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Thumbs up for Deaf Culture and New Zealand Sign Language Week!

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Did you know that New Zealand has, along with English and te reo Māori, a third official language? Actually, it’s been that way since 2006!

Engaging television, online and print advertisements may have recently caught your eye and alerted you to the fact that 8 – 15 May is New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) Week in 2017. This may have even spurred you on to learn some signs yourself, or plan to do so together with your students. You may have decided to learn greetings and maybe some signed songs — and perhaps even incorporate sign and gesture into your daily teaching practices. Ka pai! It’s fun and worthwhile. But what if we dig a little deeper? What other opportunities does NZSL Week offer us? What do we know of Deaf culture — or even that ‘it’s a thing’?

The TKI Thumbs Up! website describes some of the distinct cultural characteristics of the NZ Deaf community that you may not be aware of:
“Deaf culture is not based on family culture or ethnicity. There are some multi-generational Deaf families, but not all the people in families with Deaf members are deaf themselves. For this reason, many hearing people also belong to the Deaf community, use NZSL for communication with Deaf people, and identify with the Deaf community.

Only about ten percent of Deaf children have Deaf parents. This is why NZSL users ask about, or identify, family members as Deaf or hearing.

Māori Deaf have a unique dual identity. They belong to both the Māori community and the Deaf community. There is no separate Māori sign language, but there are Māori signs, for Māori concepts. Both Māori and Pākehā Deaf use NZSL as a common community language. Māori Deaf people have developed and continue to develop signs to express concepts relating to Māori culture in New Zealand.

Ethnicity is important in how Deaf people identify and describe people in NZSL, along with descriptions of other distinguishing features that a person may have. This helps to build a picture of the person in a way that helps others to recall them more easily, especially when the person who is being discussed is not present. Visual descriptions are so important that they are often used as permanent sign names, much as nicknames in other cultures, for example SHORT-HAIR, BIG-MOUSTACHE, and SKINNY. Physical descriptions rarely cause offence in the Deaf community. It is generally acceptable to describe someone as fat because this uses a visual feature in a way that creates a more friendly and relaxed connection with the person. However, excessive or overly exaggerated signs can cause offence.”

For schools, centres, and kura, new educational e-resources are being created to support Deaf learners in culturally-responsive ways. For example, as stated on the TKI Literacy Online site, “the Ministry of Education collaborated with Deaf Aotearoa to develop selected Ready-to-Read titles as e-books. These apps are targeted resources intended to support effective guided and shared reading instruction for NZSL users. They are available through iTunes or GooglePlay and are free to download.”

Another recent special development is an exciting new quad-lingual e-book:

“Rūaumoko — The Rumbling Voice, is an interactive educational digital book narrated by Deaf Māori students in Te Reo Turi and New Zealand Sign Language. It tells the story of Rūaumoko, The Māori God of Earthquakes, and looks at the relationship of this deity to Deaf Māori people.

Produced as an educational resource, this digital book was developed over an intensive five-day workshop held in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, Kelston Deaf Education Centre, CORE Education Ltd, and KIWA Digital.” (KIWA)

ruaumoko - the rumbling voice

So, have you ever thought about:

  • The difference between being deaf and being capital-d Deaf, which indicates people who are members of the ‘historical and cultural community of deaf people and who use a natural sign language’ (Marschark, 2007)?
  • How NZSL initially emerged from and through an ‘underground’ movement of culture (as did overseas natural sign languages)?
  • The role that gesture and facial expression play as part of signing?
  • How you can appropriately get the attention of a Deaf person?
  • The fatigue that comes through the constant visual load that deaf/Deaf people process?
  • The differences involved in language acquisition and use for those who are deaf from birth, compared to those who are deafened later in life?
  • The special cultural connections that our relatively small NZ Deaf community has developed via Van Asch and Kelston Deaf Education Centres, and local Deaf Clubs?
  • Ways of communicating with Deaf people in a world set up for the hearing, compared to ways that Deaf people integrate language and culture when interacting with each other in everyday situations?
  • The importance of open visual spaces and light placement, and absence of ‘busy’ clothing patterns, so that signers can see messages clearly?
  • What communication supports need to be in place for Deaf people and their families during emergencies?
  • The range of levels of hearing impairment and deafness that may need to catered for in our learning and teaching environments (for students, staff, and whanau/community)?

NZSL Week is a great opportunity to highlight these, and many other ways, that we can learn to be culturally responsive to Aotearoa’s Deaf community. Difference, not deficit or disability, is the key focus. So, let’s explore the websites, games, and challenges that Deaf Aotearoa have provided. Watch the inspiring Hearing Hands YouTube clip. Dip into the official New Zealand Sign Language in the Curriculum document. Talk to our PLD facilitators about ideas for making learning communities more inclusive for New Zealanders who have our third official language as their first language. Seek and reach out to members of the Deaf community who cross paths and journey through life with us. And, if you missed out on the free NZSL taster classes this year, make sure that you get in quickly in 2018!

