Joanne Weber

This paper examines the ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments of a deaf-led team, which informs their implementation of story dramas with deaf preschoolers in a Western Canadian preschool. A bimodal bilingual teaching team co-constructed a story drama delivery model for deaf children based on training provided by the researcher to the instructional staff at the preschool. The training presented story drama interventions originally developed with hearing preschoolers and elementary students. To examine the ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments of the deaf-led instructional team, the researcher observed how the deaf-led team applied the training to their story dramas delivery to their deaf preschool students. Multimodal discourse analysis of video recorded classroom sessions of story dramas with deaf preschoolers revealed how the deaf-led team provided a strong ocularcentric, multimodal, and interactive approach to story drama, which differed significantly from the training model developed from sources on story dramas for non-deaf children. The study also included interviews with the deaf-led instructional team, which were coded according to themes arising from the interviews. The study interviews explore the deaf-led team’s perceptions of the impact of their delivery of three story dramas on their deaf students, reporting significant changes in their students, including increased linguistic production, development of concepts, collaborative behaviors, and social and emotional development. The study recommends a deaf story drama training model for deaf preschoolers according to deaf ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments of deaf-led instructors and teams.

Spatial skills, while vital to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) fields, are fundamental to understanding all mathematics. Yet the absence of spatial development in elementary curricula, particularly geometry, where such skills can be deeply explored, is compounded by a lack of theoretical and empirical research, especially in deaf education, where little research addresses learners’ spatial-geometric understandings and the ways their bodies contribute to developing such understandings. We first review relevant literature to interrelate mathematics, spatial activity, and embodied cognition with aesthetics for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) in deaf education. We then present a case study in which we observed and assessed Evan, a deaf student, as he worked on three geometry tasks. This video-based research utilises the Pirie–Kieren Theory/Model to further consider the aesthetic, spatially dynamic, and embodied ways that Evan’s geometric understandings emerged and evolved into more formal mathematical activity. Finally, we discuss the ways the study findings focused on spatial-geometric development support future STEAM education research and classroom mathematics towards growth-oriented learning for deaf students.

Deaf aesthetics is a theoretical framework we actualized to enhance interactions in deaf education, particularly via multimodal pedagogy and curricular experiences. Prior research illustrates that deaf aesthetics are desired by deaf teachers and students who are deaf; however, most instructional-delivery formats lack these supports. The present mixed-methodology, multi-method case study is an empirical evaluation of how deaf aesthetics contributed to the process of redesigning a course, including major revisions to instructional slide decks (e.g., PowerPoint, Google Slides, Prezi). The research question we examined is: How can instructional designers and university educators effectively design and use deaf aesthetics and multimodal curricula and pedagogies to prompt and sustain educational interactions with deaf or deafblind learners and teachers?

In this paper, I provide an arts-based posthumanist cartography of a theatre play, Apple Time performed by deaf youth in Regina, Saskatchewan. This play was co-constructed by deaf youth performers, two deaf adults, a hearing teacher, and a hearing director. Apple Time premiered in Regina, Saskatchewan on June 2, 2018, and was remounted again at the Globe Theatre (Regina) in February 2019 and again at the SoundOff Festival in Edmonton, Alberta. The arts-based cartography examines intelligibility as a methodological problem as posited by Graif (2018), in which the actions of deaf children and youth often remain invisible due to the ontological position that perception of the world is predicated upon the ability to hear. Intelligibility as a methodological problem poses a challenge to the deficit perspective commonly held by families and service providers working with deaf children and youth (Glickman & Hall, 2019). The performers in this play were able to re-align audience perceptions through the presentation of their inner worlds and preoccupations, thereby making their multiple deaf worlds more intelligible.

Los entornos cambiantes plantean retos para la formación y, de manera muy especial, para la inclusión educativa de personas con dificultades auditivas y visuales. ¿De qué forma la educación abierta y las tecnologías digitales y flexibles pueden aportar vías para inclusión en el marco de la complejidad? El objetivo del estudio fue analizar posibilidades de educación abierta y tecnologías, por medio de identificar prácticas actuales, retos y posibilidades, con miras a proponer un modelo inclusivo y abierto en el marco de la complejidad para el futuro de la educación. El método fue diseño basado en investigación, donde se aplicaron cuestionarios a 390 participantes en el contexto de un programa de educación abierta e inclusiva. El análisis de datos dan cuenta de (a) prácticas actuales como libros electrónicos, cursos formativos y lenguaje de señas; (b) identificación de los retos de recursos educativos abiertos (REA) de calidad, políticas de apoyo a la inclusión y diversidad, y modelos de sostenibilidad de los REA, para desarrollar materiales digitales accesibles y abiertos, y (c) los componentes de un modelo educativo abierto para la inclusión que contempla elementos estratégicos para el futuro de la educación y tecnologías emergentes e innovadoras. El estudio pretende ser de valor para profesores, formadores, desarrolladores, tomadores de decisiones, interesados en nuevas posibilidades para la educación abierta e inclusiva.

While translanguaging occurs in the homes of deaf people and their hearing family members who do not sign or possess limited signing skills, in this article we argue that translanguaging alone does not explain the complex, domestic-sphere language experiences of three young, newcomer artists in Saskatchewan, Canada. We frame our inquiry around the “dinner table experience” phenomenon, wherein deaf family members receive partial or little access to conversational exchanges. At the dinner table, which is both a literal setting and a metaphor for exclusion experienced by deaf people in audiocentric cultures, many deaf family members report feeling loved yet disconnected. However, translanguaging serves to expand linguistic repertoires among hearing and deaf interlocutors amidst the dinner table experience. We draw from three interviews with deaf youth who describe the dinner table experience through both dialogue and art making, including descriptions of ways in which communication is facilitated or not facilitated, thereby highlighting available and unavailable translanguaging practices in the domestic sphere. The interview data suggest that the dinner table experience is a significant setting for translanguaging, and that promoting accessible and equitable translanguaging practices in the home remains a significant challenge, especially when combined with newcomer lived experience that does not always match current descriptions of translanguaging. We posit that translanguaging is a necessary practice among hearing and deaf persons at the table that can and should be expanded to consider the intersectional experiences of communicators in this literal and metaphorical setting.

“Dinner table experience” describes the uniquely crip affect evoked by deaf and disabled people’s childhood memories of sitting at the dinner table, witnessing conversations unfolding around them, but without them. Drawing on 11 prairie-based deaf and/or disabled artists’ dinner table experiences, four researcher-artivist authors map a critical bricolage of prairie-based deaf and disabled art from the viewpoint of a metaphorical dinner table set up beneath the wide-skyed “flyover province” of Saskatchewan. Drawing on a non-linear, associative-thinking-based timespan that begins with Tracy Latimer’s murder and includes a contemporary telethon, this article charts the settler colonial logics of normalcy and struggles over keeping up with urban counterparts that make prairie-based deaf and disability arts unique. In upholding an affirmative, becoming-to-know prairie-based crip art and cultural ethos using place-based orientations, the authors point to the political possibilities of artmaking and (re)worlding in the space and place of the overlooked.