Deafness and Hearing Impairment at School: Communication, Access to Content and Active Student Participation

The teacher explains the material by walking around the room. At a certain point, he turns his back to write on the board and continues talking while writing down formulas and concepts. Colleagues laugh at a spontaneous comment made in the back of the room, but the joke was not written on the board. In the corner of the room, the hearing-impaired student copies everything with impeccable attention, but has missed the explanation, the context and the shared laughter.

In another class, a deaf student has a professional Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) interpreter at his side. Throughout the class, the teacher only talks to the interpreter and makes almost no direct eye contact with the child. In group activities, colleagues do not know how to get closer, and the student remains on a kind of “island for two”, isolated from common coexistence.

Scenes like these reveal a central challenge of inclusive education: the barrier faced by students with deafness or hearing impairment is rarely their cognitive ability to learn. In the vast majority of cases, the barrier lies in the way communication, space and teaching are organized.

As we have already discussed in The Illusion of Presence, being inside the room is not enough. Ensuring authentic inclusion requires understanding the linguistic particularities of each student, transforming teaching into a genuinely visual experience and building real bridges of participation with the entire school community.

Deafness and Hearing Impairment: Understanding the Differences

In the school environment, terms such as “deafness” and “hearing impairment” are often treated as synonyms, but they encompass very varied identities, experiences and pedagogical needs.

1. Deaf Students and the Bilingual Perspective:
Many deaf people identify culturally and linguistically with the deaf community, having Sign Language as their first language (L1). Brazilian legislation recognizes Libras as a legal means of communication and expression, establishing that education for deaf people must be bilingual — with Libras as L1 and Portuguese, in written form, as a second language (L2). For this student, the world experience is eminently visual-spatial.

2. Hearing Impaired Students and Technology Users:
Other students have mild, moderate, severe or profound hearing losses and use sound amplification resources, such as the Individual Sound Amplification Device (AASI) or the Cochlear Implant (CI). Many are oral and communicate through spoken language, relying on orofacial reading and auditory cues provided by assistive technology, also differentiating themselves from functional conditions such as central auditory processing.

This distinction is essential to avoid ready-made recipes. The support that benefits a student using a cochlear implant (such as reducing background acoustic noise and lip reading) may be insufficient for a deaf student whose learning depends on sign language mediation. The starting point is always attentive listening to the student and their family.

The Interpreter Does Not Replace the Pedagogical Relationship

The presence of a Libras translator and interpreter in the regular classroom is an essential right for linguistic access. However, it is necessary to avoid a common trap: transferring the responsibility for teaching exclusively to this professional.

The regent teacher continues to be the deaf student's teacher. He is the one who plans, evaluates, sets objectives and monitors learning progress.

When the teacher speaks looking only at the interpreter — using phrases like “tell him to open the book” instead of directly addressing the child, an affective and pedagogical distance is created. The direct gaze, welcoming gestures and personal interaction between teacher and student are the basis of the educational bond. The interpreter is the communicative bridge, but the pedagogical path is followed by the teacher and the student.

Visual Didactics and the Rule of Alternating Attention

For content to be accessible, the classroom needs to adopt a visual organization of knowledge. However, there is an indispensable neuropsychological principle that many educators are unaware of: the impossibility of simultaneous double visual attention.

The listening student can look at the book while listening to the teacher's explanation. Students who are deaf or have significant hearing loss do not have this possibility:

• If he is looking at the interpreter (or at the teacher's lips), he can't read what is on the slide or on the board.
• If he is copying a note into his notebook, he cannot receive the explanation that is being signaled at that exact moment.

Requiring students to copy and pay attention to class at the same time produces cognitive overload and loss of crucial information. It is essential respect the rhythm perceptual and visual perception of the student.

Some inclusive pedagogical practices simple changes transform this reality:

• Take intentional breaks: Present the image or text on the board, give the whole class a few seconds to read it visually and, only then, begin the signed or spoken explanation.
• Maintain frontal positioning: Avoid talking while walking with your back to the class or while writing on the board. Lip reading and eye contact require a bright, unobstructed face.
• Anticipate materials and vocabulary: Providing summaries, concept maps, visual diagrams and lists of key terms in advance allows the student to become familiar with the concepts before the lecture.
• Use subtitles and multimedia resources: Videos must contain quality subtitles or a Libras window, ensuring autonomy of understanding.

