Multimodal Transduction in Deaf Pedagogy - Skyer (2022)

Deaf students are often positioned as outsiders with regard to academic writing. The recent turn away from “literature” or “language arts” and toward composition and rhetoric in many academic departments has isolated deaf/Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing students who often lack the sophisticated jargon of academic composition as well as the conceptual framework for rhetoric and academic argument (Hermsen and Franklin, 2008). By using hybrid forms of multimodal literacy, K-12 teachers can employ radically different tools that are designed to foster greater inclusion and autonomy by positioning students as authentic creators of new knowledge in a variety of languages and communication modes. This study is based on three years worth of in-depth qualitative interviews with deaf college students regarding their learning processes, language acquisition strategies, and attitudes necessary for success in composition/rhetoric/academic writing. Data are sourced from student-produced personal reflections (in ASL and English) following a 1-semester course in college composition. This study employs the theoretical lenses of Deaf Gain (Bauman and Murray, 2014; 2013) and social multimodality (Kress, 2010) to clarify its claims. This study relies on qualitative methodologies, including discourse analysis (Gee, 2014) and autoethnography (Denizen, 2014) to synthesize emergent themes from multiple cohorts of deaf adolescent youth becoming acculturated to academic prose. The findings from this inductive analysis are then mapped out and applied to K-12 education in a variety of settings. Considerations and themes emphasize the use of social and interactive methods for learning and highlight the importance of using digitally mediated, multimodal tools to teach academic rhetoric. The study also notes the importance of facilitating motivation in student learning, and the overarching need for devising and curating visual strategies for teaching deaf students working in sign, speech, print, and other visual media. Additional themes include the complex nature of identity development in the writing process and note the importance of intersectionality with regard to deafness, disability, language, and culture. Finally, implications for using the above themes as vectors for teaching and learning in K-12 settings are discussed. This exploratory study reiterates the need for educators to engage in authentic dialogue with students throughout the educational process and indicates that multimodal communication frameworks are ethically, theoretically, and empirically sound approaches to deaf literacy development at all stages of deaf education.

Critical Education, 2020

Abstract From a critical pedagogy standpoint, we examined a bilingual (American Sign Language [ASL] and English) video-publication titled "Seizing Academic Power." The video-publication explores interactions of power and knowledge in deaf education and research and proposes tools to subvert ableism and deficit ideologies within them. By centralizing multiple visuospatial modalities, the video-publication's medium is also its message. Qualitative data were produced and analyzed via structured coding cycles then interpreted through two theoretical frameworks focused on culture and aesthetics in critical pedagogy. Our analysis highlights conflicts at the nexus of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology of deaf education and research. Findings reveal how deaf students gain and develop critical consciousness within the classroom, depending on their teachers' conceptions of marginalized cultures, use of signed languages, and multimodal knowledge, all of which modulate power and ethics in deaf pedagogy and research about it. Our study concludes with implications for ASL video-publications for teacher-training in deaf higher education and in research production and dissemination.

Understanding how deaf educators conceptualize, design, and apply visual modalities in teaching, and why they use them, is a practical concern for all stakeholders in deaf education. The central problem this research focuses on is a lack of empirical evidence and theory about how and why deaf educators use visual modes in teaching. There is a high demand for and low supply of theoretical tools to guide visual pedagogies in deaf educational contexts. This problem constrains researchers and educators who seek to reform the field and exacerbates complex problems related to deaf students’ learning. Through this research, I intend to gather, interpret, and link empirical evidence on visual teaching with strengths-based research on deaf students’ visual abilities. Thus, I propose two research questions: How do deaf educators understand, construct, and evaluate deaf visual pedagogy? And, How do deaf educators engage with praxis using deaf visual pedagogy? Historically, robust value conflicts surrounding deafness and vision—such as disagreements about senses, cognition, language, and power—obscure research which connects them. My research will draw upon such conflicts productively to address the problem space. One benefit to these conflicts is that, even after decades of research, opportunities exist to investigate how and why educators use and theorize visual tools and discourses with deaf learners. We know that vision is used in complex ways but lack sophisticated knowledge of its dynamic interactions in learning and teaching of subject matter. This proposal establishes a qualitative research design using case study and grounded theory methods to examine conflicting issues about how and why vision is used in deaf pedagogy. Throughout, I argue that the visual constitutes the center of deafness. Educating deaf ocularcentric people demands visual pedagogy—an imperative based on the principle of biosocial adaptation. Deaf visual pedagogy is a situated method of teaching in which deaf educators use visual discourses and visual tools in teaching praxis. Deaf visual pedagogy explicitly rejects deficit ideology about deafness in teaching theory and practices. Vision is a regenerative biosocial adaptation rooted in deaf ocularcentric ontology and deaf visual epistemology. This proposal illustrates four paradigms of deaf research but focuses on the emergent biosocial paradigm, which challenges previous paradigms due to its ecological structure and concern for the practical effects of visual theory on teaching and research axiology (ethics, bioethics, and aesthetics). Biosocial deaf education illustrates ecological relationships between biological and social processes of vision in both deaf pedagogy and research about it. This analysis contributes to the literature by clarifying issues of dissensus in deaf education research on teaching by generating novel concepts useful toward understanding vision as a dynamic valence for conceptual, theoretical, and methodological frameworks.