 

References

Online:

Print:

  • McKee, R. (2001) People of the Eye. Bridget Williams Books: Wellington.
  • Marschark, M. (2007) Raising and Educating a Deaf Child (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press: New York.

Image Credits

Thumbs up image CC0 on Pixabay
Rūaumoko — The Rumbling Voice cover images: used by permission from KIWA

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Once upon a time…in 2017

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One of the great things about our Christmas and summer holidays being rolled into one, is the opportunity to take a break from our everyday routines, sit back, and have some space to think. We educators find ourselves in the unaccustomed situation of having time to reflect —  and to allow ourselves the luxury of proactive (rather than reactive) thinking.

Time with family and friends, and the consideration of new goals (resolutions) for a new year can also be springboards for bigger-picture thinking — about our work, our society, and the world we are developing for future generations. I’ve been doing just that, and would like to share my ponderings with you…

We are in the privileged position of helping to shape young lives, and that means that alongside providing our young learners with relevant tools, processes, and strategies to engage in new learning, we need to support them to develop the wisdom to use these well. (This might be thought of by some as an old-fashioned word, but the time for its renaissance has arrived).

In New Zealand we are fortunate to have a curriculum that allows for values (deeply-held beliefs) to be woven through school experiences. Students come to understand the social importance of enacting responsibility alongside rights; of practising manaakitanga and whanaungatanga. They are supported to take ownership as they authentically apply these principles and values. This learning comes through their exposure to experiences and ideas — some directed towards them; some sought by them; some that they have come across unexpectedly — formally and informally.

Once upon a time, we educators deliberately designed specific opportunities for our tamariki to discover, to grow understanding, and to form their identities, around such values. We ‘wove spells’ of teacher-directed planning to keep our children within safe (though perhaps stifling) boundaries that kept us and them comfortable. But in this new, exciting, beckoning, expanding digital learning environment where we encourage student agency and foster independent and collaborative exploration of terra incognito (unknown territories) via the internet, we also need to acknowledge that, in the words of the early maps, ‘Here be dragons’. We have a responsibility to furnish our young people with awareness of possible pitfalls. We need to help them to predict, recognise, and avoid the modern-day monsters of the information highway, so that they can bypass the highway robbers of false information, potential time-wasting purposeless screen time, and the dangerous quagmire of negative social media.

We need to find ways to help our akonga/learners to make the best of digital aspects of their lives, whilst independently and automatically:

  • recognising the signs of ‘fake news’/ false websites/ biased information/viral emails etc
  • bursting out of the social media and search engine filter bubbles that only give them more of what they have already experienced, and trap them in a limited digital world
  • breaking free of the tyranny of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and applying their personal filter as to what is worth spending their time attending to
  • finding joy, satisfaction, and balance in real and digital/virtual world activities
  • keeping the human experience in focus rather than automated/robotic ‘convenience’
  • becoming wise enough to work towards a collective better world, whilst nurturing their own needs and aspirations

… and of course, we don’t have a magic wand to do all this. But we do have each other.

So — let’s pull together, modelling how to use our traditional and digital networks safely and effectively, in the best ways that we can learn how, and weave those positive spells. If you’re not sure where to start, why not contact CORE Education? We’ve been doing some thinking….

Safer Internet Day:

You can join in a discussion about internet safety on the Virtual Learning Network (VLN). Safer Internet Day is 7th February 2017.

A few resources:

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Navigating the Flood and Avoiding the Fog of Information Overload

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I wonder if you’ve felt in recent years that life is constantly overwhelming — that there’s so much more to deal with than you have time for, and that you are always in ‘catch-up’ mode?

Welcome to my world. In fact, welcome to our world: an increasingly-digital world of multiple demands and stimulations, full of so many challenging, exciting and diverse opportunities that it becomes difficult to decide what to do. Perhaps we feel a little like the proverbial children in a sweetshop, but faced with much more complex situations. And as educators, we are tasked with the additional responsibility of helping the next generation to navigate this world.

Does it make your head whirl? Do you sometimes find yourself so busy being connected and available, that you fall into the trap of thinking of ubiquity as:

‘everywhere, all the time’

rather than:

‘anywhere, any time’?

Does the mental fog sometimes descend and paralyse you temporarily? Do you feel the slight panic and fear of missing out, if you don’t feel up-to-date or on top of everything? I know that I do!

Recently I found myself discussing this very issue with members of my book discussion group. Among our number are several educators, businesswomen, and psychologists, so the conversation ran deep and drew on wide bases of knowledge and experience. This powerful social context for learning led us to discovery of a taonga – which, if you did not already know of it, I now pass on to you.

Introducing…

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