The Challenge of Literacy in a Second Language (L2)

Learning to read and write in Portuguese represents a unique challenge for deaf children who use Libras.

For the hearing child, the literacy process relies heavily on the correspondence between sounds and letters. For the deaf child, this abstract phonological path makes little or no sense. The written language works for her as a second language, with a grammatical structure, syntax and morphological rules completely different from Sign Language.

For this reason, psychopedagogy and applied linguistics recommend that deaf students' literacy be built from:

• Direct association between meaning, image and written word: Instead of insisting on meaningless phonetic spellings, writing is linked to concrete concepts, real contexts of use and visual narratives.
• Valuing Sign Language as a language of reflection: The student first understands and discusses the content in their reference language and then records and elaborates their conclusions in written language.
• Coherent assessment of textual production: Recognize that the deaf student's writing may present signs of the structure of Sign Language (such as the absence of prepositions or specific verbal inflections). The assessment must prioritize the coherence of ideas, conceptual mastery and clarity of thought, working on formal correction as part of a continuous L2 acquisition process.

Coexistence and Belonging: Breaking School Loneliness

Inclusion is not limited to the academic dimension; it is, fundamentally, social and relational. One of the biggest complaints of deaf teenagers and young people in regular schools is the feeling of invisibility in informal moments: at recess, in conversation circles, in games and activities.

The school needs to be a meeting ground and not one of veiled segregation. Some actions strengthen community coexistence:

1. Promote basic Sign Language learning for the class: Teaching greetings, the manual alphabet and everyday signs to fellow listeners transforms curiosity into empathy and natural approach.
2. Organize clear speaking turns in discussions: Establishing that only one person speaks at a time in debates allows the interpreter to translate faithfully and the deaf student to follow whoever is speaking.
3. Encourage structured cooperative work: Propose group dynamics where the student's visual, creative and practical skills are valued and integrated into common objectives.

The Role of Psychopedagogy

Clinical and institutional psychopedagogy plays a strategic role in monitoring students with deafness or hearing impairment:

• Investigate learning style and cognitive mediation: Evaluate how the child develops hypotheses, organizes logical reasoning and constructs abstract concepts through visual language.
• Differentiate language barriers from learning difficulties: One careful evaluation allows us to distinguish whether a school difficulty arises from gaps in access to the language (previous linguistic deprivation) or whether there is a specific associated disorder.
• Guide the pedagogical team: Support teachers in qualitative curricular adaptation, in planning multimodal materials and preparing assessments compatible with the student's linguistic condition.
• Strengthen the partnership with the family: Guide parents about the importance of full and early communication in the home environment, whether through sign language or consistent auditory and speech therapy stimulation.

Teaching to Whoever Sees the World

Deafness does not limit the human capacity to think, question, create, produce science and transform reality. The human mind is extraordinarily plastic and builds knowledge from the senses and languages ​​available to it.

When the school stops seeing deafness as a "fault" to be remedied and starts to recognize it as a linguistic and visual difference, the entire environment is enriched. A class that becomes more visual, clear, organized and attentive to communication does not just benefit the deaf student — it benefits all students in the room.

Including is not asking the deaf student to make an effort to appear hearing. It means building a school capable of welcoming your language, respecting your perspective and ensuring that your voice is fully heard and respected.

References

BRAZIL. Ministry of Education. Secretariat of Special Education. Federal Decree No. 5,626, of December 22, 2005. Regulates Law No. 10,436, of April 24, 2002, which provides for the Brazilian Sign Language - Libras. Brasília, 2005.

HUMPHRIES, T. et al. Bilingualism: A Pearl to Foster Certain Potentialities in Deaf Children. Frontiers in Psychology, v. 10, p. 1-13, 2019. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00693.

MARSCHARK, M.; HAUSER, P.C. How Deaf Children Learn: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

MAYER, C.; LEIGH, G. The Changing Face of Deaf Education: New Technologies, New Thinking, and New Challenges. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, v. 15, no. 4, p. 327–337, 2010. DOI: 10.1093/deafed/enq026.

QUADROS, R.M. Deaf Education: Language Acquisition. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2008.

SKLIAR, C. (Org.). Deafness: A Look at the Differences. 8. ed. Porto Alegre: Mediation, 2016.