This section of the web site provides strategies for dealing with the variety of challenges you may face in establishing a classroom environment that’s supportive of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in your course.

Items like proper lighting, acoustics, and visual access are critical to including deaf and hard-of-hearing students successfully in your instruction. Sometimes these conditions are optimum in the lecture room without modification. Sometimes optimal conditions are unavailable even after efforts have been made to modify the setting. Perhaps most often effort on your part, working with others, can result in favorable modification of the setting. What can or should you do to ensure that the environment is as accessible as possible for the deaf and hard-of-hearing students enrolled in your classes?

Finding Material

We’ve organized the material in this web site into short, readable sections with names like “Lighting,” “Safety,” and “Group Work.” As you seek information about challenges you face centering on deaf and hard-of-hearing students look for words in the four columns above that match your particular situation.

Think of the topics above like a large collection of suggestions that can help you in the teaching/learning process with your deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Under each topic you’ll find material organized into challenges and accompanying strategies. You’ll also find links to related topics in the collection, as well as occasional video segments that help to clarify the issue.

In addition there are occasional handouts. These are provided for your use, and are provided in a format that will allow you to open those files, modify them as needed, and they distribute them to your students. For example there is a handout with communication interaction rules for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing students when working together in groups.

Feedback

We’re always interested in knowing what you think. If you don’t find a topic that relates to the issue you face, or if the material is not helpful (or even if it is), please click the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the page and send us email. We’ll help if we can.