To Örebro University

This study concerns adult Codas, or hearing children of deaf¹, signing parents. They are of significant interest to language researchers as bimodal bilinguals who grew up in a multifaceted bicultural environment. The study is based on interviews with 12 Coda adults in Sweden (aged 18–50 years). The interviews were translated, transcribed, and coded for thematic analysis. The analysis draws on the theoretical concepts of social identity and investment proposed by Norton (Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 1(29), 9–31 https://faculty.educ.ubc.ca/norton/Norton%201995%20p.pdf.). The main findings indicate that for these Codas, the everyday experience of bimodal bilingualism acts as a driving force in the formation of social identities, fostering linguistic, cultural, and social awareness, which, in turn, influences how individuals invest in their languages and cultures.

Denna studie gäller en grupp personer som benämns CODA (Children of Deaf Adults). CODAs1 är för forskare en intressant grupp eftersom de växer upp i familjer med ett visuellt-tecknat språk och ett auditivt-talat språk. De använder sina två modalt olika språk i sin familj. Trots denna speciella tvåspråkighet är forskningsfältet begränsat. 

Studien är en intervjustudie av tolv hörande vuxna (18–50 år) som växt upp i teckenspråkiga familjer. Huvudsyftet för studien var att utifrån ett translanguagingteoretiskt perspektiv analysera effekter associerade med erfarenheter av svenska och svenskt teckenspråk under uppväxten. I föreliggande artikel fokuseras de positiva flerspråkiga erfarenheterna som denna grupp har, samt hur de beskriver egna upplevda bimodala språkeffekter. Huvudfynden visar att den teckenspråkiga uppväxten upplevs som en styrka för utveckling av svenska och för generell språkkompetens. 

This study concerns a group of people often called CODA (Children of Deaf Adults). CODAs are of significant interest to researchers since they grow up in families with one visual-signed language and another auditive-spoken language. They use two languages in the family in two different modalities. Despite this, the research field is limited.

The study was an interview study of twelve hearing adults (age 18–50) who had grown up in deaf signing families. The overarching purpose of the study was, from a translanguaging theoretical perspective, to analyze effects associated with experiences of Swedish and Swedish Sign Language during childhood. In this particular article, positive multilingual effects and experiences are focused upon, as well as how they describe bimodal language effects. The main findings from this study show benefits from CODAs growing up in a signing family on development of Swedish and of general linguistic competence. 

Ett inkluderande arbetssätt inom skolan innebär att lärare och övrig personal tillsammans ska verka för att lärmiljön görs tillgänglig för alla elever. I skollagen (2010:800 kap. 3) anges att elever som behöver extra anpassningar och särskilt stöd har en lagstadgad rätt (Skollagen 2010:800 kap.3), att få ett pedagogiskt stöd, för att kunna nå de nationella målen. Utformningen av elevhälsoarbetet och samverkan mellan olika professioner utgör en central del i skolans verksamhet för att skapa en skolmiljö som kan inkludera alla elever oavsett social och kulturell bakgrund eller funktionsnedsättning. Hälsa och lärande har ett nära samband med elevers skolframgång, därför blir det nödvändigt att se på inkludering och tillgänglig lärmiljö utifrån ett salutogent perspektiv. Ett sådant arbete kräver att alla berörda professioner i skolan samverkar kring elevers skolsituation. Detta för att kunna skapa lösningar som är både främjande och förebyggande för elevens skolgång. Olika professioners kompetens och kunskap (Hjörne & Säljö, 2014) kring hälsa och lärande kan också innebära olika syn och arbetssätt kring elevhälsofrågor. Man behöver utveckla pedagogiska former för hur olika professioner kan samverka för både elevhälsoteam och pedagoger i skolan. Likaså är en samsyn kring innebörden av inkludering och implementering av skollagen nödvändig. Syftet med det pedagogiska utvecklingsprojektet är att skapa olika lärtillfällen där studenter från ämneslärar-, specialpedagogiska och socionomprogrammet kan mötas för att diskutera och lära kring utbildningarnas gemensamma men också olika ingångar i utbildningen kring elever som är i behov stöd. I genomförandet av studien har casestudier varit ett kursinslag i de gemensamma kursmomenten. Utöver kursaktiviteter i de gemensamma programöverskridande momenten har uppföljande semistrukturerade intervjuer genomförts med deltagande studenter från båda programmen. Resultaten visar att följande kursmoment i form av programöverskridande samarbete synliggör studenternas behov att mötas och diskutera gemensamma elevhälsofrågor. Det visar att studenterna behöver kunskap om varandras professionsuppdrag för att kunna skapa samverkansformer i ett kommande gemensamt elevhälsoarbete mellan elevhälsoteamet och skolans pedagoger. 

