Miss-Delectable
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2004
- Messages
- 17,160
- Reaction score
- 7
A Study Of Adaptation - Education - RedOrbit
It's about 11 a.m., and Anne Nutt is teaching a vocabulary lesson to a group of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders at the American School for the Deaf.
As the class looks on, she projects words onto an overhead screen, using American Sign Language to reinforce the lesson and explain the meaning of phrases such as "deep-rooted."
The students are energized. They respond in sign language, their fingers moving with ease and fluidity to relay letters, words and symbols.
Then Nutt speaks to her students, asking questions. And a few students, with the aid of innovative technology, are able to hear her voice.
Some timidly and some more adeptly, these students respond by speaking, too, straddling two very different worlds of communication.
This is deaf education in the 21st century.
Since the 1980s, technological tools such as digital hearing aids, FM transmitters and cochlear implants -- and a lengthy, sometimes divisive dispute in the deaf community over their use -- have transformed the landscape of deaf education and deaf culture.
At the 191-year-old American School for the Deaf, the cradle of deaf education in the country, teachers use sign language but include visual projectors, computer software and their own voices to teach hearing-impaired students with a wide range of abilities and needs.
Yet, in this most prosperous and education obsessed community, teachers like Nutt toil in near anonymity as they break new ground in a challenging field.
Elementary Learning
It's 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.
For the first 15 minutes of her day, Becky Peters follows a familiar ritual of helping her kindergarten students -- some of whom have arrived from as far away as Danbury and Bridgeport -- fish out the components of their cochlear implants and hearing aids from their backpacks and coat pockets, making sure all the parts are in working order.
Shielding her mouth with a sheet of paper to keep the children from reading her lips, Peters hisses and makes other sounds, which her students try to mimic, as a gauge of what they can hear. A subtle electronic tone -- feedback -- fills the room.
Six of Peters' seven students have cochlear implants, which provide some sense of sound through a surgically implanted electronic device under the skin and external components such as a transmitter, microphone and speech processor. The cochlea is the spiral-shaped part of the inner ear that contains the sensory organ for hearing.
On this chilly morning, one of the students has left a critical, external component of the implant at home: a small, fragile piece of hardware worth thousands of dollars, not much larger than a cellphone earpiece.
He will have to communicate with his teacher and classmates through sign language and lip reading. His classmates, an energetic bunch of kids aged 5 to 7 in a brightly lit room with big windows, small tables and tiny chairs, seamlessly adapt to the differences in hearing and communication abilities among one another.
Along with common kindergarten challenges like student outbursts, bad manners, short attention spans and occasional crying, Peters daily handles a range of hearing, speaking and learning abilities.
She also says deaf students don't usually enter these classrooms with the same level of skills and preparation as hearing children.
"What I want them to have here is I want them to be able to communicate," said Peters, a first-year teacher who taught in Delaware and Pennsylvania before coming to the school, known as ASD.
On this day, Peters guides her students through basic reading and counting exercises and a discussion of the holiday season. She works not only on teaching words and phrases but on explaining their meaning and significance.
"Teachers of the deaf have to teach the experiences," said Edward F. Peltier, the school's executive director and a 35-year veteran of deaf education.
Another challenge, teachers say, is keeping students focused. Because deaf students rely heavily on their vision for class activities, teachers are mindful of fatigue.
Deaf students, teachers will tell you, don't have the option to daydream, to visually tune out a teacher yet still catch their instructions. So keeping the students' attention for several hours a day requires some creativity and innovation.
Peters keeps her students on task by giving them coins. Behave well, get a coin; behave badly, lose your coin.
When she needs her students to pay attention immediately, she or an assistant will flash the room's lights.
And when her class needs a break, they often go next door to visit with students attending ASD's preschool and day care program to burn up energy and interact with some hearing children, who are open to enroll in the ASD preschool.
The children dance and jump and bask in a flurry of bubbles. Peters' students don't miss a beat.
The students -- both hearing and deaf -- even play what they call "the hat game," a different take on musical chairs in which children walk in circles and pick up a hat when music stops.
This particular game comes down to two preschoolers -- both with the ability to hear -- and one of Peters' students with a cochlear implant.
Her student wins.
Transformation
When Donna Blain arrived at ASD 15 years ago, there were perhaps two students with cochlear implants.
This year, more than 40 of the school's 200-plus students have the implants -- and the number seems to grow weekly. Dozens more use other types of hearing aids.
"We've got a totally different population," said Blain, a cochlear implant audiologist at the school. "You're teaching deaf kids for 200 years and it's 'boom!'"
