From: Cristina Santos
Email: TIN911@aol.com
Course: Child Development 169: Motivating Children and Adolescents in Educational
Contexts
College: San Jose State University
Instructor: Eugene Matusov
ClassWeb: http://www.ematusov.com/cd169
ChildrenObservations: No
Date: 24 May 1997
Time: 18:02:06
Remote Name: pax-ca7-02.ix.netcom.com
I am going to be doing option number one which involves an integration and elaboration of our group paper. Our group topic was on deaf children specifically psychological aspect of the deaf, communication of deaf adolescents, motivation in academics and social development, improving self-confidence in the classroom, integrated schools, mainstreaming the hearing impaired, and deaf minorities.
Since majority of us in this class are going to be educators, I decided to focus on teachers roles, attitude as well as plan in order to help deaf children achieve the desire perhaps motivation to function effectively in a regular classroom which would enhance their communication, personal, social, and academic skills.
To start off, I believe most classroom teachers are or will be confronted with the challenge of teaching impaired students without even having a special training, special resources or support services that would be available to help them. Thus, a lot of teachers would probably feel angry, frustrated, uncertain, fearful, challenged, and helpless. But I think if one is a capable teacher, he or she will be able to overcome the anxieties with information and experience. After doing further research about this topic, I have learned that deaf children despite of their verbal language competence are still able to function effectively when it comes to academic and social skills.
According to Williams and Sussman (1971) communication impairment affects every aspect of life. Due to this the realization that adjustment and achievement are primarily dependent on communication skills lead directly to the importance of the teacher's perspective in meeting the needs of the hearing impaired. First of all, these authors suggest that to minimize communication deprivation, hearing impaired students should be given help and understanding from teachers and everyone else in the environment. This includes showing empathy because this is a fundamental aspect in positive development. Interestingly, as Furth (1973) puts it, "acceptance of the thinking and feeling deaf child who is growing into an adult is priority number one for education. These four forms of acceptance of deafness are at home, school, work, and in the society would effectively benefit the hearing impaired and would also reverse our perspective on deafness. According to my readings, a call for help is another important thing a teacher should do. He or she should be able to show a great kindness to hearing impaired children by perhaps enlisting the aid of special personnel either on the external and internal staff. On the other hand the school personnel must be able to have the initiative to learn the characteristics of the hearing impaired population in general thus helps meet their special needs. Here are some suggestions for educators to be able to help deaf children cope with their language incompetence. Therefore view life in a very positive way. For instance, it is true that hearing impaired students need both teachers and resource people who understand their situation. For example, a recent hearing test conducted by an audiologist would be an important resource person in order to have a further diagnosis and prognosis. Secondly, many hearing impaired students can easily feel isolated, the opportunities of communicating with family, peers, teachers, and other significant people would greatly reduce that feeling.
Interestingly enough, since the essence of this paper is about the educator's roles, let me share some important notion about different suggestions I have read to be able to benefit the hearing impaired children. Regular classroom teachers should be able to have a full understanding of what is deaf, how it is to be deaf . He or she should be able to understand the meaning of impaired hearing. He or she should provide opportunities of communication with students as well as visual information. Along with this, opportunities for experiential and incidental learning are important. Furthermore, providing opportunities to develop self-esteem, being deaf role models, multi-level learning, finally and most importantly, it is important to provide deaf children with opportunities with successful and social functioning. In my own opinion, if all these things are being possessed by every educator, children with this kind of disability would be able to grow up perceiving the world positively thus would have a healthy state of development.
What I think is important as well to consider is the idea that parents certainly has an enormous influence on their children. According to one of the article that I pulled from the internet, there is a strong evidence supporting the notion that children raised in families that enjoy reading and writing as an activity is inclined to become good readers and writers. Due to this, it is important to be role models for their children for instance if parents are seen to be reading and writing it would have a positive impact on children. I agree that children who are surrounded by books will be inclined to develop interest in reading. As parents, we should be able to know that our job is to teach our children just like what educators are doing. I think educators and parents both have to work hard in teaching children most especially if they are handicapped in this case like hearing- impaired students.
In conclusion, it is important to know the psychological aspect of the deaf, their communication with other people or peers. With regards to our group's research, we found that deaf preschoolers played with hearing children during an outdoor play. This study then suggests that language similarity is not an important factor in forming friendship among young children. But what is important for young children are age, gender, and ethnicity. Adolescents on the other hand look at language similarity as the most important factor. They preferred to communicate with sometime with the same language as their own. What our group also found interesting is the way children improve self-confidence in the classroom. This is related to what I talked about earlier. I think hearing-impaired children should be listened to, understand to, cared for, give importance to, and be provided with a very stimulating environment for a positive development. This also helps in the improvement of their self-confidence. The issue of integrated schools and mainstreaming the hearing impaired children are also the issues our group discussed. And finally, deaf minorities are also one of the issues our group researched on.
In my own opinion, parental home should employ acceptance of communication, The society as well should be able to accept deaf individuals. And most importantly, the school should employ acceptance of the thinking and feeling of self. I think if all of the above things are considered, a hearing-impaired individual would definitely function as effectively as a regular student.
REFERENCES:
http://deafworldweb.org/dww/pub/l/literacy.html
http://www.isl.net/-cuedspmn/problems.html
Paul, P. V & Quigley, S. P. (1990) Education and Deafness.
Furth, H. G. (1973) Deafness and Learning: A Psychosocial Aproach to Learning.