The state and national education departments have awarded two training grants of about $1 million to the Boston University deaf-studies program in the School of Education for technology upgrades and scholarships.
The money is crucial because a shortage of about 2,500 qualified teachers for the deaf will soon exist, according to an SED press release. This shortage is apparent at BU, where only 10 students are enrolled in its deaf-studies program, said program director Robert Hoffmeister.
“I think it’s a very specialized degree and, in addition, you have to learn a language,” Hoffmeister said. “It’s probably not what you might consider an easy degree to obtain. . . . The steps that you need to get through are probably more than the average teaching steps.”
One grant focuses on attracting more teachers by developing prerequisite training courses off campus to entice more students to consider the BU deaf-studies program. It will also help to perfect “real-time” American Sign Language Internet courses, which use iChat but are slowed by unreliable connections.
“The grant funding helps us to bring on board motivated students and to not only educate them effectively but also give them the means to work in the field,” said program co-director Marlon Kuntze.
The second grant will improve effective ASL communication of math and science terms. The deaf-studies program will develop a DVD of its findings on this subject, which will serve as a dictionary for teachers in Massachusetts, Hoffmeister said.
“The grant funding does have some strings attached to it — research and other efforts associated with improving deaf [education] for the long term,” Kuntze said. “We want to make sure our teaching techniques are effective and strategic.”
BU became the first university to have a deaf-studies program in 1981, and is still the only program in New England to teach using ASL.
“Many of the people who are working here have deaf parents,” Hoffmeister said. “We’ve all grown up in the culture, in the community of the deaf. We recognize the value of ASL and what it can do for kids for learning.”
Kuntze is also moving into the second year of another separate $2 million each year grant from the National Science Foundation. His research will be administered mostly at Gallaudet University, the only liberal-arts university specifically for deaf students.
He said he and his coworkers will focus on human-visual learning. One avenue of research will include looking into how deaf children learn to read despite having no access to spoken language.
“Deaf children who exclusively use ASL learn to read,” Kuntze said. “So they have this lack, if you will, of prior knowledge of the spoken mode, but they’re learning to read very well. So we’re looking for a theory to explain how that happens.”