Asha for Education

The goals of Jeevan Gnanodaya school for the deaf are primarily two-fold:

# Provide formal education to children till Class X, with necessary speech therapy along the way. Preference is given to students hailing from very poor families and to children who have profound hearing losses (meaning a hearing threshold of close to 90dB).

# Vocational (Industrial) Training: Skills such as turning, fitting etc. -- achieved via the ITI.

The focus at Jeevan Gnanodaya is children who have hearing impairment. Established in 1989, over the last two decades, the organization has identified children with acute hearing disability whose adversity is compounded by severe economic constraints. While providing hearing aids & other learning materials, the need for formal education at the center is addressed through oral/speech therapy. Earlier, such students were limited to jobs with relatively low salaries. But currently, through an initiative along the lines of an Industrial Training Institute (ITI), Jeevan Gnanodaya has helped students graduate with a vocational skill set, making them highly competitive, and widened their spectrum of choices to include employment in factories with better remuneration.

In recent years, Jeevan Gnanodaya has also tried to go a step forward in implementing innovations in their teaching philosophy. Fundamental research in the domain of education has established the superiority of a bilingual approach to teaching, wherein mastery of one language gives children a greater chance to learn a second one. For people who can hear/speak properly, this first language is commonly the mother tongue; for deaf children, the use of signs (e.g., ASL, ISL, etc.) has been suggested. The above philosophy, though successfully implemented in the West, comes at a significant cost in terms of trained professionals & teaching materials. The problems are enhanced in a country like India with multiple languages, varied culture & lack of qualified teachers. Jeevan Gananodaya is slowly beginning to take baby steps in this direction, and has been actively recruiting teachers who are professionally trained in imparting sign language education. Currently, as a pilot exercise, they are restricting the use of sign language for English lessons only.

Here are some videos from the project: