READ WRITE EASY

Front matter

S ISHARA SRS RESEARCH GK 5 \S "SERIES <4

Series editor Nick Palfreyman

Editorial board

Part 1

2. Assessing deaf students’ development of English literacy in a peer-to-peer learning programme Daniel Waller, Christian Jones and Jenny Webster

3. Tracking learning with primary school children in a deaf school in India Nirav Pal, Jenny Webster and Ulrike Zeshan

4. Deaf peer tutors’ decision-making when teaching multiliteracies to deaf learners in India, Uganda and Ghana Jenny Webster and Eilidh Rose McEwan

5. Identifying and meeting the training needs of deaf sign language users as professionals in deaf education contexts Rebecca Olivia Nankinga

PART 2 6. The reverse curriculum: Game-led design for accessible learning Ulrike Zeshan

T: Qualitative data from learner portfolios Nirav Pal 8. Collaborative curriculum development

9. The storymakers mini-project: Encouraging children’s multimodal writing Julia Gillen and Uta Papen

Preface

This publication, appearing in the form of two related volumes, is the result of a substantial process of research in the field, analysis of data, and coordinating the writing of chapters with many contributors. The several successive research projects that are the basis for the two volumes are described in the introductory chapter.

We would like to thank each of our expert contributors and all of the project participants, research team members and partner institutions who made this book possible. The respective individuals and institutions are acknowledged in the relevant chapters of both volumes. We also acknowledge the Vidya Bhawan Society, who have been our partner in India during the production phase of the books.

To make these publications possible, each author gave their time and expertise generously throughout 2020 and 2021, despite the many unprecedented challenges and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We would also like to express our appreciation to all of our learner participants and, in the case of participating children, their caregivers for granting us permission for the use of all of the images that appear in this volume and its counterpart.

We are delighted that across these two volumes, both deaf and hearing authors are represented, and there is a balance between authors from the Global South and North. Six deaf and 11 hearing authors have worked on the various chapters, with most of the deaf authors being based in Southern countries. Out of the 17 authors, 10 are based in the Global South. It is very encouraging to have had the involvement of more contributors from the Global South than the North, as the balance is often the other way around in similar publications. We hope that this balance and deployment of outstanding Global South scholarship will be repeated in future published works in deaf studies, literacy studies, education, and related fields.

Finally, we wish to thank all those who have contributed their effort and commitment to bringing this book project to fruition. We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their expert guidance. We also acknowledge everyone who has contributed to the technical realisation of the two volumes, from typesetting to sourcing pictures and working with proofs and formatting. In particular, we are most grateful to the series editor Nick Palfreyman, who has gone the extra mile many times to support us as the books were developing through the necessary stages. His role in undertaking and coordinating the peer reviews for both volumes has been absolutely essential, and we thank him for the incredible amount of assistance he has provided throughout the editing process.

Jenny Webster and Ulrike Zeshan, November 2021

This book, along with a second volume, presents a strand of innovative research with, by and for deaf people in countries of the Global South that led to new learning opportunities in the field of language and literacy. This work builds on decades of research in the education of deaf children and youth, in particular in the area of sign bilingualism, that is, the acquisition of a sign language and a spoken language primarily in its written form alongside each other (e.g. Wilbur 2000; Marschark, Tang & Knoors 2014; O’Neill 2017).

Tang (2017) traces the development from ‘traditional’ sign bilingualism that arose in the 1980s in specialist schools for deaf children as a consequence of sign language linguistics, to more recent attempts at integrating sign bilingualism into regular schools. The latter includes models such as co-enrolment, where a critical mass of deaf students integrate with a larger group of hearing students, and teaching staff communicating through both spoken/written language and sign language are present in the same setting. Tang (2017) argues that sign bilingualism and co-enrolment have shown promising results, including deaf learners’ competences in literacy. An active debate continues among researchers and practitioners about ways forward in deaf education, and further literature is discussed in the individual chapters of both volumes.

