you see of Deaf kids, they're all Deaf kids and I do

have permission from them and their parents to use their photos. I

want to start with three premises, three things that you need to

understand to understand how Deaf children learn. The first is that


the lack of understanding of cognitive skills underline educational

intervention. This seems to be a fundamental problem in the

development of special education. All that means is that, if we want

to best educate Deaf kids or any child with special strengths, we

have to understand how they think, what they know. It's not enough

just to look at them, treat them like they're hearing kids and assume

that's going to work. You have to know what's underneath all that

superficial stuff of learning.

The gist of that is that language and learning interact, they influence

each other, they build on each other. Something like this. I don't

know the name of whoever is doing the realtime text, the

captioning, but she can't see this, or he can't see this. I'm sorry,

whoever you are. So, the point is if I have colleagues who study

language or literacy -- okay, Roxy, I'm with you. We'll talk later.

ROXY: Okay.

MARC: Understanding part of development - but you're buying the

drinks. understanding part of development isn't enough; we have to

understand the whole child. In my opinion, that's more important for

educating Deaf children than it is for hearing children.

Third, Deaf children are not just hearing children who can't hear.

Yesterday I looked up to see when it was the first time I ever said

that. It turns out it was here in Sydney at Thomas Pattison School,

when I was here in 2004. Back then it was my conclusion at the

end, and now it's become one of my premises at the beginning.

A few times in this first part I'm going to talk about some claims that

are made about educating Deaf children that have no evidence to

support them. Now, it doesn't mean they're wrong, it doesn't mean

they're right, it is just these are things that we believe, myself


included, that it turns out don't have evidence to support them -- the

kind of research that Kate mentioned. What I'm going to do for I

think for three or four of these is to tell you the claim, why people

think it's true and then what we really know and what we don't.

So, for example, we're told that sign language and spoken

language are equivalent for educational purposes. Why would you

think that's true? Well, we know that language development of Deaf

children of Deaf parents parallels that of hearing children of hearing

parents. We've known that for quite a while, although we've just

discovered that's actually only true up till age 2. Then the two

separate in ways that I think are interesting and we could talk about

later, if you think it's interesting.

But we also know that sign language is easier for most Deaf

children to learn than spoken language. That's also true. The thing

that I think people have missed for a long time is that whether a

Deaf child uses sign language or spoken language there are

differences relating to cognition to learning depending on which

modality they use, all right?

So that sign language and spoken language are not equivalent for

education; they're both appropriate, but there are differences in

those two languages that as a teacher you need to know about, if

you're going to educate a Deaf child to their potential. Both

appropriate, not necessarily equivalent.

I really hate this. Most books about educating Deaf children will tell

you that, at least in the US, Deaf kids graduate from high school,

18-year-olds, reading at third or fourth grade level. It's not exactly

true. What we know is that 50 per cent of Deaf 18-year-olds who

take this particular test in the US, the SAT, 50 per cent of them are


reading at grade four level or below. But that means 50 per cent are

reading at the grade 4 level and above. But everybody is obsessed

with that bottom half. I only know of two studies that have looked at

the Deaf students in the top half. Who are the best Deaf readers?

Both studies showed exactly the same three predictors that makes

the best Deaf reader.

Number 1 is parents. Parents who are involved in their child's

education, involved in their co-curricular activities, not just in the

classroom but outside, was the best predictor of the best Deaf

readers. Second was parents. Involved parents led to better Deaf

readers. Third was parents. Right? Both studies showed that was

the predictor. Parents make the difference.

What we also know … is that this situation hasn't changed in the

US in 40 years. I'm going to show you a slide with a graph on it. It's

ugly. You don't need to read any of the numbers on it. There are

five lines there. Five different editions of this SAT test that most kids

in the US take, Deaf and hearing. What you see is that not much

has changed from the sixth edition in 1974 to the tenth edition now.

But if you're trying to figure out the top one, that was from 1996.

