Teacher Training in Deaf Education in Morocco

• In Event: Teacher Professional Development for Disability Inclusive Education

Proposal

There are over one million deaf and hard of hearing people in Morocco. There are no exact statistics about DHH school enrollment rates. According to unofficial data from the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOE), the number of deaf children and youth who are in schools (K-12) is somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000. Very few students who are deaf attend primary school and few of those who do pass the national exams at the end of grade 6 and even fewer continue their education beyond grade 6. Those who continue their education beyond grade 6 either attend a mainstream secondary school, where they have no access to Moroccan Sign Language, or the Lalla Asma Foundation in Rabat which is the only school for the deaf that offers secondary education opportunities catered to deaf youth in Morocco.
This formal paper presentation will share the co-development and teacher training process of the first comprehensive Moroccan Sign Language (LSM) Course. Since 2021, DevTech Systems Inc. and the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Center on Deafness, under the USAID Morocco Inclusive Education Teacher Training Activity (MITTA), have been collaborating with 8 Master Trainers from Morocco’s Deaf Community, the Government of Morocco, the University Mohammed V, Faculty of Education Sciences (UM5/FSE), and the Lalla Asmae Foundation to strengthening the capacity of teachers of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children in Morocco and the local Deaf community. The presentation will showcase how the course was co-developed in person and online to provide training to future instructors of LSM to have the content knowledge and pedagogical skills to teach LSM to persons demonstrating no prior knowledge of the language to beginning sign language skills. The presentation will also focus on the training aspects of the 8 Master Trainers from inception in the course design process until the final course assessment to certify their competency and qualifications to teach LSM. Under MITTA, the 8 Master Trainers will roll out this knowledge to the learners who would like to specialize in deaf education with the UM5/FSE Certificate Program. In addition, the presentation will show how the course will serve for the development of a simplified version LSM Module tailored for pre-service general education teachers under the Ministry of Education, Regional Education and Training Centers. The presentation will also cover the parallel work of mapping NGOs across Morocco that support Deaf Education initiatives and the Deaf Community in order to link NGO leaders and potentially enroll them in the UM5/FES Deaf Education Certificate. MITTA’s work in Morocco and the rolling out of the LSM course will set the foundation for inclusive education in Morocco through the incorporation of the Module as part of the Inclusive Education National Policy and through access to training for any individual who would interested in inclusive education instruction. MITTA is scheduled to continue its program implementation until 2025.

Authors

• Carla M Doolin Paredes, DevTech Systems

• Jose Pineda Pineda, DevTech Systems

• Siham Bojji, DevTech Systems