Invitation to the VL2/Clerc Center School Partner Meeting

March 18, 2012

Newark, Delaware

The Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) is housed at Gallaudet University. Our purpose is to advance our understanding of the science of learning that specifically investigates how aspects of human higher cognition are realized through one of our most central senses, vision. We seek to determine the effects of visual processes, visual language, and social experience on the development of cognition, language, reading and literacy. We especially pursue new perspectives on these learning processes through the widened vantage point of studying deaf individuals and sign language as a window into the flexibility and structure of the human mind. We study these learning processes in monolinguals and bilinguals, both deaf and hearing, across the lifespan in order to promote optimal practices in education in both formal and informal settings.  We have a two-way discovery model in which practitioners and scientists exchange ideas freely and mutually identify core questions in educational and social practice.

Given our purpose, VL2 and the Clerc Center will host a School Partner Meeting to facilitate the development of a two-way dialogue between VL2 researchers and School Partners.  Presentations from the Center will summarize ongoing research as well as the applications that are being developed by the Research to Practice Team.  Then Teacher Panels will respond to presentations for discussion of how to integrate this information into schools.  Collaborative mechanisms will be discussed that provide opportunities for teachers and schools to be more centrally involved in on-going projects.

VL2 would like to invite your school to select one to two of your best teachers, those who believe that they can succeed with all children, to send to our meeting. Many of our current products are being developed for young children, but we would like to encourage teachers of all grades to attend the meeting to help with thinking about future products.

Our goals for this meeting are threefold:

1—to develop/strengthen dialogues about research to practice;

2—to inform teachers of current VL2 activities;

3—to craft an agenda for future evidence based educational interventions and products.

We will offer a $500 stipend to cover expenses for each teacher. Currently, we are soliciting nominations, and selections will be on a first come first served basis. The location of the meeting provides us with reasonable hotels and is accessible from the Philadelphia Airport.  For individuals on the east coast, the train is also an option.  Hotel information will be sent in a follow-up communication.

Below, you will find an agenda. Also included here is a flyer about the meeting.  The meeting follows the National American Sign Language and English Bilingual Consortium for Early Childhood Education: Summit III meeting, which is being held at the Delaware School for the Deaf in Newark, Delaware.  Information about that meeting can be found at http://bilingualece.org/.

We look forward to hearing from you.  If you would like to participate in this exciting opportunity, please fill out the informational sheet included here and send it to diane.clark@gallaudet.edu.

Nominations for VL2/Clerc Center School Partner Meeting

March 18, 2012

Newark, Delaware

Teacher 1 Name: _______________________

Grade Level: ___________________________

Content Area: __________________________

Teacher Race/Ethnicity: ________________________

Teacher Sex:   Male ____  Female ____

Type of Classroom:

Mainstreamed                 ____

Deaf Education                ____

Multiple Disabilities        ____

School Characteristics:

Urban Setting                 ____

Rural Setting                  ____

Percentage of Students Receiving Free Lunch:   ____

Teacher 2 Name: _______________________

Grade Level: ___________________________

Content Area: __________________________

Race/Ethnicity: _________________________

Sex:   Male ____  Female ____

Type of Classroom:

Mainstreamed                 ____

Deaf Education                ____

Multiple Disabilities        ____

School Characteristics:

Urban Setting                 ____

Rural Setting                  ____

Percentage of Students Receiving Free Lunch:   ____

VL2/Clerc Center School Partner Meeting

March 18, 2012

Newark, Delaware

8:15   Coffee

8:45   Welcome and Introductions

Drs. Clark and Harmon, VL2, Integration of Research and Education

Dr. Jacoby, Executive Director of Planning, Development, and Dissemination, Clerc Center