Background: The Swedish school is based on an inclusive principle where teachers’ ability to meet and teach all children and student groups with different social backgrounds and disabilities, other ethnic backgrounds, low and high performance is central. This means, for example, that students in need of additional adaptations, special support or challenges of different kinds receive the support they have statutory rights to (Skollagen 2010: 800, chapter 3), which often involves collaboration with student health skills such as SENCO, school social worker and also psychologist ( SOU 2017: 35). Hjörne and Säljö (2014) point to the difficulties encountered in collaborating on student health issues and students in need of adaptations and support. That is an area that addresses key questions for the school, health care and social services. Different social institutions thus work with student health issues but from different perspectives. It also creates different approaches to student health issues, which can complicate the understanding of different professionals’ skills and knowledge (Hjörne & Säljö, 2014). We therefore see the importance of courses where the students have the possibility to meet, understand and discuss with each other, as a way to create bridges between different professions.

Research question: The purpose of this study is to investigate what kind of knowledge and skills of co-operation future teachers, SENCO and school social workers need in order to qualitatively achieve good results across the professional boundaries with a focus on student health issues?

Method: University students who have participated in cross-disciplinary learning activities and with active schoolteachers; SENCO and school social workers in professional teams of student health, will be interviewed. Experience and knowledge of difficulties and opportunities for collaboration, as a basis for what kind of knowledge about collaboration and action skills the students need as newly educated teachers, SENCO and school social workers. The empirical collection will start in early 2019 and last throughoutthe year.

Results and discussion: The intended outcome addresses questions about what is important to develop in terms of professionalism within the multidimensional field. It is also important to get an overall picture of the students’ experiences and reflections of the academic learning activities found in the education and professional experience and knowledge. This applies to knowledge and action competence both in terms of content and collaboration in student health issues. Experience in working in different types of profession-wide teams such as student health, as well as meeting parents.

We see this as aspects of how to develop collegial interaction and exchange of ideas about the educational activity in the context of students in need of special support. With these educational efforts in the programs, both students and teachers take an active role in the development of students’ career in the context of the multidimensional field, special education and school social work. It identify and problematize ”the gap” and develop opportunities, arenas, for this kind of issues in school’s student health work.

In Sweden, recent waves of immigration have dramatically altered the linguistic landscape of Swedish schools for the deaf and hard of hearing. Many newly arrived students come with no experience with any sign language, and/or rudimentary skills in one or more spoken languages. Educating such a linguistically diverse population poses vexing challenges. Translanguaging offers exciting potential as a framework to guide teachers in recognizing and utilizing the totality of students’ varied linguistic resources to promote learning, regardless of current proficiency in Swedish and Swedish Sign Language. However, the promises of translanguaging elicit mixed reactions among [Deaf educators]. On the one hand, it affirms that a multilingual repertoire naturally leads to language use that draws from multiple sources, a fact that should be recognized and supported by educational practices. Translanguaging offers a valuable framework for analyzing the dynamic blending of signed and spoken language that educators have long observed from all deaf children. On the other hand, Deaf signers are alarmed by translanguaging practitioners’ calls to abandon the concept of language separation and allow elements of signed and spoken language to mix freely. Such unrestricted mixing calls to mind the long struggle against “SimCom,” the simultaneous mixing of speech and degraded signing that has repeatedly proven inaccessible to deaf signers.

How can Swedish Deaf schools employ translanguaging in a way that ensures equal access for all students, not just those with greater access to spoken language? The answer depends on teachers with strong competence in both Swedish and Swedish Sign Language, specifically trained to create visual learning environments where sign language skills are actively developed and used to facilitate access to spoken language content. Our talk highlights examples of such practices and identifies specific aspects of teachers’ ability to understand and leverage the multilingualism in their classrooms.

Translanguaging is often regarded with great skepticism in the context of Deaf education, as an approach that has already been tried, with disastrous results. Already in the 1960’s educators understood the critical importance of allowing deaf children to exploit their full linguistic repertoire for learning: not only listening, lip-reading and reading/writing, but also sign language, fingerspelling, gesture, and other strategies that render language visually accessible. The resulting teaching philosophy, Total Communication (TC), quickly became the dominant approach employed in Deaf education. Yet despite its progressive stance on multilingualism and multimodality, TC ultimately failed to provide deaf students with full access to a natural language. This chapter contrasts the ineffective multilingual practices under TC with characteristically “Deaf ways” of multilingual meaning-making observed among skilled Deaf signers. Excerpts from life story interviews illustrate the impact these practices have for scaffolding learning among Deaf students newly arrived in Sweden. We conclude that prioritizing visually-oriented practices and supporting both students and teachers to become skilled signers offer the best assurance for successful translanguaging in Deaf education without engendering the problems that caused TC to fail.