As you might have seen on the recent news there’s a debate about the problems of using mask in classrooms, because of the fact that children with hearing impairments can’t follow appropriately the class. They need to read the lips in order to understand what are the teacher and their classmates saying, however the masks make it impossible.
As the Journal of Chemical Education (1) sais, that problem afects on the learning but also on the social, cultural and emotional development of the child. They report feeling lonely and isolated as well as a deep lack of security.
Actually the government has the proposal of doing invisible masks so they can follow better the class. We agree with the National Deak Center (2) that it can be one remedy and broke the barrier that isolates them; there are also other ideas like reforcing audio equipment on shcools but we think that it is not as efective as the first one.
It has been dificult for us to get information because of the recent all of it is, so if you find any article related to that topic we encourage you to coment it.
PD: During the research we’ve found some really interesting websites where we got the information, but also they give some good advices and resources for teaching and parenting deaf and hard-of-hearing students. We attach the links for you to give a look if you are interested.
by Marta Herruzo and Clàudia Fagella
Lynn, M. A., Templeton, D. C., Ross, A. D., Gehret, A. U., Bida, M., Ii, T. J. S., & Pagano, T. (2020). Successes and Challenges in Teaching Chemistry to Deaf and Hard- of-Hearing Students in the Time of COVID-19, 3322–3326. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00602
https://www.ndcs.org.uk/covid-19-coronavirus-support-for-deaf-children/
https://masseyeandear.org/covid-19/hearing-loss-resources-students-teachers
Great Marta and Clàudia! Since you have already looked at information, perhaps one of your next writing could be related to the intervention of the psychologists in students with hearing impairment.