Topic A: Ongoing Research at the Center

9:00     Summary of VL2 Research

Dr. Laura Ann Petitto

Dr. Peter Hauser

9:20     Teacher Response Panel

9:35     Q & A

Topic B: VL2 Products Under Development

9:45     ASL Story Books

Melissa Malzkuhn

10:00   Parent Information Package

Dr. Kristen Harmon

10:15   Toolkit of Assessments

Dr. Thomas Allen

Dr. Sharon Baker

Dr. Laurene Simms

10:45   Teacher Response Panel

11:15   Q & A

11:30   Lunch

Topic C: Participation in VL2 Research

12:30   Participant Data Base

Dr. Thomas Allen

1:00     Infants and Young Children

Dr. Jenny Singleton

Dr. Rain Bosworth

1:30     New Models for Participation

Dr. Christen Szymanski

Dr. Diane Clark

2:00     Teacher Response Panel

2:10     Q & A

Topic D: Future Collaborations

2:20     Collaborative Mechanisms for Research to Practice and Practice to Research

Teacher Panel

3:00     Summation by Drs. Allen and Petitto

Delaware Family Advocacy and Child Educational Services is proud to host the National American Sign Language and English Bilingual Consortium for Early Childhood Education’s third annual Summit. The theme of this year’s  Summit is The Path to Bilingualism: The Child and Family.  This Summit will be an opportunity for early childhood professionals actively involved in ASL and English bilingual education,  to address issues such as assessment, early literacy, pedagogy, family education, and multiculturalism specific to working with deaf and hard of hearing children ages 0-8 years and their families.   Please note that the Summit is not meant to serve as an introductory conference. It is designed for professionals who are familiar with ASL and English bilingualism and desire to enrich their professional development.

Your involvement and our work during the summit will have a positive impact on how we all can work together to provide information, resources and strategies that will allow for early access to language and bilingual education for deaf and hard of hearing children.  The Summit will begin on Friday, March 16th at 7:45 am and end on Saturday, March 17th at 5:00 pm.  The agenda will be announced shortly.

The session will briefly describe the history of the SKI-HI Institute in the area of providing early intervention services and support to families with deaf and hard-of-hearing children.  The benefits of the early intervention services and support are augmented when a missing puzzle piece of early intervention programming, Deaf adults as Deaf Mentors, is included.   Typically available to families with deaf and hard-of-hearing infants and toddlers, the SKI-HI Institute goes one step further by making the services available from birth to age 6.  The Deaf Mentor Curriculum, which was created for the Deaf Mentor Program, is presented to families in collaboration with early intervention and early childhood education professionals. The Deaf Mentor Program is a working model incorporating bilingual language acquisition (American Sign Language and English), approaches to providing support and encouragement to families, ways to promote positive communication with families, and the creation of a bicultural community where deaf, hard of hearing and hearing people learn, play and work together cohesively.  Bilingualism in ASL and English, and biculturalism in home and school life promote healthy language development and communication, and create positive self-esteem among deaf/hard of hearing children of diverse color and creed.

Learners Objectives:

Participants will:

1. Develop an understanding of the value of having Deaf professionals in the early intervention system.
2. Define Deaf mentoring and the roles of Deaf professionals as Deaf Mentors within the SKI-HI Model.
3. Describe what the SKI-HI Deaf Mentor model looks like within the early intervention system and deaf education system.
4. Illustrate how Deaf Mentors can serve as one of the links in school and home partnership.
5. Identify ways to start a Deaf Mentor Program in their states.

With the growing Latino population, educators find themselves face-to-face with Spanish-speaking parents in the classroom across the US. Understanding how to work with Spanish-speaking families and removing barriers, especially language barriers between the families and the deaf child, is an important task to help parents become more involved in the child’s education. This workshop will provide the audience with an understanding of Latino families’ culture and their perspective on education. Comprehending where the family comes from and why they aren’t fully engaged in their deaf child’s education is essential for educators to know in order think of ways to get the family to be involved as early as possible.  Also, it is important to understand the benefits of trilingualism for the deaf child which can improve relationships in the home.

During the group discussion, participants will work to develop more effective home, school and community partnerships by using J.L Epstein Form T One Year Action Plan focusing on 6 types of involvement (Parenting, Communicating, Volunteering, Learning at Home, Decision-Making, and Collaborating with the Community).