The research presented in this book and its companion second volume diverges from the focus on literacy by extending the discussion to the acquisition of skills in multiliteracies. This means developing a complex range of semiotic resources that are multilingual and multimodal, including sign language(s), reading and writing, drawing and other visual representations, and technology-mediated communication, as well as metalinguistic and meta-cognitive skills (New London Group 1996; Cope & Kalantzis 2015). There is a conceptual overlap with translanguaging, which denotes ‘the complex language practices of plurilingual individuals and communities, as well as the pedagogical approaches that use those complex practices’ (Garcia & Li 2014: 19). Translanguaging has been applied to deaf sign language users and their communicative strategies both inside and outside classrooms (e.g. Swanwick 2017; Safar 2017; De Meulder, Kusters, Moriarty & Murray 2019). The notion of linguistic and semiotic repertoires that are deployed in communication is central to both multiliteracies and translanguaging. In addition to the focus on multiliteracies, another particularity of the research presented here is that it is based entirely in countries of the Global South, namely South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Work reported in the individual chapters speaks to the longstanding issue of deaf learners’ insufficient access to quality education, resulting in lack of employment, income, fulfilment and quality of life. Working with young deaf people in India, Ghana and Uganda, the research team has facilitated the acquisition of reading, writing and multiliteracies skills through sign languages in programmes led by deaf peer tutors.

This work has followed a learner-centred approach, aiming to use deaf communities’ own resources and making full use of accessible communication in a deaf-friendly environment. After the initial approach was validated in research with young deaf adults (Zeshan et al. 2016; Waller, Jones & Webster, this volume), the work was extended to deaf primary school children. Rather than implementing individual interventions, the research team has sought to establish new ecosystems of learning where different elements of the learning situation come together and support each other in novel ways (Fan 2018). In these ecosystems of learning, the content, the pedagogy, and the supporting technology interact in order to stimulate learning, and multiple factors combine in a holistic way. For instance, the content may consist of authentic learner-generated materials (instead of a standard textbook), alongside learning led by deaf peer tutors with a sign language as the medium of classroom communication, and supported by multimedia technologies. Different aspects of this work appear throughout these volumes.

The immediate goal has been to improve educational attainment and professional development for deaf sign language users, increasing their access to literacy and multiliteracies learning. However, capacity building has been equally important, with a particular focus on South-South collaboration. The team have trained an international group of young deaf professionals as resource persons and created curricula to qualify deaf people for teaching roles. Within the research team, young deaf researchers were supported in their professional development, including the presentation and publication of their own research.

In this introductory chapter, the trajectory of the successive phases of this research is discussed in section 1. Then a short description of each research chapter in the current volume is provided, situating the chapters in the context of the overall research programme (section 2) and setting out the thematic focus of this volume. Themes that are covered include tracking and testing of learners, pedagogical issues as seen from teachers’

perspectives, and issues related to curricula. Next, a preview is given of four ‘innovation sketches’, which are short reports of innovative practices that have arisen in the context of this research (section 3). These sketches are not based on data analysis but are relevant for practitioners and for researchers with an interest in methodologies. In this volume, authors report on learner portfolios as a teaching method and a way to document learners’ progress; a method for creating original storybooks with deaf children; and two curriculum-related innovations: creative facilitation of learning through the use of a ‘reverse curriculum’ concept, and a co-creative curriculum development process. Finally, section 4 describes some of the overall impacts of the research and the measures being taken to support its future sustainability.

This volume has two main parts: Part 1 includes four research chapters, while Part 2 presents the innovation sketches. This book is the first of two volumes. The second volume likewise includes research chapters and innovation sketches, but with a different thematic focus, namely learner engagement and classroom practice, capacity building, and issues related to educational systems. Where relevant, cross-references are made to the second volume throughout this book.

1 Research trajectory

This research is the result of three successive international projects led by the International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS) at the University of Central Lancashire in collaboration with partner organisations in the UK, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. All three projects were funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’ (FCDO), through their joint scheme ‘Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems’.

All three projects have involved fieldwork in the participating countries, including work with both deaf adults and deaf primary school children. As part of the ethics procedures, consent for the use of data was obtained from the participants, either from the individuals themselves or from the children’s parents or schools (in the case of boarding schools, it is common for the school to act in loco parentis in some countries). The pictures used in this volume are covered under this informed consent

1 The original funder was the Department for International Development (DfID), which merged with the Foreign Office to form the FCDO in 2020.

provision. Where consent is in place and individual authors have felt it appropriate, real names (first names only) may have been retained, or authors may have used alias names.

