Peer to Peer Deaf Multiliteracies: research into a sustainable approach to education of Deaf children and young adults in the Global South

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The exclusion of deaf children and young adults from access to school systems in the developing world results in individuals and communities being denied quality education; this not only leads to unemployment, underemployment, low income, and a high risk of poverty, but also represents a needless waste of human talent and potential. To target this problem, this project extends work conducted under a pilot project addressing issues of literacy education with young deaf people in the Global South. Creating, implementing and evaluating our innovative intervention based on the peer teaching of English literacy through sign language-based tutoring, everyday real life texts such as job application forms, and the use of a bespoke online resource, enabled us to generate a sustainable, cost-effective and learner-directed way to foster literacy learning amongst deaf individuals. To reach further target groups and conduct more in-depth research, the present project extends our work to new groups of learners in India, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda and Nepal, both in primary schools (ca 60 children in India, Ghana, and Uganda) and with young adult learners (ca 100 learners in interventions, plus ca 60 young adults in scoping workshops in Nepal and Rwanda). In the targeted countries, marginalisation begins in schools, since many have no resources for teaching through sign language, even though this is the only fully accessible language to a deaf child. This project intends to examine how we can change some of the dynamics that contribute to this, by involving deaf individuals in the design of new teaching approaches, and by using children and young people's everyday experiences and existing literacy practices as the basis for their learning. Participants in such a programme will not only develop English literacy, but "multiliteracies", i.e. skills in sign languages, technology, written English, gesture, mouthing, and other forms of multimodal communication. Developing a multilingual toolkit is an essential element of multiliteracies. Being 'literate' in the modern world involves a complex set of practices and competencies and engagement with various modes (e.g. face-to-face, digital, remote), increasing one's abilities to act independently. Our emphases on active learning, contextualised assessments and building portfolios to document progress will increase the benefit to deaf learners in terms of their on-going educational and employment capacity. Apart from the actual teaching and interventions, the research also investigates factors in existing systems of educational provisions for deaf learners and how these may systematically undermine and isolate deaf communities and their sign languages. Our analyses will identify the local dynamics of cultural contexts that our programmes and future initiatives need to address and evaluate in order to be sustainable. One challenge we encountered in the pilot was the lack of trained deaf peer tutors. There is a need for investment in local capacity building and for the creation of opportunities and pathways for deaf people to obtain formal qualifications. Therefore, at least four deaf project staff will enrol on an MA programme in Applied Linguistics/TESOL at our partner institution in India. We will develop training in literacy teaching and in research methods for all deaf project staff.We will also develop and adapt appropriate assessment tools and metrics to confirm what learning has taken place and how, with both children and young adults. This includes adapting the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) for young deaf adult learners and the 'Language Ladder' for deaf children so that we use locally-valid test criteria. To document progress in more detail and in relation to authentic, real life literacy demands we need to create our own metrics, which we will do by using portfolio based assessments that are learner-centred and closely linked to the local curricula.