Learners Objectives

Participators will:

1. Develop an understanding of the Latino deaf child’s home culture and language.
2. Learn how to increase Latino parents’ involvement in their deaf child’s education as early as possible.
3. Discuss parental involvement in their school and utilize a tool guide to help create more effective parental involvement.

Ingredients for a Successful ASL/English Bilingual Family Recipe: Relevant Healthy Family Concepts from the Mental Health Field

The Deaf and hard of hearing child’s place in their family—as a child, as a sibling, and as a grandchild—greatly impacts their view of themselves and their ultimate success in school and in their future. Borrowing important healthy family concepts from the field of mental health, Sheila Jacobs, MFT will share the “ingredients” that contribute toward a more successful bilingual family “recipe”. Like an immigrant family who has moved to a new country learning a new language and culture, the hearing family faces a similar situation as they unexpectedly need to learn a new language and how to become part of a new Deaf World. The goal of early childhood bilingual education is to support the family in navigating the stages of bilingual, or sometimes trilingual, family development step by step successfully.

What are these predictable developmental stages of bilingual and bicultural family development? What are the key ingredients we as professionals can offer the deaf and hard of hearing children and their families easily and quickly so that the family feels more invested in becoming a successful bilingual family as time is of the essence?

Sheila recommends that the fields of early childhood bilingual education and mental health consider ways to collaborate in a possible interdisciplinary approach for the optimal success of our deaf and hard of hearing children in school, their future careers, and in raising our next generation of children. How can we work together toward helping build a successful early childhood family foundation with lots of positive family communication experiences for the whole family in the Deaf Community so that the whole family feels accepted, valued, and respected by both the Deaf and hearing worlds?

Learners Objectives:

Participants will:

1. Develop an understanding of key healthy family concepts used in the mental health field
2. Develop a new framework for considering the predictable stages of bilingual family development as a possible road map toward more successful bilingual family communication, step by step (for example, learning to sign directly with the deaf and hard of hearing child vs signing to the hearing family members instead of speaking)
3. Clarify the diverse ways that hearing families currently communicate with their young deaf and hard of hearing children at home which would be the various starting points on the path to bilingualism for the deaf and hard of hearing child and their families
4. Clarify that the path to bilingualism means that we also need to prepare bilingual families for the variety of hearing world and Deaf world settings that impact the family’s need to successfully juggle both languages. How can we better teach families a variety of bilingual communication strategies that successful bilingual families already know how to use? (Examples: holiday celebrations with many hearing relatives, attending Deaf Community events, family vacations and meeting many hearing strangers)

An In Depth Exploration and Discussion regarding the Predictable Stages in Bilingual Family Development

There are stages of child development, language development, and family development which interact in the predictable developmental stages of a bilingual family. We will apply these principles in order to better identify the various stages of bilingual family development from 0 (no bilingualism) to 10 (very successful bilingual family). Once professionals can agree on these stages of bilingual family development, then this scale could be used in the assessment of where each family is on the path to bilingualism. What does half way #5 on the scale look like for a bilingual family who is half way there?  What do the 25% or 75 % (#3 and #7) benchmarks on the path to bilingualism look like?

There are many factors that impact family communication and not all families can reach the “ideal” level of bilingualism. However professionals working with the family can be compassionate and work with the family’s strengths in order to coach them toward the next appropriate stage of bilingualism for each family member as well as for the family as a whole. Observing our own “stages of bilingualism” will be instructive about our own attitudes and approaches to working with deaf and hard of hearing children and their families.

Learners Objectives

Participants will:

1. Learn about stages of child development, language development, and family development that interact in the daily lives of a bilingual family on the path of bilingualism
2. Discuss the stages of family bilingualism from 0 to 25% to 50% to 75% to 100% as a way for the professionals to develop some agreements about possible ways to assess where each family is on this path to bilingualism.
3. Once there is some agreement on this “Scale of Family Bilingualism” and possible ways to assess the family’s strengths as a bilingual family, then we may be better equipped as professionals to help establish workable short term goals for the family to increase their bilingualism in stages, one step at a time.
4. Clarify the difference of the individual hearing family member’s ability to be bilingual vs how the family works as a team on being more bilingual. What are the various steps that a family may utilize on the path to bilingualism that are common strategies that families use to pool/share their resources?
5. Clarify from our own personal and professional experiences of our own individual and family bilingual development ways we can pool our “collective wisdom” about the possible many paths of bilingualism in the Deaf Community. Families start at different places and what are various ways we can support them in becoming more and more bilingual step by step without stressing the family out. (Example: family members could become too overwhelmed and feel incompetent, then give up.)
6. What are ways that the fields of early childhood education and mental health could collaborate and find effective interdisciplinary approaches to help the whole family become invested in becoming a bilingual family and highly motivated to stay on the path of bilingualism over the long term?

This session will present the longitudinal language development of over 25 children in the state of Colorado born between 1998 and 2003 and followed for the first 7 years of life.  Age of implantation ranged from 12 months to 48 months.  The vast proportion of these children were identified as deaf or hard of hearing prior to six months of age, with the exception of some children who were born with normal hearing but acquired hearing loss in the first few years of life.  Children in Colorado are confirmed as deaf or hard of hearing today at a mean age of 29 days.  Parents often have first contact with a professional who is deaf or hard of hearing at the first audiological evaluation.  They will be referred to early intervention and about 35 to 40% are contacted by a Colorado Hearing Coordinator who is hard of hearing.  They are offered sign language instruction by a native and/or fluent sign language instructor who is deaf or hard of hearing.  There are approximately 40-50 trained  sign language instructors.  If families chose this option, they receive 1.5 hours per week of sign language instruction in the home.  The families are offered 1.5 hours of weekly home intervention services from a certified educator of the deaf, speech/language pathologist or audiologist.   Of the early intervention providers along the Colorado Front Range  about 20% of the providers are deaf or hard of hearing.  The average age of implantation for congenitally deaf infants is about 12 months of age.  If the parents choose this option, they also typically add a child-centered clinic-based weekly hour auditory therapy after the implantation.  It is not uncommon for a family to invite their sign language instructor to the cochlear implant candidacy meeting.  The session will include research information about the central auditory pathways of these early implanted children, monitoring of auditory skill development, assessment of the daily spoken language environment, early sign language development and early spoken language development.

1. Participants will be able to identify the sign and spoken language trajectories of children who are deaf, whose families are learning sign language and have successful spoken language outcomes.
2. Participants will be able to identify critical characteristics for successful cochlear implant outcomes of children who sign, including age of implantation and characteristics of auditory therapies,
3. Participants will learn some new assessment procedures for auditory development and spoken language environment analysis including Visual Reinforcement Infant Speech Discrimination, Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials and LENA (Language Environment Analysis) procedures.
4. Participants will be able to discuss characteristics of EHDI follow-through systems, including Deaf/Hard of Hearing Infusion of professionals, sign language instruction from native/fluent signers, Deaf Mentors/Role Models, increases in Deaf/Hard of Hearing early intervention providers, audiologists, speech/language pathologists and mental health professionals.

Bio:

Dr. Christine Yoshinaga-Itano is a Professor of Audiology in the Department of Speech,Language and Hearing Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Science, Center for Neurosciences, University of Colorado at Boulder; Department of Otolaryngology and Audiology, University of Colorado at Denver; and the Marion Downs Hearing Center. She received her Bachelors degree from the University of Southern California in Psychology, her Masters degree in Education of the Hearing Impaired and Ph.D. in Audiology and Hearing Impairment from Northwestern University. Dr. Yoshinaga-Itano is both a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing and an audiologist. She has conducted research in the areas of language, speech, and social-emotional development of deaf and hard-of-hearing infants and children for over thirty years. Her research has been used as justification for establishing universal newborn hearing screening throughout the United States and also world-wide.  Over the last 20 to 30 years, she has focused on the impact of early-identification and early intervention on the developmental outcomes of children with significant hearing loss. In addition, she has served as a consultant for many countries currently developing their early hearing detection and intervention programs, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Korea, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Philippines, and South Africa.