The first project was a pilot in cooperation with Lancaster University and partner organisations in India called ‘Peer-to-Peer Deaf Literacy’ (P2PDL; 2015-2016).” It explored innovative ways to teach literacy to deaf adults in India through sign language, peer tutoring, and a bespoke online platform called Sign Language to English by the Deaf (SLEND). A central element was the focus on ‘real literacies’ (Papen & Tusting 2019), that is, working with texts that the learners would come across in their daily lives (‘Real-Life English’). The aim was to design, implement, and evaluate English literacy instruction, using Indian Sign Language as the medium of communication between tutors and learners; deaf peer tutors delivering the interventions with deaf learners; and multimedia online learning materials, designed by the groups of learners themselves. As well as deaf research assistants and peer tutors, the project involved academics across multiple disciplines including applied sign language linguistics, ethnography, digital literacy and teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), together with deaf-led NGO partners in India. The project also employed individual deaf research assistants working in sub- Saharan Africa (Ghana and Uganda) on exploring the feasibility of such an approach through stakeholder workshops.

The second project was a three-year study called ‘Peer-to-Peer Deaf Multiliteracies’ (P2PDM; 2017-2020), which maintained the main elements from the pilot — sign language as medium of communication, deaf tutors, “Real-Life English’ and ICT resources — but extended the approach in several ways. Firstly, the investigation moved on from a focus on literacy to a wider perspective of deaf learners’ use of ‘multiliteracies’. This means that the targeted skills are not limited to reading and writing but extend to other modes of expression such as sign language (including fingerspelling), drawing, and technology-enabled and multimodal communication. The broadening of focus from literacy to multiliteracies was motivated by the findings from the pilot research, which indicated that important learning took place across a range of skills related to different types of literacies (see section 1.2).

Secondly, whereas the pilot project only involved young adult learners, P2PDM also worked with deaf primary school children. As

2 Within the text, we use shortened project names for easy reference. For the full names, see the acknowledgements at the end of this chapter.

disadvantage of deaf learners in education already begins at primary school level (Murray et al. 2016), the team wanted to extend the logic of the multiliteracies approach to primary school children, introducing the same principles of learner-centric teaching methods delivered by local deaf tutors and supported by deaf research assistants. Finally, the P2PDM teaching interventions were expanded to Ghana and Uganda, supported by local partner organisations, in addition to continuing work in India. Extension workshops were also conducted in Nepal and in Burundi but without implementing any teaching activities.

The third project was a collaboration with Uganda’s Makerere University and several partner NGOs in India to increase the impact of the research by building capacity among deaf tutors and creating bilingual teaching, training and learning resources. This impact project was called ‘South-South collaboration in realising the impacts of Peer-to-Peer Deaf Multiliteracies research in India, Uganda, and Nepal’ (2019-2021). Again, this project relied on the outcomes of the previous research, aiming to turn research findings into pedagogical practice. A combination of capacity-building training and materials development resulted in a set of instructional videos in Indian, Ugandan, and Nepali Sign Language, as well as curriculum designs for training deaf professionals in deaf education. This project was particularly fruitful in producing a number of innovations in practice and methodology. These are summarised in the innovation sketches of both volumes and notably include several innovations that are based on Serious Games, that is, activities that have the form of games but have non-entertainment purposes such as training or awareness (cf. Zeshan 2020).

Across the three projects, the partners based in India included the National Institute of Speech and Hearing (NISH), the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women, the Rural Lifeline Trust, the Haryana Welfare Society for Persons with Speech and Hearing Impairment, and Vidya Bhawan Society. The African partners were the University of Ghana, Uganda’s Makerere University, and the Uganda National Association of the Deaf, and the UK partner was the Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University. In addition, a range of local organisations providing education to deaf students worked with the project team to set up learner groups as field sites for the research.”

Across these three projects, the research team was able to develop the work by cascading the approach to a wider variety of deaf learners in

3 Local partner organisations are acknowledged in the individual chapters in this volume.

different countries (1.1) and by moving from the concept of ‘literacy’ to that of ‘multiliteracies’ (1.2).

