multilingualism multiculturalism linguistic equity inclusion culturally sustaining pedagogy American Sign Language Deaf and Hard of Hearing video-on presence presentation mainstreaming
Abstract:
This teacher inquiry explores two particular challenges in my online/hybrid student teaching practice that I wanted to explore further from a multimodal and multilingual perspective. These two remote teaching challenges include students having minimal video-on presence in a remote classroom and students’ presentation skills lacking in effective non-verbal communication. To explore these challenges and how American Sign Language linguistic and cultural awareness activities could impact hearing students’ video-on presence and presentations skills (while producing a more linguistically equitable and inclusive learning space), I designed, collected data, and analyzed student results of preliminary surveys, video-on record sheets, predetermined ASL linguistic and cultural awareness activities, and assessments. Results from this research show some benefits to incorporating ASL linguistic and cultural awareness activities to improve video-on presence and non-verbal presentation skills. Other results show a need for continued research using heightened application of research methods.