What this means is that when mainstreaming came into the US,

1975, reading didn't improve. When sign language came into the

classroom in the early 1980s reading didn't improve. For most kids

with Cochlear implants, well, it's hard to tell. The little kids who got

them at age one or two, they're not in this graph yet. It remains to

be seen, but I'm going to come back to that later, because on

average Deaf kids with implants look like they're reading pretty well

at a young age, but a lot of those gains fade by the time they get to

secondary school. I think that's because we don't know how to


teach them yet, but we'll come back to that. And we can certainly

talk about it later.

But in general everything I'm telling you this evening relates

to - unless I say different - everything relates to everything from

hard of hearing, mild hearing losses to profound hearing losses and

kids with implants. Let's see. We are obsessed with language.

That's a good thing maybe. We have this idea that if we remove the

communication barriers in the classroom typically people assume

that's through sign language, Deaf students will succeed even in

mainstream settings. Now, we think that's true because people tell

us that Deaf children acquire sign language as the first language.

One-handed finger spelling, H-A. Ha-ha-ha-ha. In fact, most Deaf

kids don't acquire a sign language fluently as a first language. In

fact, most Deaf kids come to school, whatever language they have,

not fluent in the language of instructions. It doesn't matter if it's

spoken language, with or without an implant or sign language. It

makes it tough for teachers who are trying to teach content and

language at the same time when they have seven kids in the

classroom all at different language levels. This must be a teacher.

SPEAKER: I'm nodding.

MARC: I am, too. At the university level I have classes with Deaf

students at all different language levels. In fact, we did a study here

at the Thomas Pattison School a number of years ago where we

looked at students learning through sign language, through Auslan,

from the native signing Deaf teacher or from text reading, with

Danni providing the text. This was text provided by a highly skilled

interpreter doing realtime text in the classroom.

The kids learned just as much from reading as they did from sign


language. Same thing holds at the university level. May not be

surprising here that hearing students learned more when they read

the material than the Deaf students did. But in a situation like this

with a teacher teaching a class with a highly skilled interpreter like

Rebecca, and an award-winning teacher, by the way, which I'm not,

but in all this research we only used award-winning teachers and

the best interpreters. The hearing students still learned. But the

interesting point you'll notice the Deaf students learned more from

what they read than what they saw signed. We've done this any

number of times. Either they learn the same amount from text and

from interpreting or signing, or they learn more from reading, but

they don't know that (indistinct)

We actually spent five years trying to figure out a way to improve

learning in a situation like this with a hearing teacher and a sign

language interpreter. We pretty much got the same thing every

time. Teachers design the tests; the hearing students always did

better. We tried using American Sign Language or signing with

English word order; didn't make a difference. We gave the students

notes in advance and we gave them concept maps in advance – for

you teachers who like concept maps. They didn't help.

We gave the interpreters notes in advance. The interpreters really

like getting notes in advance. They feel better, but it didn't help the

students learn more. We even controlled for teachers in a mixed

class of Deaf and hearing students - the hearing students generally

come into the class knowing more about the content than Deaf

students. Even when you control for that (indistinct)

Probably 20 times we've done this. Nothing we did made any

difference. But it's not about sign language. We get exactly the


same result from students who grew up aural with or without

Cochlear. So it's something else. So, all of these studies were

mainstream classes. Our interpreter friends pointed out, well,

obviously, if what the teacher is doing comes from my mouth into

Rebecca's ear and out her hands it's got to lose some of its fidelity.

It's not about the Deaf students in the classroom, it's about how

they interpret.

So, we repeated all these studies with Deaf and hearing teachers

signing for themselves or using an interpreter. 'Direct' means direct

instruction. Our students tell us 'I do better when the teacher signs

for herself'. You can see from the green bars that's not true. Trust

me, we've done this enough times.

In fact, our students learn just as much from an award-winning

teacher, a good one, as they do from a good interpreter, and vice-

versa. And still the hearing students learn more. But there was a

difference.