ASD staff members said the rise of tools like cochlear implants -- and the years of cultural debate on the pros and cons of using technology to aid hearing -- has prompted them to adapt their mission.
In the 20 years since cochlear implants gained government approval, the historically tight-knit deaf community has grappled with the technology. Outspoken critics of the implants view them as an affront, as carrying the implication that there is something wrong, that a deaf person somehow needs to be "fixed."
Proponents, while admitting results vary for each person, say the implants allows them to more easily connect and communicate with parents, family and mainstream society.
In 2000, the National Association of the Deaf released a landmark position paper that outlined the pros and cons for cochlear implants and urged the deaf culture, parents of deaf children, educators and leaders to carefully evaluate who should consider getting an implant:
"The NAD recognizes all technological advancements with the potential to foster, enhance, and improve the quality of life of all deaf and hard of hearing persons. ... The role of the cochlear implant in this regard is evolving and will certainly change in the future. Cochlear implants are not appropriate for all deaf and hard of hearing children and adults. Cochlear implantation is a technology that represents a tool to be used in some forms of communication, and not a cure for deafness. ... While there are some successes with implants, success stories should not be over-generalized to every individual."
For ASD staff and students, the controversy and continuing dialogue over the use of technology has translated into a clear mission: Help families make the best decisions.
"If we give kids and their families the tools to make appropriate, good choices, we're really being successful," Peltier said.
For students like Narelis Perez, 14, a Waterbury resident and ninth-grader at ASD who got a cochlear implant when she was 10, the emerging technology has allowed her to connect with the mainstream world. She said she even has a favorite sound -- the phone ringing in her house.
Born deaf to hearing parents of Dominican descent, Narelis said the implant has allowed her to better communicate with her mother, with whom she also tries to speak in Spanish, their family's native language.
"It makes me feel like a whole person," Narelis said.
Her success with an implant is not unique at ASD. But for every student like her that thrives and succeeds, there are many others who reject the technology as cumbersome, uncomfortable, impractical and even unattractive.
School officials are quick to say that results vary for those who opt to get a cochlear implant.
Joey Ronan, a high school student at ASD, decided to stop using the implant he got as a child.
"There was no reason to speak," he explained. "I'm deaf and that's it."
Changing Role
After spending ninth, 10th and part of 11th grade at Platt High School in Meriden, Jessica Schwabe is back at ASD, where she is a junior.
Jessica started attending ASD at age 3. She got a cochlear implant when she was 12, and when it came time for high school, she was curious to experience a school community outside of ASD. With the support of her family, she decided to attend public school and enter into the mainstream.
At Platt, she made friends. She communicated with ease and used her voice. She did well in the classroom, earning a 3.97 GPA. She played on the softball team.
But Jessica, who attended every class period except lunch and physical education with a sign language interpreter, ultimately decided to return to ASD.
"Before I left here, I wanted to go to public school to compare," she said. "I wanted to communicate with hearing people."
Her experience mirrors that of many students at ASD who now go back and forth between this institution and mainstream schools.
Peltier, who taught at ASD in the 1960s, said the institution's role in teaching the deaf began changing three decades ago, when Congress transformed the way public schoolsteach special education students. That triggered years of significant change for ASD's role and its mission.
Students like Jessica, who once would have enrolled at the school during infancy and probably left only after finishing high school, and sometimes into their early 20s, are increasingly likely to attend public school special education programs first and shuttle in and out of ASD.
The average age of a student entering ASD is now 11, and successful students like Jessica often leave to enroll in their home school districts. These changes are constantly prompting the school and its teachers to assess their approach and continue to focus on the needs of students that public schools sometimes can't meet.
"As the population has changed, they've had to make adaptations," Peltier said.
Jon Cybulski, 17, a junior from Bristol who was born with damaged cochleas, communicates through sign language at ASD. Then about noon every school day, Jon leaves the campus and heads up North Main Street to take courses like algebra and English at Hall High School.
This type of collaboration, to give students the opportunity to take outside courses and still meet their individual education goals, is increasingly common, Peltier said. This year, the school has about 35 students working with local school districts to take courses outside ASD.
When it comes time to weigh higher education opportunities, those students increasingly are considering mainstream colleges and not just traditional deaf schools like Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., officials said.
Of the 16 students in the ASD class of 2007, which graduated in June, nine went to college and four are working.
For those who aren't ready for higher education or the workplace, Peltier said ASD continues to be successful in adapting its services to prepare students for the mainstream world.
