This week had the most amazing experience in service learning. We went to a class for disabled students hosted by the Thanh Xuân branch of DP Hanoi. The class was and was aimed at teaching individuals with learning disabilities how to read and write. In terms of structure There were about 11 students in the class from ages 12-35 with a huge range of physical and mental disabilities. The class was headed by a retired elementary teacher who seemed incredibly passionate about her job, but used extremely mechanical methods of teaching. The organizational structure of the class was fairly basic. She spent most of the class reading the lesson out methodically in a call and repeat format. For example the word trấm ̣(100) would be read as:
teacher: â m âm
students: â m âm
teacher: tr âm sắc (the name of the tone) trâm trấm
students: tr âm sắc trâm trấm
This process would be repeated for each word in the paragraph. The whole thing sounded almost like a song. While this structure is useful in that it emphasizes the vowel and then builds the word phonetically around the vowel I have to question using it with this class. Considering that with only a minor learning disability I find this structure nearly impossible to follow it seemed weird to be using it with students with such sever disabilities. Indeed only about 3-4 of the students seemed able to fully follow the call and repeat structure. About four other students attempted to follow it while three students stayed completely unengaged (I will get to why in a second). Of the students who were attempting to follow but couldn’t several seemed to have difficulties with the speed of the process. This may because they had some type of speech delay, which is common to a bunch of learning disabilities. Others could pronounce the full word but like me were unable to follow the complex process required to break down the word.
As there was such a wide range of learning disabilities I think this class would have greatly benefited from a different organizational structure. First I think introducing more variation in the teaching methods would have allowed more of the students to engage with the material. Pictures to help the students understand the meaning of the words or games to keep the students engaged would have been really useful. Even changing from the complex phonetic system they were using to a simpler version of sounding things out in order might have helped several of the students (me included) follow the lesson. Furthermore more individual time with the teacher or small group work would have been useful seeing as there were a huge host of learning disabilities in the room.
One of the best examples of the way that class wasn’t meeting the needs of its students was one of the boys sitting in the back row. The boy was 16 years old and while he could hear was completely mute. While the rest of the class repeated the lesson out loud he sat quietly in the back waiting attentively. When the teacher called on him he proceeded to repeat the lesson in almost flawless Vietnamese finger spelling. I got to signing with him after a bit and realized just how much he didn’t belong in that class.
The boy was brilliant. He is the first real live example of someone creating a home sign system I have seen (i.e. he had invented his own sign language for communication). We were going through the first grade Vietnamese reader and I was asking him what his signs were for the different pictures. He had signs for all of the animals, verbs etc. in the book. He could explain his family structure to me (although the grammar of his language here was a bit too complex for me to follow) and tell me which members of his family could speak. He had his own word for age, could give me directions to his house, and could even explain how the shape of a birds beak determines what food it can eat. He asked me if I had arrived by airplane and prompted me to describe which country I was from and show him signs for the different continents in the world. All in all he was totally out of place in a verbally based class where students had a hard time remembering if the time of the class had been switched.
I do understand however that to an outsider this probably seemed like the most logical place to put him. Clearly a regular class room wouldn’t work and because he lives in the Thanh Xuân he was placed where the organizational structure of DP Hanoi dictates he should go: the Thanh Xuân special education class. However, I think he would benefit greatly by joining the Hanoi Association for the Deaf instead. While he is not technically deaf, he shares the need for non-verbal communication. He would benefit greatly from learning a signed language that is shared by a large group of peers and not just himself (even though his own sign language is really cool!). He could also attend the workshops they have that use sign language to teach people written Vietnamese. Joining the deaf community would open up job opportunities and help increase his sense of self worth. I’m hoping to talk to Ang Thai and Gerard in the upcoming weeks to see if there is a way to suggest this that is culturally sensitive and appropriate. In the meantime I’m thinking of getting him an Oxford English Picture dictionary with Vietnamese translations. While the book is limited in that it reflects American daily life rather then Vietnamese daily life I think it would really help him seeing as he is a visual learner. I think he has the self-motivation to take that book and teach himself the Vietnamese words for things to better communicate with his family and strangers.
Overall this was an amazing experience and I look forward to going back to the class again.
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