Higher Education for the Deaf in Japan and the U.S.

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The hearing impairment division of TCT (Tsukuba college of technology) and NTID (National Technical Institute for the Deaf), the higher education institutions for the youth with hearing impairment in Japan and in the United States, have made a cooperative research on the educational activities for three years since 1994. We focused our research on four dimensions and came to conclusions as follows :(1) Actual states of the students and the curriculumTo cope with the great diversity of academic level and language acquisition of the students, we should develop pre-matriculation programs to make the students to realize their aptitude and their aims, and individual educational programs at the basic academic level before they enter the specialized program.(2) Educational method to compensate the handicapTo compensate the handicap in the academic situation, useful and necessary things to be further studied are better orientation of the real-time captioning system, introducing e-mail, cu-see-me and functional calculator, and to develop a system to evaluate communication skills.(3) Career development and social circumstancesQuestionnaires to the deaf workers found that the communication environment is improving by diffusing e-mail, but the problems of delay of promotion and labor condition would be more serious. We need an employment center in our college to apply the problems.(4) Changing their awareness through the students' exchanging program13EA09 : Sharing the same experiences as the handicapped, the students in two countries opened their eyes to the different cultures and change their awareness of their lives, studies and handicaps. Exchanging e-mail would make this program more active and be a strong motivation for our students to learn English ans ASL.Through our three years' activity, the faculties of TCT and NTID exchanged ideas regularly. This strong connection itself would be significant for the development of higher education for the hearing impaired in Japan.