Now, when we look at prior knowledge what the students know

when they come to the classroom, we have the teacher's tests but

in all of these studies we give students a pre-test before the course

or the class to find out how much they know, because the less you

know the less you're going to learn. If you take away the pre-test

from their score on the teacher's test, you get a measure of how

much they've learnt, which is really the important bit. When you do

that, it turns out from a skilled teacher of the Deaf – we're about to

lose battery. Sorry, Roxy, it's been nice knowing you. When we

have a skilled teacher of the Deaf, Deaf and hearing students in the

same classroom learn the same amount. We never found that with

award-winning ... let's see. This one happened to have a hearing


teacher. You get exactly the same results with that teacher. When

we just did a study with a Deaf teacher who was teaching a mixed

class of Deaf students, hearing students, as well as Deaf students

with Cochlear implant - he's bilingual, he's got good speech, good

sign language. So, here he is teaching the Deaf student.

On the left side he was signing for the Deaf students. One the right

side he was speaking and the Deaf students were (indistinct). And

as before you can see it didn't make a difference. Hearing students.

On the left side, he was speaking to the hearing students, direct

instruction. On the right side the interpreter was voicing as he was

signing. It looks just like the other studies.

Now, here is the complicated one: students with implants, on the

left side he's speaking directly to them. On the right side he is

signing to them and the interpreter is voicing for him. Exactly the

same results as before. As you can see, the students with the

implants did exactly the same as the students without implants.

Now, remember these are university students, right, these are not

your typical Deaf kid - actually, there is no typical Deaf kid. The

individual differences in Deaf children and college students are so

big that I recently did a presentation entitled "There is no average

Deaf child". This is a pretty select group.

Oh, and the Deaf and hearing students learned the same amount.

So, we know that Deaf students and hearing students can learn the

same amounts when they're taught by a skilled teacher of the Deaf,

something that we have not found in mainstream classrooms.

It makes us ask: so what are the differences between Deaf and

hearing students? And within that group of Deaf students who are

all so different from each other, what are those differences? How do


they affect learning? And what is it that teachers of the Deaf do that

allow the Deaf and hearing student to learn the same amount?

What's that about? Well, we know that there are some cognitive

differences between Deaf and hearing students that will affect

learning. When I first suggested this about 10 years ago people

went, 'Oh, no, no, that's not possible. We're all the same.' Well, we

don't have to be the same, we can be different, not better, not

worse, just different.

There are two other areas of cognitive difference that I am going to

talk about, because I have been asked to talk about them. There

were some other differences between Deaf and hearing students

that relate to education and learning in the classroom, and I just

finished a book on them. I already wrote a book on the top part, so

I'll talk about that later. Okay.

First memory. First, what is called short-term memory, or working

memory. Who's done Psychology 101? They know that working

memory and short-term memory are different. So, we know about

memory for the short term. We've known since 1917 that if you give

a series of numbers or letters that hearing people will remember

more than Deaf people. We've known since 1917 that Deaf people

who use spoken language remember more of those letters or

numbers than Deaf people who use sign language. We now know,

because of studies of working memory, it is not because Deaf

people have worse memory that they can't remember as much,

working memory are short-term memories.

Depending on when you took Psychology 101, you might have

heard that working or short-term memory is seven things plus or

minus two. We used to think that, so we expect people to


remember seven numbers or letters, plus or minus two. We now

know that short-term memory is two seconds long. You can say

more letters or numbers in speech in two seconds than you can

make sign. Individual signs for digits and letters take longer. You

can fit fewer in two seconds.

Now, over longer spans, because signs carry more information

than speech does - sorry, signs than spoken words, the rate of

information communication is the same in spoken language and

sign language, which is why Bec and I are going at the same

speed. But when it comes to a series of items it takes longer to sign

them. Yesterday - this may be boring but I'm going to tell you,

anyway. It is what teachers do, right?

I got an email from a guy in the States yesterday who's interested in

short-term memory in Deaf kids. He has new findings. He's

interested in how kids learn to spell/learn new words. The challenge

that he has is that when the teacher is teaching a new word, like

how to spell - I need a word.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Accommodate.

MARC: Accommodate? I'm not supposed to sign after arm surgery,

but fine. Accommodate. And he says the problem is by the time you

get to the end of the word what happens when the kid has forgotten

the letters at the beginning? Normally we would sign

'accommodate' all in one place. He tried spreading them out,

a-c-c-o-m-m-o … I can't do that. c-a-t-e. That didn't help. But then

he did something that we do in ASL - a-c-c-o-m - that is, you use

your fingers to enumerate things like this in ASL, and I guess in

Auslan. When he did it that way, the memory score shot up. No-one

had ever shown that before. What he did was to match the issue of


English with the issue of how the kid thinks in ASL. He is just

starting this research line, but it is very cool.

