UC San Diego

Fifty percent of deaf students graduate high school with a 4th grade reading level (Traxler, 2000) and representations of deaf characters in children’s literature are typically modeled after the medical communities’ view of deafness (Golos & Moses, 2011), Deaf children are not given an opportunity to identify themselves as cultural and linguistic beings who belong to a larger Deaf community within standard children’s literature. My curriculum addresses these problems by allowing deaf children to create a representation that matches their experiences. By utilizing rubrics, pre and post surveys, teacher observation, exit tasks, and student guided learning, I collected evidence to suggest an increase in students’ understanding of Deaf Community Cultural Wealth (DCCW, a term coined by Dr. Flavia Fleischer) and deafhood would enable students to actively challenge and change those models. Students created an ASL historical fiction story that more accurately represents their life experiences, to eradicate the detrimental effects of negative representation in children’s literature. Evidence from this curriculum suggests that, after analyzing differences in representation from both the hearing and deaf perspective, Deaf students understood the need to represent deaf people in a cultural way, focusing on what deaf people can do instead of what they cannot do.