"There continues to be a place for ASD and schools for the deaf," Peltier said.
Future
These are busy times for Jeff Bravin, the school administrator overseeing the planned multimillion-dollar renovation of the ASD's Gallaudet Hall, the institution's flagship building.
On any given day, Bravin goes from meeting to meeting, portfolio in hand, to meet with designers, architects and state or school officials. His goal is to evaluate every facet of what would be the first total renovation for Gallaudet Hall since it was completed in 1921.
The renovation of the school's main classroom and administrative buildinghas been in the planning stages since the 1980s, and it can't come soon enough.
Pipes break regularly. Old gutters are falling. Walls are badly in need of a new coat of paint, as are the columns on the building's palatial front entrance seen from North Main Street.
Windows are cracked, broken, inefficient and in need of replacement. Bravin, who is deaf, said there are asbestos concerns. Parts of the building are not entirely up to fire code, and other parts don't fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"It's an aging facility," he said through a sign-language interpreter.
Bravin said the two-year renovation could cost more than $20 million, much of which will be paid by the state. The scope of the plan is limited to Gallaudet Hall, and proposed features such as a new auditorium have been scrapped because of costs, Bravin said.
Expected to be completed by fall of 2010, the construction will focus on the school's aging infrastructure and modernizing the middle and high school classrooms. ASD's elementary school, housed in a different building on campus, was renovated a few years ago.
Everything from lighting to acoustics will be improved, and the building will soon feature state-of-the-art FM transmission technology to better help students with hearing aids and cochlear implants.
An expansion of the classrooms' multimedia capabilities will reflect the school's new teaching methods and philosophy.
"We needed to make sure that the focus is on students and what the students would benefit from," said Bravin, a former teacher at New York's Lexington School for the Deaf. Bravin said he drew on his own experiences as a deaf person to help design and plan the project.
Over the last decade, ASD's enrollment has remained mostly flat, at about 200 to 220 students. The numbers are significant becausethey come while technology and special education services have continued to evolve and affect ASD's role, Peltier said. The school, he added, still plays a vital role in the lives of hearing impaired students.
"It's not only a belief, we see that need with each new youngster" entering the school, Peltier said.
As the school approaches its bicentennial in 2017, officials said they hope to keep building on the school's founding mission.
"It's a private-public partnership that stood the test of time," he said. "One hundred and ninety years later, it's good and it works."
It's about 11 a.m., and Anne Nutt is teaching a vocabulary lesson to a group of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders at the American School for the Deaf.
As the class looks on, she projects words onto an overhead screen, using American Sign Language to reinforce the lesson and explain the meaning of phrases such as "deep-rooted."
The students are energized. They respond in sign language, their fingers moving with ease and fluidity to relay letters, words and symbols.
Then Nutt speaks to her students, asking questions. And a few students, with the aid of innovative technology, are able to hear her voice.
Some timidly and some more adeptly, these students respond by speaking, too, straddling two very different worlds of communication.
This is deaf education in the 21st century.
Since the 1980s, technological tools such as digital hearing aids, FM transmitters and cochlear implants -- and a lengthy, sometimes divisive dispute in the deaf community over their use -- have transformed the landscape of deaf education and deaf culture.
At the 191-year-old American School for the Deaf, the cradle of deaf education in the country, teachers use sign language but include visual projectors, computer software and their own voices to teach hearing-impaired students with a wide range of abilities and needs.
Yet, in this most prosperous and education obsessed community, teachers like Nutt toil in near anonymity as they break new ground in a challenging field.
Elementary Learning
It's 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.
For the first 15 minutes of her day, Becky Peters follows a familiar ritual of helping her kindergarten students -- some of whom have arrived from as far away as Danbury and Bridgeport -- fish out the components of their cochlear implants and hearing aids from their backpacks and coat pockets, making sure all the parts are in working order.
Shielding her mouth with a sheet of paper to keep the children from reading her lips, Peters hisses and makes other sounds, which her students try to mimic, as a gauge of what they can hear. A subtle electronic tone -- feedback -- fills the room.
Six of Peters' seven students have cochlear implants, which provide some sense of sound through a surgically implanted electronic device under the skin and external components such as a transmitter, microphone and speech processor. The cochlea is the spiral-shaped part of the inner ear that contains the sensory organ for hearing.
On this chilly morning, one of the students has left a critical, external component of the implant at home: a small, fragile piece of hardware worth thousands of dollars, not much larger than a cellphone earpiece.
