International Educational Outreach

In 2001, with an initial investment from the Nippon Foundation, RIT/NTID created a multinational network of colleges and universities to improve and expand secondary and postsecondary education for deaf and hard of hearing students. The partners of the Postsecondary Education Network-International (PEN-International) and the Pre-College Education Network (P-CEN) participated in significant training and development of best practices in deaf education with regards to instructional strategies, access services and educational support services, educational technology, and faculty development and training.

A common area of frustration for many has been an inability for their graduates to find meaningful employment. Employment outcomes and career advancement for people with disabilities (PWDs) in ASEAN countries still lags behind many other nations. Further, deaf and hard of hearing people face significant barriers to employment due to lack of language and communication access. This is exacerbated by limited training opportunities and the lack of awareness among prospective employers. Little data exists, however, on the current employment trends for PWDs. Amid the pandemic of 2020, many deaf people who were employed, particularly those in the service industry, lost their jobs. The swift change to virtual and remote technologies combined with very different ways of doing business now means deaf people need a variety of opportunities for retraining and gaining new skills. In addition, as the pandemic begins to ebb, deaf people must be prepared to adapt to changing work environments.

Therefore, RIT/NTID and its partner institutions in the Philippines and Việt Nam been awarded a new grant from the Nippon Foundation to create two Centers on Employment to support the education and employment of people who are deaf or hard of hearing in the Philippines and Việt Nam. These centers will be established to provide the necessary training and support services to assist with the educational needs of deaf graduates in both partner countries.

This proposed Project TREE will transform early grade reading experience for young deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children through Sign Language Rhythm and Rhyme (SLRR) and Shared Multilingual Reading Strategies (SMRS) on the ACR GCD: World Around You (WAY) platform.

Several challenges that early childhood professionals face are finding instructional strategies, curriculum materials, and assessment approaches in language literacy for DHH children. Additionally, these strategies must be visually engaging and follow developmentally appropriate practices of early learning to attract young DHH children to reading. With the increasing acceptance and recognition of sign languages worldwide, professionals have been exploring innovative ways to bridge the gap between sign language and the written language. The main focus is reducing the global deaf literacy gap earlier.

Project TREE addresses the gap by providing DHH children greater access to sign languages, early-grade reading materials, songs about vocabulary, and digital learning assessments. SLRR is an innovative, playful way to play with language visually and develop sign language phonological awareness. Similar to hearing children's captivation with songs that have sound-based beats and rhymes, deaf children enjoy visual-based beats and visual rhymes. Project TREE commits to producing SLRR and SMRS training materials and providing training-of-trainers to partner country teams for maximum success in the assimilation of materials in three different countries: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines. We are partnering with deaf community leaders in these countries. The leaders are currently creating preschool stories in their sign languages as part of the current ACR GCD: Begin with Books project. Project TREE will promote community engagement and inclusion by including families with DHH children and deaf community members in the process

Project TREE aims to create 6 sign language rhythm books and related training materials in their sign and written languages. Each book can be exported as an EPUB for offline viewing/reading and transfer to other open library platforms. We will design, create and share SLRR and SMRS modules for parents and adults who work with young DHH children. All the digital content will be open-licensed and duplicable. We also want to make sure to provide a grow-your-own SLRR and SMRS training template for each partnering country along with early childhood education foundational skill assessments for sign language phonological awareness, signed word recognition, written letter awareness, and written word recognition. This project will cover all four domains of the Measure of Child Development and Learning (MELQO). Playing with language increases social-emotional learning and executive functioning skills, especially with Theory of Mind. The books and related materials have a variety of activities to promote early literacy and mathematical skills.

The proposed project includes a month-long on-line intensive training-of-trainers with well-known deaf Early Childhood Deaf Education experts in SLRR, SMRS, home and classroom visits, and capacity building for partnerships with various organizations (e.g., SIL PNG, the Gabay project) and communities for in-country training workshops. The total proposed budget includes training, home and classroom visits, community events, monitoring and evaluation, and personnel efforts for training content creation and delivery.

Chris Kurz, Stephen Jacobs, Thomastine Sarchet, Kim Kurz
International countries partners: the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, and Somali

• One of ACR GCD’s most recent competitions is Begin with Book, launched in 2019 in partnership with the Global Book Alliance. Begin with Books is designed to create thousands of books in languages that children use and understand. After a global call for proposals, RIT was one of four winners selected by ACR GCD to receive funding to build books for preschoolers through 2nd graders.
• By the end of this 2-year project, we will produce early grade literacy materials:
  • 50 signed books for each level (Pre-K to Grade 2) for a total of 200 books.
  • Seventy percent of the books will come from the existing free and open source libraries.
  • Thirty percent of the books will be new stories about the deaf experience (15 books each level; 60 altogether).
  • Twenty percent of the books will be Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics related (10 books each level; 40 altogether).
  • Each book will have six eligible sign languages (Filipino Sign Language, Indonesia Sign Language and local sign languages, Somali Sign Language, and PNG Sign Language and Pacific Island: Fiji Sign Language and Samoan Sign Language).

Books will be available on WAY and Global Digital Library.