11 Cascading to multiple countries

The seeds for this work were planted in 2009, about six years before the pilot project, when the iSLanDS Institute established a BA course in Applied Sign Language Studies (BAASLS) in India. This course equipped a pool of deaf graduates with the capabilities needed to carry out the pedagogical approach that the team developed in the later research programme. BAASLS was the first university-level course on sign language in India and graduated 70 students from several countries in the Global South, including all the countries that subsequently became involved in the deaf literacy/multiliteracies research, with the exception of Ghana.

Based on the P2PDL pilot, the second project P2PDM was able to roll out teaching interventions to other educational institutions in India, Ghana and Uganda, as well as exploring the approach with further countries through workshops in Nepal and Burundi. The impact project then focused on the professional capabilities for deaf people to act in teaching roles, setting up a programme for deaf trainees from India, Nepal and Uganda. Engaging with more systemic interventions through the creation of curricula and learning resources for language and literacy was another focus of the impact project (cf. Akanlig-Pare, Mugeere, Singh & Zeshan 2021). Figure 1 illustrates the trajectory from 2015 to 2021, with each dot representing a partner location. Work has included interventions with schools and adult learning centres (in blue), exploration with communities (in red) and professionalisation with deaf tutors (in green). These phases correspond to the three successive projects.

i Ones Z j 4 N ee, l EA < o e y \ ee” ~ D e Ara Y% e a "A one J i J = s~ X% : ere aR O DY | PHASE 1: PHASE 2: PHASE 3: Interventions in India; Interventions in India, Professionalisation for exploration in Uganda Ghana and Uganda; language and literacy and Ghana exploration in Nepal education in Uganda, and Burundi Nepal and India

Figure 1: The trajectory of the peer-to-peer deaf literacy and multiliteracies initiatives from 2015 to 2021

This cascading of work to multiple countries is not to be seen purely in numerical terms, that is, in terms of the number of locations and institutions involved. Roll-out here does not imply working with more partners in each phase. Instead, the qualitative progression is just as important, as this work has moved from running exploratory workshops to implementing classroom interventions to targeting professionalisation of teaching roles. In some cases, there has been a continuous trajectory, but this was not always possible. For instance, work in Uganda has gone through all three phases. Throughout the entire period, India has taken a lead role and involved a wider network of partners compared to other countries. This is due to the long-standing embedding of work by iSLanDS in the country, as exemplified by the introduction of the BAASLS degree course.

However, there has been expansion over time with respect to the number and diversity of learners involved. In the pilot, the learners were all adults, and they focused on functional aspects of English, which means using the language to do everyday things such as sending WhatsApp messages. Classes were implemented at five field sites across India, with a total of 46 deaf learners between the ages of 18 and 35. The project employed three deaf research assistants and five deaf peer tutors in India. The team also carried out small-scale investigative fieldwork in Ghana and Uganda, with the help of two more deaf research assistants, to look at transferability across contexts.

For the P2PDM project the team included groups of children as well as adults. By the end of this phase, 124 young adults and 79 primary school children had been involved. The P2PDM project provided 13 posts for staff in India, Ghana and Uganda, and it revealed that new ecosystems of learning can be developed and adapted for use with groups of deaf children and youth in different countries of the Global South.

In order to go a step further towards introducing key elements from the research into concrete educational contexts, the third project concentrated on capacity-building with young deaf professionals. It was not possible for reasons of feasibility and resources to involve all countries from P2PDM in the impact project, so work was carried forward in India, Uganda and Nepal. A group of 12 trainees participated in a six-month training programme organised in India in 2019-2020.* The project has

4 The impact project was heavily affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the main objectives were fulfilled, the amount and quality of stakeholder engagement was much reduced as activities moved online. Part of the training programme had to shift to an online mode, and efforts towards exploring accreditation options for the new curricula were adversely affected.

also been generating a range of materials including curricula in the area of language and literacy provision, teachers’ handbook materials, teaching and learning materials, and prototypes for alternative learning. Some of these materials are discussed in the chapters of this volume, as well as in Volume 2. They underpin newly arising roles for deaf professionals, and indeed have been co-created with the group of trainees and with the project staff. The curriculum and materials design has arisen directly from the experiences of the preceding projects.

