Deaf studies for transfer deaf adolescents
This capstone project focuses on developing a curriculum unit that deals specifically with Deafhood. The purpose of this curriculum development project is to help deaf students who transferred from mainstreamed schools to a school for the deaf, leam more about the DEAF-WORLD and thusly adapt to the new environment by constructing a Deaf identity and becoming confident in themselves as contributing members of society. Increasingly, transfer students are introduced to a new educational and cultural environment where sign language is free flowing, one of the primary educational and social languages of the deaf. The curriculum unit is divided into five programs:
Deafhood: A concept stressing possibilities, not deficits
Born-deaf, sign-language-using people have for the past two centuries been placed within a succession of externally constructed models, notably the traditional ``medical'' or pathological model. This perceives them primarily as biologically deficient beings in need of cures or charity in order to be successfully assimilated into society. This paper proposes that the concept of colonialism is the one that most appropriately describes the ``existential'' reality of deaf communities, and offers instead a deaf-constructed model. Utilizing recent confirmation of the existence of bona-fide feaf cultures, it highlights the extent to which these communities have resisted such models, maintaining their own beliefs concerning their validity and quality of their existence, and what they offer to non-deaf societies. This ``vulnerability as strength'' is manifested through the concept of deafhood, which is presented as the first move towards a formal narrative of decolonizing and liberatory possibilities.
Science Buddies: Advancing Informal Science Education
An innovative nonprofit enables scientists to present inspiring project ideas based on their own research to K–12 students, parents, and teachers. Every year, about 10 million North American kindergarten through high school (K–12) students complete a science project. What part of these science projects is the most difficult? Formulating a hypothesis? Designing an experiment? Analyzing data? The answer: None of the above. Science Buddies (www.sciencebuddies.org)—a nonprofit developer of software, content, and other resources for informal science and engineering education—found that students have the most difficulty selecting a topic and doing background research to inform their work. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers interested in advising and inspiring students often do not have a means to connect with them (see the first figure). To Science Buddies, these difficulties presented an ideal challenge, and we applied a business methodology to address them, viewing our users as customers and our output as products.