Junior / Senior Projects
Chinquapin Preparatory School
Deaf Studies
Arelly Cisneros-2019
The Deaf Community is composed of a couple types of people; those who are hard of hearing, deaf of deaf meaning their parents are also deaf, lastly there is deaf of hearing which means that their parents are not deaf. Even if these people have different levels of hearing and different backgrounds as to how they became deaf there is one thing that unites them, the issues that they have to face on a day to day basis. These issues can most definitely be put to a stop if only people had enough knowledge on the issues the deaf community faces such as not being able to acquire an education of the same value as a hearing child, lack of communication among those whom they come in contact with and arrogance of those who they are surrounded by.
The goal of my project was to help spread awareness about the Deaf community to as many people as I could. I began my project by doing some research about the Deaf community, I wanted to make sure that I knew as much as I could before going off to teach others about the Deaf Community. After finishing up with my research I decided that the most efficient way in which I could spread awareness in my community was to create a lesson and teach it to the middle school students. For each grade level I met with the teacher in charge of that class period in order to make sure that the lesson plan was specific for each class.
The inspiration for my project began when I was approximately 8 years old when I met my mother’s coworker who happened to be deaf. Of course at that time I didn’t quite understand why he wasn’t able to communicate vocally with us and why if said something to him, he could not hear me. However, I didn’t do much research or learned more about the deaf community until the summer before my junior year of high school when I began to watch a series on Netflix that gave the viewers an insight into the Deaf community. I knew I wanted to spread more awareness about the Deaf community and decided the best way in which I could do this was to teach a lesson with the most crucial information I thought would be helpful for hearing people to know about in order to not come off as rude or insensitive if they encounter someone who is deaf.