Chris Kurz, Stephen Jacobs, Thomastine Sarchet

• Following pilot testing of LIFT-WAY and an additional round of judging, RIT was awarded additional funding to further refine our prototype and conduct field testing for our project, World Around You, in the Philippines.
• As part of field testing in the Philippines, Filipino Deaf community members created 20 stories in three languages: Filipino Sign Language, Filipino/Tagalog, and English. Story genres include folktale, number sequence, history, and deaf experience.
• World Around You (WAY) is a technology-based multi-lingual innovation with the goal to increase global literacy outcomes for deaf children by providing greater access to sign languages, early grade reading materials, vocabulary, reading instruction, and digital games. WAY is a library of storybooks about different topics, including folktales, deaf experiences, cultural items and foods, and sign language genres. WAY allows for the creation of multilingual signed stories with written text to be created and distributed across the Internet.  WAY promotes community engagement by allowing contributors to publish stories collaboratively. WAY reinforces literacy for deaf children and sign language documentation of local, regional and national sign languages by Deaf people.

Chris Kurz, Stephen Jacobs, Thomastine Sarchet, Mel Chua and Kim Kurz

• One of ACR GCD’s competitions is Sign on For Literacy, launched in November 2017 in partnership with the World Federation of the Deaf, the Nyle DiMarco Foundation and Deaf Child Worldwide. Globally, only 1 to 2 percent of children who are deaf receive instruction in sign languages, leaving millions of children with little access to language or communication and limited prospects for healthy development. Sign On For Literacy is designed to drive innovations that increase access to local sign languages for all children.
• After a global call for proposals, RIT was one of five innovators selected by ACR GCD to receive seed funding to develop technology-based solutions to improve sign languages and literacy outcomes for deaf children in low-resource settings. We proposed to develop open source software targeted for deployment on Linux-based computers and mobile devices that would run locally or in a web browser. This would include interactive literacy instruction materials in the form of interactive books and games that were capable of adding new video collections for different signed languages and a larger suite for creating and editing new libraries for the interactive content and creating compendiums of signed languages. This proposed technology innovation project will include a cross-linguistic software suite that promotes interactive game-based reading for deaf children and collects local and national sign languages in developing countries.

WAY (World around you) website

Supported by UNICEF/Krousar Thmey Cambodia

The proposed project includes the in-depth analysis of available international and national educational resources related to standards and practices, the development of a comprehensive curriculum and training modules for training Special Needs Teachers specialized in leaching children who are deaf or hard of hearing in Cambodia, and the training of trainers with the modules. The project will include an on-site training of trainers (ToT) for selected veteran teachers lo become future trainers of current and future professionals working with deaf or hard of hearing students in Cambodia.

The purpose of this proposed project is to establish a solid comprehensive curriculum to be broken into 10 different modules of 45 hours each, for teacher training in Deaf Education. After the initial training of trainers on curriculum modules, the modules will be available for trainers to train special needs teachers working with deaf and hard of hearing students in Cambodia. This concept follows the grow-your-own approach for current and future professionals and teachers in the field.​

Supported by Ford Foundation Global Travel and Learning Fund

Funding from the Ford Foundation is used to support the development of official partnerships with educational programs (primary through tertiary organizations) across Africa. Specifically, funds are being used to increase our presence and strengthen in-person, face-to-face discussions, as well as virtual communications. This will help facilitate the network building between existing programs that is currently lacking. Ford Foundation

Supported by a Private Donor

This exploration grant draws upon the expertise and experience of educators and service providers from NTID who will collaborate with an Ethiopian team to assess the current programs; identify needs for extending secondary education as well as technical and vocational services to the deaf community in the country; and create a vision to meet those needs and a plan for implementing the vision.

The long-range goal is to propagate, expand and enhance secondary and upper secondary education for citizens who are deaf within Ethiopia. The outcome of the proposed exploration project will be a phased implementation plan for secondary/upper secondary and vocational programs for deaf Ethiopians. The implementation plan will present a detailed vision for the expanded programs and lay out the goals, outcomes and timelines for designing and developing the programs and making them operational. The entire process of planning and implementation will serve as a model for the East African Region.

Supported by NTID and the Nippon Foundation of Japan

This pilot project was established to prepare international Deaf students at NTID to serve as leaders who will make significant contributions to the betterment of their home communities as well as globally, in collaboration with their local Deaf advocacy organization(s) and/or the World Federation of the Deaf. The year-long program is designed to align with The Nippon Foundation’s primary purpose under the NTID Sasakawa-DeCaro Scholarship to help deaf people from developing countries participate in information and cultural exchanges, increase leadership skills, and return to their home countries to aid in the support of their local deaf communities.

Supported by the US-Japan Foundation

Secondary Educational Enrichment for Deaf Students – International: Sowing the SEEDS of Cross-Cultural Understanding (SEEDS-International) is the first-of-a-kind pilot program that provides global learning opportunities and cultural awareness for deaf high school students, a historically under-served population. Delegations of students, faculty, and sign language interpreters from both schools participate in video conferences, local cultural classes, journaling, week-long reciprocal school visits, and capstone presentations about their experiences to assemblies at their home schools.

Supported by the Nippon Foundation of Japan

The Pre-College Education Network (P-CEN) was the evolution of the PEN-International approach to enhancing deaf education in developing countries through the use of wide networks of motivated and dedicated faculty and administrators of local and regional programs supporting deaf students.