Simangele Mabena will be defending her PhD dissertation proposal at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, March 11th, at Scarfe Library Block 278 (the building behind the Education Library).
All are welcome to attend.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Maureen Kendrick, Dr. George Belliveau and Dr. Janet Jamieson
Title: Teaching and Learning Together: A study of D/deaf and Hearing Teaching Partnerships in South Africa.
Abstract:
The emergent literacy education of young students relies on the relationship between language acquisition and literacy development. For typically developing hearing children, this process is incidental as access to the dominant spoken language leads to the acquisition of language and subsequently literacy education in schools. This process is dissimilar to a certain degree for D/deaf students. Two paradigms have been the driving forces in the literacy education of young D/deaf students; namely approaches that emphasize listening/spoken language and those that emphasize visual access to language, such as sign language. The choice of paradigm has implications for classroom pedagogy in teaching literacy. For some D/deaf children, quality emergent literacy education includes additional exposure to fluent models of a visual language (sign language) and teachers skilled in modelling both sign language and written text of a spoken language (Moses, Golos, Roemen, & Cregan, 2018). This is the approach used in most educational programs for D/deaf students in South Africa. However, it is a challenge in the South African context for one teacher to possess both the sign (visual) and spoken English (auditory) fluency, so a collaborative team-teaching model between a hearing teacher and D/deaf teaching assistant in teaching South African Sign Language (SASL) has recently been introduced. Nevertheless, in spite of the widespread implementation of this team-teaching partnership, little is known about how it is practiced or how it is perceived by D/deaf and hearing team members. The proposed study will explore the teaching practices between a D/deaf and hearing teacher in teaching emergent SASL literacy. My research question aims to examine how Deaf/hearing teaching teams engage in and perceive team-teaching of SASL? More specifically, this study aims to examine: 1) What actions do D/deaf and hearing teachers participate in while practicing team-teaching? and 2) How do the D/deaf and hearing team-teachers understand their individual roles and contributions in team-teaching?
Through this ethnographic study of deaf education, I will explore this team-teaching partnership through an intersection of social constructivist (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978), critical deaf studies (Kusters, De Meulder, & O’Brien, 2017), and multimodality (Kress, 1997). Within this methodology, I will also generate data with two D/deaf-hearing teaching teams at a South African School for the Deaf, through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, lesson plan documentation, audio/video teacher reflections, and researcher reflection journals. It is hoped that the findings will offer insights into emergent literacy development in young D/deaf students and team-teaching pedagogy in the South African D/deaf education context.
This event will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.