Anyway, moving on. This is a thing that made me go to school

every day. In general though, research for, I don't know, at least

100 years has shown that hearing adults and kids tend to show

better memory in a variety of tests than Deaf adults and kids. It's

true for words and signs, but it's also true for pictures and drawing,

which tells us that it's not just about language. But to explain why

that might be true I'd have to talk about metacognition, and that's

about 10 minutes from now. So hold that thought.

Now, it's also true that kids who grow up signing have better visual

spatial memory than sequential memory, and they have better

visual spatial memory than hearing people. Let me give you a

couple of examples.

There are four cars. The orange car is faster than the green car.

The red car is faster than the orange car. And the yellow car is

faster than the red car. When they reach about age 7 what happens

is that people imagine something like this. We did this test with

college students, looked at how quickly they could respond to

questions like 'Is the yellow car faster than the green car?' Because

we know that Deaf students have better visual spatial processing

than hearing students, of course they can do better. Except that

they didn't.

Interestingly, some of our Deaf students, none of our hearing

students, some of our Deaf students made little diagrams of the

cars, like what some of us had in our head. Of the students who did

that, who knew they had to make models of some kind, the

difference disappeared. What does that tell us? Having ability,


having better visual spatial skills, isn't the same as knowing when

and how to use them. To explain that I'm going to have to talk about

visual processing and metacognition in a minute.

The question is: can we teach Deaf students to use their visual

spatial skills, which are better than hearing skills? Can we allow

them to figure out a way to make it automatic, not to say, okay,

draw that little diagram but to have that mental image pop up

automatically? Roxy, you just died here. Oh, you're back.

ROXY: Hello. I'm still here.

MARC: Okay. And the question is: for those Deaf students who do

have better visual spatial skills, how do we use that in the

classroom to support their education?

Visual information processing. Deaf and hard of hearing children

are said to be visual learners or have better visual skills than their

hearing peers. It's one of those claims being made about Deaf

children without the evidence to support them. I don't know who it

is. Roxy, I'm glad you can't see that. One example, face

discrimination.

Being able to see a face and pick out from others just like it. It

doesn't matter. The point is that, yes, Deaf people are better at this

than hearing people, if the difference in the faces relates to eyes

and the mouth, parts of the face that are important for sign

language. Deaf kids who are oral do not do better on the test. It's

only Deaf kids who sign.

So the younger Deaf kids of a hearing parent don't do any better

until they grow up and learn to sign. Deaf kids with Deaf parents

have it right away.


Generating complex mental images. Here's your test. I give you a

matrix like this and I'm going to show you this little x and I want you

to imagine a capital letter F with its upper corner where the x is. So,

you imagine something like this - actually the screen is blank, you

just think you see it. Now I'm going to put up a dot and you have to

tell me if it's on the F or off the F. Deaf people are better at this than

hearing people. The problem is there are a variety of other visual

spatial tests - these are used in schools, for example - where

hearing kids are better than Deaf kids, children as well as college

students.

This one. Put the pieces together until they are like the top one. I

think you can see - it doesn't matter. On this task actually the

hearing students are better than Deaf students. No difference

between early signers and late signers, so this is really about – it's

not about sign language. In fact, kids with greater hearing loss do

better on the test. Hearing students do best, but then it's not the

kids with mild losses who do better, it is the kids with profound

hearing loss that do better. And for Deaf students but not hearing

students how they do on this test predicts how well they do on

maths.

What it tells us is that Deaf students and hearing students might

use their visual spatial skills differently. In different tasks, different

concepts. Just because you have a skill doesn't mean that you are

going to use it the same way all the time. And different people use it

differently.

