As we are pretty busy with our current project I don't really get round to write on my blog. Still I wanted to share some insights from our current process. We are doing a service-design project on the topic of "Language as participation"
We spent the first two weeks doing intense design-ethnography. The whole class conducted interviews around the topic of language learning. Our interviewees were students, immigrants, refugees, teachers, language and dialect specialists..Our focus was to find out about how learning works in everyday life's situations and encounters. We mapped out our interviewees "journeys" of learning or teaching foreign languages (mostly Swedish) and started to analyse the material in a number of synthesis sessions.
In a two-day workshop we draw conclusions by creating posters on which we mapped the most important themes in language learning. For instance, cross-generational learning plays a big role in a lot of people's life's: It happens as soon as kids, their parents and maybe their grandparents speak different languages natively and by that learn from each other. Sometimes there are two native languages (from mother and father) plus their shared language (often English) plus an additional language of the country the family lives in involved.
After splitting up in smaller groups of two - three students, we started to think about focus areas. I teamed up with my classmates Adam (Swedish) and Jules (Dutch) as we shared the interest in the different learning channels. There are different types of learners: auditive, visual, kinesthetic and tactile learners. Most people learn the most effective by having an individual mix of learning methods, probably with a focus on one of them. That's when we started to ask ourselves what would happen if you take away the access to one learning channel? If born deaf the auditive channel is very limited or even not available. We started to look into the topic of Sign-language and decided to focus on it for the rest of the project.
In one more week we explored a lot about the topic, read a lot of articles, papers and stories from deaf people as well as relatives and experts.
We prepared a workshop with our class, our tutors and teachers to get ideas from people who have no or only little knowledge about the topic and approach it completely un-biased.
Yesterday we started a number of interviews with people who are in touch with Sign-language: educators, speech therapists, interpreters, users of Sign-languages. It is an extremely interesting but very challenging topic at the same time. For now, we have no idea what we could come up with, as there is still a lot to learn and to narrow down. One thing we decided though: We will do a service for parents who rear a deaf kid and have to learn Sign-language because of that.