Post on 15-Aug-2020
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 1
Australian Office
PO Box 265
Cleveland, QLD
Australia 4163
Phone +61 7 3286 3901 Mobile 0402010002 / +61 402010002
http://bradleyreporting.com
ABN 71908 010 981
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.
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 2
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 3
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 4
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 5
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 6
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 7
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 8
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 9
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 10
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 11
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 12
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,
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 13
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.
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 14
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 15
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'.
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 16
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.
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 17
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 18
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 19
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
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 20
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.
Draft Caption Notes by Bradley Reporting 2013 Page 21
KATE: 15 minutes.
(A short break)