Another aspect of the research trajectory is the involvement of individuals from the target countries in the different phases. Involving the same people across different phases has given continuity to the research programme and facilitated the capacity-building aspects, as deaf project members increasingly gained research skills and pedagogical experience. Table 1 illustrates some of this continuity, showing how people progressed individually.

Table 1: Continuity of people from India (IN), Uganda (UG) and Ghana (GH) across the research trajectory

BAASLS P2PDL P2PDM Impact project Lecturer (IN) > Lecturer (IN) > Consultant 5 Consultant (IN) (IN) Student (UG) 5 Research 4 Research x Research Assistant (UG) Assistant (UG) Assistant (UG) Research Research

Eá i Assistant (GH) Assistant (GH)

Peer Tutor > Research

(UG) Assistant (UG) Student (IN) > Peer Tutor (IN) > Research > Research

Assistant (IN) Assistant (IN)

Peer Tutor (IN) Peer Tutor (IN) > Research

> i Assistant (IN)

Student (IN) > Peer Tutor (IN) > Peer Tutor (IN)

These kinds of continuities are rare but seem to offer valuable opportunities for deaf individuals to build their knowledge and skill-sets. McEwan (2021) analyses the peer support networks among deaf peer tutors and research assistants from the three countries involved in P2PDM. The findings indicate a rich set of interactions between project staff at different levels and in different locations. For instance, out of 218 instances where peer tutors reported receiving assistance with skills or tasks from others in the project context, assistance came from research assistants 28% of the time. Skills transfer was horizontal from one peer tutor to another in 22% of cases, and help was provided by senior project staff 23% of the time. Two of the peer tutors also gained considerable support from interacting with colleagues in another project country (McEwan 2021: 190-195).

1.2 Literacy to multiliteracies

The pilot project aimed to explore new ways of teaching English to deaf learners in India, with a view to improving the quality of educational outcomes for learner groups who do not adequately benefit from traditional interventions. Instead of traditional language teaching, this project took a learner-driven, functional and ethnographic approach, exploiting a virtual/mobile learning platform and supporting deaf peer tutors to develop their own materials and strategies co-creatively with their learners, including teaching through sign language.

The pilot project’s theoretical and methodological underpinnings comprised an ethnographic approach based on authentic identification of literacy needs (‘real literacies approach’, Street 2012) and a transformative mixed methods paradigm (Mertens 2010) towards social justice and the furtherance of human rights (see Ahereza et al. 2016; Gillen et al. 2016; and Zeshan et al. 2016). The P2PDL project also drew on standardised language testing using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, CEFR, level A1/A2 (Council of Europe 2001), adapted for deaf people (see Waller, Jones & Webster, this volume) and qualitative data analysis from focus groups, interviews, and observations.

Findings from the pilot indicated a positive response regarding the real-life English approach and highlighted the use of Indian Sign Language as essential to improving English literacy (Zeshan et al. 2016; Fan 2018). The learners appreciated that working with real texts gave them opportunities to learn many useful new words and expressions, which equipped them with a vocabulary that could support them in other situations and activities in their everyday lives. Learners felt that their knowledge was positively recognised, and in the lessons, their sign language skills were valued and expanded as they jointly made sense of a text or prepared a contribution to the SLEND. They valued opportunities to connect with other student groups, the diversity of activities, and the multimodal learning resources. The peer tutors were seen as supportive, raising learners’ confidence. Respondents also commented on difficulties, most crucially, issues with access to the SLEND and some concerns regarding varieties of Indian Sign Language.

The second project, P2PDM, intended to examine how to change some of the dynamics that contribute to the disadvantages faced by deaf learners at all levels due to widespread disregard for their accessible linguistic modality (sign language), as well as their specific resources and capacities, such as peer support and visual learning styles. As in the pilot, it was important to involve deaf individuals in the design of new teaching approaches, and to use children and young people’s everyday experiences and existing literacy practices as the basis for their learning. However, one of the main lessons taken forward from P2PDL was that the learners not only developed English literacy, but multiliteracies, i.e. skills in sign languages, written English, drawing and other forms of visual representation, editing of multimodal productions, and forms of technology-mediated communication that combine different modalities.

