Ms. Abeer Habib and Ms. Batoul Haidar of Al-Hadi Institution for Hearing and Visual Impairment and Language and Communication Disorders took part in the Sharjah conference for human services, on the occasion of the 46th Arab Deaf Week, where they gave a presentation on Al-Hadi Institution's experience regarding the challenges facing the deaf pupil as a result of distance learning.
The conference was held via the Zoom application with the participation of many Arab countries, during which they presented papers and presentations on how to treat the challenges imposed by the coronavirus pandemic on teaching deaf pupils and how to follow them up educationally, therapeutically and psychologically.
Al-Hadi Institution's paper focused on the institution's experience in facing challenges such as: the challenges of awareness about the pandemic, where a guide to the safe return to the institution was prepared, awareness videos including sign language interpretation were produced, and networking with the Ministry of Health and contact tracing were carried out.
In addition, the paper spoke of the complications of home confinement for the deaf and of the psychosocial and economic challenges, where psychological support programmes were prepared, psychological treatment was followed up, psychosocial support packages were prepared, and meetings with families and individual and group sessions with the children were held.
The paper also presented the challenges of distance learning and how they were overcome: preparing training courses on using technological tools, forming a committee of experts in the field of technology, creating a digital library, converting the teaching and therapeutic curricula into interactive digital curricula, preparing a guide to remote learning, assessment and feedback within the teaching standards that ensure the teaching objectives are reached by the methods and strategies suited to the deaf pupil, adopting the hybrid teaching strategy, and creating a platform for communicating with pupils within a systematic teaching programme that guarantees the deaf pupil's right to total communication and sign language.
