Here is a an article on the National Technical Institute for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. While reading this article, I thought about opportunity for these students and also increased diversity in the workforce. This article reminded me of the NSF report on "Broadening Participation in America's STEM Workforce." Where the authors point out that more effort should be targeted "on two particularly under-attended-to groups in STEM: persons with disabilities and Native Americans."
I thought the later part of the article, where the author talks about the StepWise method for solving mathematical story like problems, was really interesting. It's exciting to see that these methods not only improved the students' learning at NTID, but that they could also be suitable for hearing students.
http://www.prism-magazine.org/jan11/tt_01.cfm
That was a really interesting article. It is great that people are working on improving the STEM training for those with hearing issues. Besides working on promoting diversity for equity's sake, I think that training students with disabilities in engineering should hopefully produce technological breakthrough that will better aid hearing disabled people in the future.
ReplyDeleteIn the most recent Society of Women Engineering Magazine, they talked about the SWE 2010 Achievement Award Recipient, Chieko Awakawa. Chieko is researcher at IBM, who is blind and who helped develop new technologies to allow vision impaired people to be able to use computers more efficiently.
While we use the phrase the blind leading the blind most often in a negative connotation, in Chieko case it was her leading them to greater computer accessibility.
You can read her short speech here.
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/swe/winter11/#/52