Research on deaf students using digital technology in higher education shows that communication modality is an important feature of learning and teaching; distinct modes exert synergistic influences upon other modes, which affects communication practices for both students and faculty. This paper establishes deaf digital learning platforms (DDLPs) and categorizes them under three broad headings: (1) purposes, (2) practices, and (3) characteristics. This paper uses multimodal theory to reveal the nuances of communication practices and tools used by deaf people in digital learning environments in order to clarify the diffuse work represented in the literature. Multimodality illuminates dynamic communication practices and reveals new tools for researchers and practitioners to design and reflect upon pedagogical practice. Deaf technological communications are embedded in larger contexts of, social, political, and educational change; this paper contextualizes multimodal deaf communication as part of the digital paradigm shift effecting higher education, knowledge creation, and pedagogical practices. This paper illustrates how deaf students engage with digital learning and to what ends; however, the primary argument of the paper is to propose a complete reworking of deaf education through multimodal analysis, so that educators can better understand the complex relationships between communication mode, digital higher education, and foundational characteristics of deaf student learning.

Since at least the time of Aristotle, vigorous debates have positioned the status of ‘images’ in communication—with one camp asserting that images are appeals to our baser yearnings and the other arguing that images are fundamental to consciousness and social reality (Knight, 2013). Gunther Kress asks: What is the role of imagery in social communication? Considered as the founder of multimodal communication and social semiotics theory, Kress’s work is foundational to inquiry situated at the intersection of language and image in social communication (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010). Kress’ multimodality theory adds analytic clarity for those interested in the power that images have in education. Kress suggests that education is an aesthetic experience greater than the sum of its parts (Cherryholmes, 1999; Kress, 2010). Along with Kress, I wonder how the aesthetics of education can be explained vis-à-vis multimodal theories of knowledge representation and construction. This scholar-author study hopes to answer the following question: How has Kress’s theory of multimodality used in education, and how has it changed over time? The goal of this paper is to better understand how multimodality clarifies the ‘doing’ of teaching using images in conjunction with language. My work in deaf education is aspires to understand how images can be leveraged as communicational tools in the pedagogical process. I wish to unpack Kress’s theory so that I can better understand how images are positioned relative to language in general research before digging into the specific ontological and epistemological differences that characterize how deaf students learn and how deaf educators use images, gestures, icons, and other multimodal visual representations in their work.

INKLUSI, 2018

Bahasa Inggris Deaf students need special treatment for gaining communication skills. Regarding this problem, there has been a new method called Maternal Reflective Method (also known as MRM) that encourages the deaf students to speak using their articulation organs simultaneously with the Indonesian Sign Language. This study aims to discover how nonverbal communication, including touch, body movement, and paralanguage are implemented in a teaching-learning discourse in the kindergarten classroom for the deaf children. The method used by the teacher in delivering the teaching material is the main focus to see the variation of pedagogic multimodal resources. The modes found are also scrutinized due to their communicative implication nature; in regard to Jakobson's framework on the language functions: referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, and poetic. The results indicate that most of the time the teacher uses multimodal resources for commanding, prohibiting, and inviting the students in relation to the conative function of language.

Diffractions, 2023

In American Sign Language (ASL), Transgressing the Object IV: Critical Pedagogy (2012) depicts a cinematic form of critical deaf pedagogy. The videotext conceptualizes inequities of power and knowledge in deaf education by analyzing intersections of audism (antideaf oppression) with sexism and ageism. As the participants construct individual and collective deaf epistemologies, they generate egalitarian counter-narratives. To interpret these pluralist discourses, I describe a decisive role for deaf epistemologies in critical deaf pedagogy. I do this by using a theoretical framework about Deaf Culture in teaching and deaf aesthetics in learning. I also illustrate three analytic findings showing: 1) how culturally revitalizing deaf pedagogies are established, 2) how power/knowledge is shared in equitable heterarchies, and 3) the benefits of educational interactions with deaf aesthetics (e.g., classroom architecture, sign language metaphors, and embodied multimodality). Finally, I juxtapose my findings against a conceptual framework about deaf people who use self-determination to struggle for legitimation.

DELTA, 2023

This article reports on a preliminary investigation into the language practices of three groups of deaf learners of English, all users of British Sign Language (BSL), and myself as their tutor in an adult education setting. These practices were explored through the lens of translanguaging, viewed as both a description of a linguistic process, and a theory of language, to learn more about how we draw on the totality of our resources to communicate and make meaning. The purpose of this investigation was to learn more about how BSL and English are used together in the same context and how that interplay works to our advantage. Additionally, consideration was also given to the contribution manually-coded English systems such as Sign Supported English (SSE) and Signed English (SE) make, together with the other written and sign languages, as well as

Profile Issues in Teachers Professional Development, 2011

This paper reports a study carried out with eleven deaf volunteers who belonged to different academic programs at a Colombian public university but did not receive English instruction as part of their professional training. The main goal of the research study was to identify the effect of using Internet resources as support for the design and development of a blended English course for deaf university students. The data were collected by means of surveys, artifacts, logs and a recorded interview to understand what worked well for deaf students and what barriers could interfere with their English learning. The study revealed some insights into the learning process of deaf students and their preference for collaborative learning and tasks linked to visual media.

Deaf education, for far too long has been a contentious field, one which researchers, practitioners and policy makers have repeatedly convoluted. What is known is that Deaf students learn in ways that are different from their hearing peers; therefore, pedagogy for deaf students should be different from pedagogies for hearing persons. Approaching Deaf education within a Deaf Epistemology framework and in an explicitly aesthetic/visual way (through various dimensions of aesthetic), should allow students to gain full advantage of the various materials, tools and artifacts that are used in the literacy classroom. Deaf educators can maximize deaf student comprehension of classroom content by better understanding aesthetic/visual considerations, which can be used then to new effect in the literacy classroom. Research to date has yet to clarify what it means for a deaf person to be a “visual learner” in a systematic way. This inquiry seeks to challenge this notion and elicit pragmatic guidelines to inform literacy instruction.