Rebooting Deaf Ed

Photos By Dan Watkins

The first sound we hear is our mother’s voice. While still in utero, we begin to absorb language and respond to familiar sounds. When we are infants, our caregivers sing nursery rhymes and read us stories. By the time we get to kindergarten, we have a foundation in our native language—which school helps us hone through play and practice.

Deaf children have a different experience.

More than 24,000 children are born with hearing loss in the United States each year, over 90 percent of them to hearing parents. From the moment a hospital screening reveals the news, parents—particularly hearing parents—are at a disadvantage for helping their children acquire language. The lack of support programs for parents of deaf children means they often struggle to learn American Sign Language (ASL), which would help them communicate with their children. In the meantime, a deaf child misses out on all the language learning a hearing child naturally acquires from birth.

“Teachers are starving for something that works, something that makes sense, something that respects both the ASL and English skills.” —Todd Czubek

When they enter kindergarten at a school for the deaf, children will be instructed in English, with curricula originally designed for hearing students. As a result, deaf students struggle to achieve fluency in either English or ASL, with long-term consequences for higher education and employment.

To help these students, Boston University School of Education (SED) faculty are developing bilingual programming, which they are beginning to roll out at Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HMS) in Allston, Massachusetts, as well as in other schools for the deaf throughout the world. “Teachers are starving for something that works, something that makes sense, something that respects both the ASL and English skills,” says Todd Czubek (SED’92,’98, GRS’17), a deaf studies instructor. His own experience using inadequate teaching methods for deaf students inspired him to develop a solution: the Bilingual Grammar Curriculum: ASL & English.

A SCAFFOLD FOR ENGLISH

As an elementary school teacher in New Mexico in the 1990s, Czubek found it difficult to support his students in both ASL and English. “For the first few years, the lack of progress they were making was really frustrating,” he says. “Eventually, I realized that it can’t be them. It’s got to be something I’m doing that’s not right.” He took a hard look at the curriculum.

In the absence of a formal bilingual curriculum, teachers often adapt lesson plans and materials designed for hearing children—and they’re not a good fit. Those materials do not help students learn English; they teach hearing children about English by helping them practice spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. Deaf students, who do not have that language foundation, require a different approach that takes into account their individual skill levels, as well as the structure of both ASL and English.

ASL relies on hand positioning in spatial relationship to the body, and is nuanced with movement of the torso, head, and facial features. It’s a poly-componential language, in which many elements can be expressed simultaneously. In the sentence “The dog is extremely big,” for example, the adverb (extremely) occurs concurrently with the adjective (big), painting a complete picture of the dog. In contrast, English is a linear language, in which the adjective follows the verb, constructing an image of the dog in stages. To learn English as a second language, it’s necessary to understand how the visual, spatial structure of ASL translates into the linear structure of English. The challenge in developing a formal bilingual curriculum is to address this inherent translation conundrum, and turn it from a roadblock into an advantage.

The Bilingual Grammar Curriculum, which Czubek is writing in collaboration with Kristin Di Perri (SED’04), a part-time instructor at SED, uses ASL as a scaffold on which to build English as a second language. Fluency in both languages is vital, and complementary, Czubek says. Because ASL is structurally different from English—or from any spoken language—using ASL to teach English as a second language requires a curriculum tailored to deaf students. No one has developed such a bilingual curriculum before because there are so few teachers of the deaf, and even fewer researchers who focus on curriculum development for this population, says Maritza Ciliberto (SED’91,’93,’95), the principal at HMS. “We need more people, more researchers, more curriculum developers” like Czubek and Di Perri to pursue this work.

PUTTING IT TO THE TEST

Czubek and Di Perri are basing this curriculum on a program they developed at the Scranton School for Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing Children in Pennsylvania, in collaboration with the Learning Center for the Deaf’s Center for Research and Training in Framingham, Massachusetts. (The center is run by Robert Hoffmeister, an SED associate professor emeritus of deaf studies.) Between 1999 and 2004, they instituted an intensive bilingual curriculum at the school, which yielded “consistently incredible” results, Czubek says. “The vast majority of the students in the program for at least five years were performing at or above levels of English proficiency and general knowledge. I can’t emphasize enough that the one factor that was indispensable was length of time in the program. Language learning takes time.”

The Bilingual Grammar Curriculum, which builds on the Scranton program, includes six levels comprising approximately eight years of instruction, in which ASL and English teachers team-teach. Students study grammar, composition, comprehension, and vocabulary in both languages. “Very few schools that we know of have taught ASL as a formal class,” Di Perri says. “ASL class is intended, like English class, to look at the language, take it apart, and look at the constituent parts, how they fit together, and how they build on each other.” The curriculum begins with sentence structure, which “undergirds everything in writing, in reading, speaking and signing,” Di Perri says.

The curriculum builds grammar from that fundamental structure, drawing in other elements of language to demonstrate how they work in the context of a sentence. The students watch interactive ASL videos of signed sentences on iPads; when asked to find the subject, for example, they pause the video at the appropriate spot, much like hearing students would circle the subject of a written sentence. Once students understand a concept in ASL, they will then complete the same exercises in English, which “takes a fraction of the time because now the student understands it,” Di Perri says.

Czubek and Di Perri have developed three of the six levels and aim to complete the entire curriculum by 2019. They are collaborating with HMS and 17 other schools for the deaf throughout the United States, and in Singapore and Trinidad (to which they connected by word of mouth), to roll out the lesson plans as they are finalized. As he and his colleagues have started implementing this curriculum, Czubek says, “What we’ve seen over and over from both ASL and English teachers is that they say they finally have a guide.” And in just the last year, during which elements of the curriculum have been implemented at HMS, “the kids are really developing their skills,” says Megan Malzkuhn (SED’16), an ASL specialist at the school. “We’re seeing their ability to become more critical thinkers improve, as well as their writing.”

Czubek and Di Perri intend for this curriculum to encourage more people to develop resources for teaching ASL as a first language, and to incentivize state and federal organizations to create more programming that promotes the progress of deaf children.

IT STARTS AT HOME

Teachers can only take literacy so far; the success of programs like the Bilingual Grammar Curriculum also depends on what happens at home, before kids even get to school, Czubek says. Scranton School educators found that students whose parents could communicate with them using ASL entered kindergarten with a solid foundation in language, and learned English more easily than children who had not been exposed to ASL from birth. “This language experience is not something parents get an instruction kit for, so we need to do a better job of supporting parents to complement what happens in school,” Czubek says. “We need to give them the resources they need, because all parents want their kids to be successful.”

To give parents a boost, Czubek and his colleagues are developing early language literature for deaf children. Hearing children grow up with nursery rhymes, stories, songs, and poems—like “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—through which they begin constructing a language from birth. This body of literature encourages “us to practice language over and over and over again in a variety of ways,” Czubek says. “We develop memory skills and play with patterns and do fundamental work that leads to more and more sophisticated literacy skills.” There is limited early language literature for deaf children, however, which puts them at a disadvantage upon entering school.

In collaboration with the Early Childhood Education Program at HMS, and with support from a BU Consortium Grant, Czubek, Malzkuhn, and their colleague Alice Pascall-Speights, a teacher at HMS, are designing ASL literature that follows visually based patterns and will be made available as videos and live performances. For instance, an ASL story for preschoolers may be presented as an interactive performance that incorporates drums so the children will feel how the rhythms are organized and participate by stomping along. Czubek says building up this body of early childhood literature will help deaf children “reap the same kinds of rewards as hearing kids, establishing the foundation of literacy,” on which deaf children can build to bilingualism.