Kristin Snoddon

Technology as a Learning Tool for ASL Literacy

This article discusses the role of technology in supporting ASL literacy. This attention to technology is part of an exploratory study of Deaf elementary school students participating in an ASL identity text project at a bilingual/bicultural school for Deaf students in Ontario, Canada. This study is a contribution to the cross-Canada Multiliteracies project, which proposes a new approach to literacy pedagogy that also includes an increased attention to technological applications. The Ontario ASL curriculum and its use of ASL technology are also elements of this exploratory study.

Equity in education: signed language and the courts

This article examines several legal cases in Canada, the USA, and Australia involving signed language in education for Deaf students. In all three contexts, signed language rights for Deaf students have been viewed from within a disability legislation framework that either does not extend to recognizing language rights in education or that presents obstacles to systemic language planning. The limitations of disability rights legislation in each country is outlined, along with alternate legal arguments for signed language planning in education.

Toward a social relational model of Deaf childhood

This paper advances a social relational model of Deaf childhood as a guiding framework for working with Deaf children in a present-day universal neonatal hearing screening and early intervention context. The authors discuss how Deaf children are contextualized in a medical model discourse, in a social model of Deaf childhood, and in a Deaf culture discourse. A social relational model is then discussed in with reference to a capability approach and to findings from the first author’s study of parents and young children participating in an American Sign Language shared reading program in Ontario, Canada.

Hearing Parents as Plurilingual Learners of ASL

Hearing parents of Deaf children who learn a signed language bring to the task of second language learning unique issues of social identity and investment (Norton Peirce, 1996). In addition, these parents have unique learning needs. In a Canadian context, parents of Deaf children often face distinct systemic, policy, and ideological obstacles to learning signed language. This chapter seeks to advance a framework for parents’ learning goals in light of current understanding of plurilingualism, which is defined as multilingualism at the level of the individual and which recognizes the different purposes, domains, and types of competence that the individual social actor may have in their use of two or more languages (Coste, Moore, & Zarate, 2009). This framework is intended as a response to certain academic and professional perceptions of parents’ learning of signed language as a second language as being unrealistic, unimportant, or contentious.

Uncovering translingual practices in teaching parents classical ASL varieties

ABSTRACT The view of sign languages as bounded systems is often important for deaf community empowerment and for pedagogical practice in terms of supporting deaf children’s language acquisition and second language learners’ communicative competence. Conversely, the notion of translanguaging in the American Sign Language (ASL) community highlights a number of recurring tensions related to standard language ideology and English-based sign systems in deaf education; these tensions can work to obscure the polyglot nature of ASL itself. This paper reports how translingual practices were embedded in an ethnographic action research study of developing and field-testing an ASL curriculum for parents of young deaf children that is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In this study of teaching parents classical ASL varieties, translingual practices were highlighted where ASL and the visual code of English are regularly in contact with and influence each other in signers’ multimodal repertoires. This data illustrate the history of translanguaging in ASL communities and points to the importance of preserving historic deaf community language practices.

Ways of Taking from Books in ASL Book Sharing

Using a multimodal literacies framework, this article describes the teaching goals and strategies of three instructor participants in an ASL book-sharing program. The concept of multimodal literacies views literacy as a social practice where the written mode is embedded in other modes of representation. An ethnographic approach that included participant observation and interviews was taken in a ten-month study of parents, children, and instructors participating in the program. In the study, the written mode was embedded in ASL storytelling and children’s books were themselves multimodal resources that were utilized in distinct ways by the instructor participants.

Deaf time in the twenty-first century: considering rights frameworks and the social relational model of Deaf childhood

Abstract This paper considers Deaf time, or imagined futures of Deaf communities, as we question the efficacy of a rights framework to support the social relational model of Deaf childhood, which positions Deaf children within Deaf cultural discourses. We probe a disability rights discourse where the inclusion movement promotes the right of all children to high quality education and full participation in society. However, there is a gap between rhetoric and practice in early childhood education, which has often been a site of disablement for Deaf children and their families. In addition, legal recognition of the right to sign language in several contexts has not prevented a decline in numbers of Deaf children learning sign language. In planning for future Deaf communities, we examine Deaf cultural childhoods through the development of a parent ASL curriculum that is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The curriculum is contextualized in relation to disability rights, sign language rights, and the rights of children outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The Social Relational Model of Deaf Childhood in Action

Early childhood education and care discourse on inclusion and ‘supports’ presents parents of young deaf children with false options regarding language learning that are not in the best interests of deaf children. The authors argue that the social relational model of deaf childhood can account for differences in children and their communities. The first author’s research, presented here, describes the process of developing an intensive American Sign Language (ASL) curriculum for parents of young deaf children. This curriculum is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Snoddon 2015). The research shows how the social relational model can be put into action for the parents of different deaf children.

Intersectional inclusion for deaf learners: moving beyond General Comment no. 4 on Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the meaning of inclusive education for deaf learners in a way that acknowledges the diversity of learner identities, and outlines problems with normative definitions of inclusive education as advanced by recent interpretations of Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This discussion calls on us to reconsider how the concepts of inclusion and segregation are understood in education for all learners with intersectional identities. We outline the legislative history of the CRPD and Article 24, show the active involvement of deaf advocacy organisations, and highlight contradictions with this history in the CRPD Committee’s recent General Comment No. 4 on Article 24. We provide examples of innovative models of inclusive education for deaf learners that provide an education in sign language and discuss the implications of these arguments for inclusive education as a whole.

It’s a small world: international deaf spaces and encounters: It’s a small world: international deaf spaces and encounters, edited by Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, Washington, DC, Gallaudet University Press, 2015, 306 pp.,

discoveries in genetics’. Such questions capture the degree of uncertainty surrounding the topic of autism to which the author alludes throughout the book. There are, unsurprisingly, wider political threads that run throughout this book – intersecting with and transcending the substantive topics on which specific chapters focus. These include politics relating to race, as Pitney Jr raises questions concerning different rates of diagnosis across racial groups, and the class politics that pervade discussion concerning access to treatments and educational interventions. Here, the context of the United States health system raises specific issues and challenges (such as the navigation of medical insurance systems), the details of which are possibly unfamiliar to readers outside the United States, but are likely to be of interest to autism and wider disability scholars, particularly for those who work within and around the UK National Health Service. Indeed, health-related discourses of autism, along with detailed consideration of ‘cure’ and of specific interventions such as applied behaviour analysis can be said to dominate in this book, with nearly a quarter of its substantive content existing within the chapter entitled ‘Medicine, Science and Math’. It is possible that such a focus on health reflects the wider culture of American autism policy and politics which this book seeks to represent, and to which it speaks, as another review of the book endorsed on the author’s blog describes autism as ‘an ailment whose precise definition is debated in the medical world’, and characterizes autistic people as ‘patients’. This characterization, and the related terminology used within the book itself may represent a challenge, not least for those members of the autistic community (mentioned briefly by Pitney Jr) who conceive of their autism as a facet of identity rather than a health issue or ‘ailment’ in need of cure. In this sense, however, The Politics of Autism does achieve something important in setting out and summarizing some current authoritative political discourses surrounding autism, and providing a springboard for future discussion and debate so that, as Pitney Jr himself concludes, ‘After decades of talking about autism as a deficit of communication, people who make and study policy should listen to autistic people speak for themselves’ (p. 122).