The basis for this approach is the idea that being ‘literate’ in the modern world involves a complex set of practices and competencies and engagement with various modes, increasing one’s abilities to act independently (New London Group 1996). For instance, young adult learners might discuss a topic with the peer tutor, create an annotated diagram related to the topic, then film and edit a video explaining the diagram in sign language, and eventually read a related text found online, with the help of signed explanations from the tutor. This multimodal engagement involves far more than mere encoding and decoding of written text.

When working with young deaf children who are making their first inroads into a written language, other forms of expression likewise support the development of multimodal and multilingual skills. For instance, on the basis of a picture book, children may sign a story, act out the roles of its characters, produce drawings with or without integrated words, and use fingerspelling as a bridge between signing and reading/ writing. In all these activities, integrating the different modalities and engaging learners with visual material has been particularly important, and several chapters illustrate how multiliteracies have been deployed in the classroom (Nankinga, this volume; Ahereza, Volume 2; and Manavalamamuni, Volume 2).

The P2PDM project’s emphases on active learning, contextualised assessments and building portfolios to document progress were intended to increase the benefit to deaf learners in terms of their on-going educational journeys and, for the young adults, employment capacity. Compared with a narrow scope of literacy in terms of reading and writing texts, the chapters in this book show that a focus on multiliteracies creates many opportunities to develop abilities, motivation and confidence, and to equip students with the communicative repertoires that will help them realise their potential.

2 Overview of research chapters

All of the chapters in this volume are based on data and analyses from the above-mentioned projects. The chapter by Waller, Jones and Webster is about P2PDL, while aspects of P2PDM are explored in the other three main chapters (Nankinga; Pal, Webster & Zeshan; and Webster & McEwan).

Waller, Jones and Webster concentrate on the assessment component of the pilot, looking at the extent to which the learners’ receptive and productive skills increased. A key aim of the pilot was to generate a way of measuring the learning in order to provide evidence to authorities and funders. The authors describe how the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001) was used in the pilot project to benchmark the assessments, including a pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test. The results showed that the deaf learners sustained their gains in English literacy. The authors also discuss tensions between a predefined syllabus that is in line with necessary external validation, in this case an adaptation for deaf learners of level A1/A2 of the CEFR, and the learner-centric dynamics of the flexible P2PDL approach. Useful bridging concepts include the model of a ‘process syllabus’, which is negotiated with learners, and the notion of a ‘protosyllabus’, where items are listed without prescribing the way or order in which they should be covered. This chapter speaks to two of the volume themes, namely testing for learning outcomes and curriculum issues.

Turning to the P2PDM project, Pal, Webster and Zeshan discuss test results obtained from one of the project’s partner schools in India. This chapter relies on quantitative data to track the learning of 22 primary school children in two different cohorts over time. The aim of P2PDM was to make assessments both child-friendly, so that they would feel like just another classroom activity without the pressure of formal testing, and more informative than simple ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ responses. Three separate measures were used to assess involvement (do children get involved in the task?), achievement (can they do the task?), and accuracy (what level of language do they use in the task?). Children were engaged in playful activities involving different languages, modalities, and multiliteracies skills. This type of assessment allowed the research team to validate the multiliteracies approach with this age group, and to evidence progress over time in a way suitable for validation by external stakeholders.

The next two chapters move beyond India and include data from the other project countries. The chapters relate to the third theme in this volume, speaking to the perspectives of teachers with respect to issues of pedagogy, capacity building and personal development in the context of deaf tutors teaching deaf learners. Taking the perspective of teachers in the classroom, Webster and McEwan investigate the decisions made by the deaf peer tutors while teaching multiliteracies skills to deaf learners in India, Uganda and Ghana. They examine data from case studies of topics covered with learners and consider the peer tutors’ descriptions of what happened in each classroom session, including their observations of learners and their reflections on their own decision-making processes. The analysis presented in this chapter covers how the lesson topics were selected by the peer tutors, how they embedded the topics to teach multiliteracies, and what they observed about the learners’ engagement with the topics.