Research
Associate professor takes part in multilingual miracle in France
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By Jim Carlson
ong-term research by a College of Education associate professor is revealing new insights into multilingual deaf students’ language practices that opens a window to make visible our broader understandings of deaf and hearing multilingual learners’ creativity in putting to use multi-modal and multisensorial communicative practices in their everyday lives.
mode of communication, as opposed to speech-only, which is the dominant approach around the world, said Valente, who himself is deaf. Valente said these follow-up interviews gave him insight into how the students developed close relationships from kindergarten to junior high. “Which is unusual because most kids, like myself … I never knew a deaf person until I was an adult, and 96% of deaf kids were born to hearing parents, so opportunities to meet another deaf person are rare,” he said.
Joseph Valente, professor-incharge for early childhood education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) and director of the “This school has deaf teachers who Center for Disability Studies, researches are the first deaf teachers to get certified young, deaf children, their language in France and their curriculum is based Joseph Valente and school socialization. He is working on collaborations between linguists with the first bilingual deaf program in at the University of Paris VIII and deaf educators; France to be recognized by the Ministry of National it’s a very innovative program that is fast becoming Education after a 200-year ban on sign language and recognized worldwide as an exemplary model for deaf deaf bilingual education in that country. bilingual education.” Valente first filmed kindergartners in Ramonville, Valente said many of the Toulouse students attend a suburb in the Toulouse area of France, about eight years ago when the program was still considered college, which goes against the norm. “Academic, experimental. Now, this bilingual deaf education mental health and employment outcomes for deaf program is one of two formally recognized by the students in France are abysmal; 50% of deaf students United Nations as an exemplary model of inclusive achieve a high school education; 30% of deaf adults are mainstream schooling for deaf students. This deaf unemployed. Only about 20% of deaf kids go to college bilingual education program is unique because it is and only between 20% and 43% of them graduate. The embedded in a hearing, local elementary school. average deaf kid who graduates in the United States graduates with a fourth-grade reading level … fifthIn early 2020, Valente was awarded a Research grade math,” Valente said. Initiation Grant from C&I to return to France to reinterview those same students, now in junior high school, while also sharing films from their kindergarten classroom almost a decade ago. Valente’s sociolinguistic video ethnographic research investigates how deaf multilingual children make use of communicative and community practices as resources for navigating the multiple, fluid and everemergent deaf-deaf and deaf-hearing spaces of their classroom and deaf and hearing school community. He also investigated how deaf children, as well as their parents and teachers, think about their own and other children’s multilingual and inclusive communicative and community practices. This was the first cross-national study of deaf bilingual kindergartners in a classroom with a deaf teacher and using sign language/writing as the primary 14
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“Nearly 40% of deaf people require hospitalization and outpatient therapy. In short, the outcomes for the deaf are atrocious; they’re actually the worst outcomes of any language minoritized student. This school is nothing short of a miracle and I’ve been trying to do everything I can to document its rise and do a longitudinal study on them. I’m trying to get (grant) money to just keep following these kids.” Valente said research outcomes are showing that the deaf students in the study are scoring average or above the average of what is expected for a hearing student and they are ascending to secondary education. “In terms of their literacy outcomes and things like that, they’re doing significantly better than the kids that don’t have these advantages,” Valente said.
