Development of peer education with deaf sign language teachers in Jordan

Abstract

In this thesis will explore the notion of peer education and sign language teachers in Jordan, to see if the prospective peer platform can be easily formed or there are challenges facing the Jordanian sign language teachers.
Teaching sign language has been of an important concept in expanding pools of sign language interpreters, teachers of the deaf, and other linkage with deaf community, and around the world, the debate of who teaches sign language has been of an ongoing argument, because of language ownership, linguistic understanding and other relevant issues. So a good sign language teacher can produce good outputs in the fore mention career linkage, but training for sign language teachers is something of an interest, what makes a good training, and the older, experienced teachers supporting the younger inexperienced teachers, if the reality of this support does exist or not.
Jordan has been chosen to be the focus of this research, because there are so many issues that faced the deaf community in Jordan, also there are little empirical research on Jordanian Deaf community, and the sign language teaching itself, whilst there have been little linguistic research on Jordanian Sign language, research on Jordanian sign language interpreters, but none on Jordanian sign language teachers, and their situation in Jordan. Also to further investigate the opportunity for peer education in Jordan for deaf people, to research on how this is developed and the process of it, using Peer Teaching Toolkit (PTTK), a toolkit to teach the sign language teachers how to teach sign language, which is one of the resources that plays it role in this research development.
The methodological approach that is used in this research is mainly action research, also gathering data comes from different sources which are personal journal, focus group interviews, and the training itself, in order to achieve data triangulation. In order to better understand the formation of peer support, also to see if PTTK does play a pivotal role in peer education, semi-structure focus group was set up, at different times, pre PTTK, post PTTK and two weeks after PTTK, to see if peer education does happen or not.