How can we use it in the classroom? Any math teachers? You're in

trouble! Okay. The guy I have done this with is a child of Deaf

adults, hearing, a sign language interpreter and a math teacher. He


was the first one to show that hearing students were better than

this, and he didn't believe it so he had to go out and do another

study. He gets all the credit. And he is trying to figure out how to

use this in his maths class.

I am going to have to move along.

Concept learning, organisational knowledge, that is, what we know

about the world and development of language. We recently did a

study where we looked at the vocabulary knowledge of Deaf and

hearing university students. This graph shows along the bottom

words that should be known by children nine years old up to adults.

Clearly, even at university level hearing students knew more words

than Deaf students. And it doesn't matter if they have Cochlear

implants or not.

Interestingly there are studies that show after young kids get an

implant their vocabulary shoots up quickly and people have

suggested that it means they will catch up at some point. They are

clearly not catching up by university age, and this is independent of

how long they have had their implants and the age they got their

implant. There are other reasons for this that I will come back to.

There are no simple answers. It gets complicated. Anybody who

tells you, 'Here's the solution', they're lying to you.

Well, that was about how much they know. There are also

qualitative differences, how they know what they know. So,

somewhere in the head the meaning of 'train' is everything we know

about trains and everything we've experienced about trains. At least

in the US if you say to a college student, "Give me the first word

you think of when I say 'train', they'll say 'track'. I gather here they

would probably say 'rail'. We say 'track'.


One country separated by a common language or something like

that!

When we look at 100 Deaf students and 100 hearing students and

ask them to give the first associate that comes to mind, there's a lot

more agreement among the hearing students than the Deaf

students. It's called the strength of association. If I say 'table' the

hearing students are going to say 'chair'. Deaf students will say a

variety of things. It's important because we don't read one word at a

time. As we read, each word activates other words and concepts

associated with it.

Let me give you an example. I'm going to put up a sentence one

word at a time. Just read it to yourselves as it comes up. The horse

ran past the barn ... You started out reading, 'The horse ran past

the barn' making sense because all of those words are relating to

each other. Now, if I had put a comma after 'past' – 'the horse ran

past, the barn …', that wouldn't have been so bad. The point was

that as you read each word it was activating appropriate knowledge

to help you comprehend. If you don't have a strong enough

connection among those words you read one word at a time, which

is how many Deaf kids read. It is how I understand Italian. I know

the word, I know the word, I know the word, I don't know the

sentence. Okay.

In that group of 100 Deaf students and 100 hearing students, Deaf

students are much more likely to give an answer that no-one else

gave out already. The point is that it is hard for a teacher. With a

hearing class everybody knows the same stuff. In a class with Deaf

students everybody knows different stuff. It's not good, it's not bad,

it's different.


So, having concept knowledge doesn't mean that everybody has

the same knowledge. We have to ask whether Deaf and hearing

kids acquire concept knowledge and the words and signs that go

with them in the same way. The answer is, no. How are concepts,

how is our knowledge activated by signs, by words and by

(inaudible) It's a fairly long story but it's different for Deaf and

hearing students. Not better, not worse, but different. Teachers of

the Deaf have to know that.

Okay. What we call executive functioning, metacognition, it's

basically thinking about thinking, thinking about learning, controlling

your own behaviour, knowing that, 'If I hit him he's going to be

unhappy, he's going to hit me back, he's bigger than I am; I

shouldn't do that.'

Monitoring your comprehension, knowing when you're

understanding the interpreter or not, because if you don't

understand the interpreter you ask a question. If you think you

understand the interpreter and you don't, you don't ask a question.

Knowing when and how to use prior knowledge. Typically Deaf kids

are delayed in this area. The question is: why? You don't have to

read all of these words. When we talk about reading, we talk about

top down, bottom up processes. What you know influences what

you read on the page, and what you read adds to what you know.

It's not just about reading, it's about any language, any

comprehension - through the air that's exactly the same. Let me

give you an example.

I have a good friend (inaudible) a friend in Ireland who is with

CLS(?), (inaudible) tell me about Ireland. I'm scared. Actually he's a

Cochlear implant surgeon. A great guy. One of the few people I


know who can drink more than me. And I can say 'he works in a

hospital in the City of Nottingham'. Okay? But we practise. So,

Rebecca can also say 'he works in Nottingham', okay? So, that last

sign is the name of his city. How many people know why that's the

name for a city?

