Training professionals for the teaching and interpretation of Mexican Sign Language and Spanish literacy for deaf people

Abstract

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are committed to their educational policies and the training of professionals to meet the educational needs of deaf people. Teaching and interpreting Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and Spanish as a second language are fundamental elements for their cognitive, linguistic and communicative development. The aim of this article is to present reflections on the process of inclusion of deaf students in Mexican higher education, taking the implementation of an educational program at a Mexican university as the starting point for analysis. Entitled “Training professionals to teach and interpret Mexican Sign Language and Spanish literacy for deaf people”, the program aims to train professionals with a multidisciplinary perspective who understand the social, cultural and political situation of deaf people in order to include them socially. It is a bilingual pedagogical proposal in which professionals generate and build responses, together with deaf people, according to their needs and contexts. The educational program is offered by a multidisciplinary team, complemented by linguists, LSM interpreters and deaf people. The results point to the importance of achieving an educational model for deaf people based firstly on teaching and interpreting LSM as a first language and linguistic basis for learning to read and write Spanish. It also highlights the importance of contributing to inclusive education through a bilingual model, in which HEIs emerge as a privileged locus for this approach.