He will have to communicate with his teacher and classmates through sign language and lip reading. His classmates, an energetic bunch of kids aged 5 to 7 in a brightly lit room with big windows, small tables and tiny chairs, seamlessly adapt to the differences in hearing and communication abilities among one another.
Along with common kindergarten challenges like student outbursts, bad manners, short attention spans and occasional crying, Peters daily handles a range of hearing, speaking and learning abilities.
She also says deaf students don't usually enter these classrooms with the same level of skills and preparation as hearing children.
"What I want them to have here is I want them to be able to communicate," said Peters, a first-year teacher who taught in Delaware and Pennsylvania before coming to the school, known as ASD.
On this day, Peters guides her students through basic reading and counting exercises and a discussion of the holiday season. She works not only on teaching words and phrases but on explaining their meaning and significance.
"Teachers of the deaf have to teach the experiences," said Edward F. Peltier, the school's executive director and a 35-year veteran of deaf education.
Another challenge, teachers say, is keeping students focused. Because deaf students rely heavily on their vision for class activities, teachers are mindful of fatigue.
Deaf students, teachers will tell you, don't have the option to daydream, to visually tune out a teacher yet still catch their instructions. So keeping the students' attention for several hours a day requires some creativity and innovation.
Peters keeps her students on task by giving them coins. Behave well, get a coin; behave badly, lose your coin.
When she needs her students to pay attention immediately, she or an assistant will flash the room's lights.
And when her class needs a break, they often go next door to visit with students attending ASD's preschool and day care program to burn up energy and interact with some hearing children, who are open to enroll in the ASD preschool.
The children dance and jump and bask in a flurry of bubbles. Peters' students don't miss a beat.
The students -- both hearing and deaf -- even play what they call "the hat game," a different take on musical chairs in which children walk in circles and pick up a hat when music stops.
This particular game comes down to two preschoolers -- both with the ability to hear -- and one of Peters' students with a cochlear implant.
Her student wins.
Transformation
When Donna Blain arrived at ASD 15 years ago, there were perhaps two students with cochlear implants.
This year, more than 40 of the school's 200-plus students have the implants -- and the number seems to grow weekly. Dozens more use other types of hearing aids.
"We've got a totally different population," said Blain, a cochlear implant audiologist at the school. "You're teaching deaf kids for 200 years and it's 'boom!'"
ASD staff members said the rise of tools like cochlear implants -- and the years of cultural debate on the pros and cons of using technology to aid hearing -- has prompted them to adapt their mission.
In the 20 years since cochlear implants gained government approval, the historically tight-knit deaf community has grappled with the technology. Outspoken critics of the implants view them as an affront, as carrying the implication that there is something wrong, that a deaf person somehow needs to be "fixed."
Proponents, while admitting results vary for each person, say the implants allows them to more easily connect and communicate with parents, family and mainstream society.
In 2000, the National Association of the Deaf released a landmark position paper that outlined the pros and cons for cochlear implants and urged the deaf culture, parents of deaf children, educators and leaders to carefully evaluate who should consider getting an implant:
"The NAD recognizes all technological advancements with the potential to foster, enhance, and improve the quality of life of all deaf and hard of hearing persons. ... The role of the cochlear implant in this regard is evolving and will certainly change in the future. Cochlear implants are not appropriate for all deaf and hard of hearing children and adults. Cochlear implantation is a technology that represents a tool to be used in some forms of communication, and not a cure for deafness. ... While there are some successes with implants, success stories should not be over-generalized to every individual."
For ASD staff and students, the controversy and continuing dialogue over the use of technology has translated into a clear mission: Help families make the best decisions.
"If we give kids and their families the tools to make appropriate, good choices, we're really being successful," Peltier said.
For students like Narelis Perez, 14, a Waterbury resident and ninth-grader at ASD who got a cochlear implant when she was 10, the emerging technology has allowed her to connect with the mainstream world. She said she even has a favorite sound -- the phone ringing in her house.
Born deaf to hearing parents of Dominican descent, Narelis said the implant has allowed her to better communicate with her mother, with whom she also tries to speak in Spanish, their family's native language.
"It makes me feel like a whole person," Narelis said.
Her success with an implant is not unique at ASD. But for every student like her that thrives and succeeds, there are many others who reject the technology as cumbersome, uncomfortable, impractical and even unattractive.
School officials are quick to say that results vary for those who opt to get a cochlear implant.
Joey Ronan, a high school student at ASD, decided to stop using the implant he got as a child.
"There was no reason to speak," he explained. "I'm deaf and that's it."