SPEAKER: Drawing the bow.

MARC: Those of you who recognise the drawing of the bow,

right, Robin Hood, Sheriff of Nottingham - it's your world knowledge

influencing in this case your understanding of signs. Actually I think

it is a generational thing, 'Robin Hood Men in Tights' and all that.

Anyway, if you put quotes around the things on the bottom I would

argue that all learning involves what you know influencing how you

take in new information. It's also one of your definitions of

'intelligence'.

Let me give you two quick examples, because we have a break

coming up. Each of those is ancient history. The one on the left

side, this woman, she did a really simple study. She gave Deaf and

hearing kids seven to nine years old a pile of pictures and said,

'What are some things that go together?' So, the kids put the

animals with the animals and the clothing with the clothing and the

vehicles with the vehicles. Everybody did that, Deaf and hearing.

Gathered up the pictures and said, 'Now, tell me all the pictures you

saw.' The hearing kids said, 'Okay. Cow, dog, echidna ... cow dog,

echidna ...' There isn't a sign for (inaudible). Oh Gee. Actually they

were American kids.

So, they were calling things according to the category they

absorbed. The Deaf kids remembered words randomly. They know

the concepts, they know the categories, because they sorted them


correctly, but they didn't know that they could use that concept

knowledge to help their memory so they remembered less. Go back

to the memory slides. It's their executive functioning, their

metacognition that's preventing them from remembering as much

as the hearing kids. They have good memory. It's just they're not

using the tools, the tricks, to help their memory.

The one on the right - you have a different name for it. We call it 20

Questions, Hangman. We gave kids from age 7 through university

this picture with 48 little pictures, they're similar in shape, some are

similar in colour, what they are made up of, their categories. We

stuck one in our pocket and said, 'What do you think I have?' or,

'Which one do you think I am thinking of?' The hearing kids ask

questions like, 'Is it round? Is it an animal?' and so on. …

Differences don't have to be deficiencies. There are cognitive

strengths in Deaf kids as well as cognitive needs ... Deaf kids and

hearing kids can learn the same amount in the same classroom.

Presumably because teachers, either someone taught them about

these differences or, more often, they have (inaudible) the

difference is they don't have enough Deaf kids over time to learn

that. And I assure you no-one teaches it in teachers college. So are

we on the right path?

No, I think in the sense that ... we have been ... that I think we've

ignored other things. Kids that were not the same as hearing kids

we thought there was something bad about them. Yes, we're on the

right path because we now recognise that Deaf kids and hearing

kids can be different, they can learn differently, and we can build on

their strengths as well as accommodate them.

So, your take-home messages: don't believe everything you read


even if I wrote it. The population of Deaf kids is changing. The kids

we have today in our classrooms are not the same as they were 10

years ago. Science is changing. We know more. Educational

methods are changing. I said before anybody who tells you they

have the answer is lying to you. Working with Deaf kids is

complicated, because they're all different.

I could not teach young kids. I can't teach young hearing kids let

along young Deaf kids. I don't have the patience to have 10 kids in

a class – that's a really big Deaf class - 6 kids in a class with

different levels of knowledge, different levels of language so that I'm

teaching language and the content, not to mention because of the

executive function they're all acting up because they think it's cool.

Deaf children are not hearing children. If we want to improve

learning, we want to improve literacy it's not just about language, it

is about all those other things that serve as the foundation for

language and for learning. For too long in Deaf education you have

the teachers, you have the parents which sometimes are involved

and sometimes not. And the research people who do their things in

the laboratory and then preach to you and they go home. It hasn't

worked. It's time for all of these groups, for everybody to work

together, because parents know things about their kids that we

don't know. Teachers know things about their students that we don't

know. And in theory at least I know some stuff about your kids that

you don't. And we have not been sharing that information. That's

new, and I think that's the right path. And the fact that we are all

here this evening says that we're on that path.

So the boss lady says we're going to have a break and we're going

to come back and we going to chat.


KATE: 15 minutes.

(A short break)

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