Changing Role
After spending ninth, 10th and part of 11th grade at Platt High School in Meriden, Jessica Schwabe is back at ASD, where she is a junior.
Jessica started attending ASD at age 3. She got a cochlear implant when she was 12, and when it came time for high school, she was curious to experience a school community outside of ASD. With the support of her family, she decided to attend public school and enter into the mainstream.
At Platt, she made friends. She communicated with ease and used her voice. She did well in the classroom, earning a 3.97 GPA. She played on the softball team.
But Jessica, who attended every class period except lunch and physical education with a sign language interpreter, ultimately decided to return to ASD.
"Before I left here, I wanted to go to public school to compare," she said. "I wanted to communicate with hearing people."
Her experience mirrors that of many students at ASD who now go back and forth between this institution and mainstream schools.
Peltier, who taught at ASD in the 1960s, said the institution's role in teaching the deaf began changing three decades ago, when Congress transformed the way public schoolsteach special education students. That triggered years of significant change for ASD's role and its mission.
Students like Jessica, who once would have enrolled at the school during infancy and probably left only after finishing high school, and sometimes into their early 20s, are increasingly likely to attend public school special education programs first and shuttle in and out of ASD.
The average age of a student entering ASD is now 11, and successful students like Jessica often leave to enroll in their home school districts. These changes are constantly prompting the school and its teachers to assess their approach and continue to focus on the needs of students that public schools sometimes can't meet.
"As the population has changed, they've had to make adaptations," Peltier said.
Jon Cybulski, 17, a junior from Bristol who was born with damaged cochleas, communicates through sign language at ASD. Then about noon every school day, Jon leaves the campus and heads up North Main Street to take courses like algebra and English at Hall High School.
This type of collaboration, to give students the opportunity to take outside courses and still meet their individual education goals, is increasingly common, Peltier said. This year, the school has about 35 students working with local school districts to take courses outside ASD.
When it comes time to weigh higher education opportunities, those students increasingly are considering mainstream colleges and not just traditional deaf schools like Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., officials said.
Of the 16 students in the ASD class of 2007, which graduated in June, nine went to college and four are working.
For those who aren't ready for higher education or the workplace, Peltier said ASD continues to be successful in adapting its services to prepare students for the mainstream world.
"There continues to be a place for ASD and schools for the deaf," Peltier said.
Future
These are busy times for Jeff Bravin, the school administrator overseeing the planned multimillion-dollar renovation of the ASD's Gallaudet Hall, the institution's flagship building.
On any given day, Bravin goes from meeting to meeting, portfolio in hand, to meet with designers, architects and state or school officials. His goal is to evaluate every facet of what would be the first total renovation for Gallaudet Hall since it was completed in 1921.
The renovation of the school's main classroom and administrative buildinghas been in the planning stages since the 1980s, and it can't come soon enough.
Pipes break regularly. Old gutters are falling. Walls are badly in need of a new coat of paint, as are the columns on the building's palatial front entrance seen from North Main Street.
Windows are cracked, broken, inefficient and in need of replacement. Bravin, who is deaf, said there are asbestos concerns. Parts of the building are not entirely up to fire code, and other parts don't fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"It's an aging facility," he said through a sign-language interpreter.
Bravin said the two-year renovation could cost more than $20 million, much of which will be paid by the state. The scope of the plan is limited to Gallaudet Hall, and proposed features such as a new auditorium have been scrapped because of costs, Bravin said.
Expected to be completed by fall of 2010, the construction will focus on the school's aging infrastructure and modernizing the middle and high school classrooms. ASD's elementary school, housed in a different building on campus, was renovated a few years ago.
Everything from lighting to acoustics will be improved, and the building will soon feature state-of-the-art FM transmission technology to better help students with hearing aids and cochlear implants.
An expansion of the classrooms' multimedia capabilities will reflect the school's new teaching methods and philosophy.
"We needed to make sure that the focus is on students and what the students would benefit from," said Bravin, a former teacher at New York's Lexington School for the Deaf. Bravin said he drew on his own experiences as a deaf person to help design and plan the project.
Over the last decade, ASD's enrollment has remained mostly flat, at about 200 to 220 students. The numbers are significant becausethey come while technology and special education services have continued to evolve and affect ASD's role, Peltier said. The school, he added, still plays a vital role in the lives of hearing impaired students.
"It's not only a belief, we see that need with each new youngster" entering the school, Peltier said.
As the school approaches its bicentennial in 2017, officials said they hope to keep building on the school's founding mission.
"It's a private-public partnership that stood the test of time," he said. "One hundred and ninety years later, it's good and it works."
