Instructional Strategies for Postsecondary Science Teaching with Deaf Students with Disabilities: An Autoethnographic Approach

Throughout primary and secondary education in the United States, science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education has become increasingly important as it promotes critical thinking skills and drives competition in the global economy. While some literature exists on teaching science to Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students, to date, few studies focus on teaching Deaf students with disabilities (DWD), particularly in STEAM subjects. In this study, we used a collaborative autoethnographic approach to document, reflect on, and modify the instructional approaches and assessment strategies we developed while working with DWD learners in our postsecondary science courses. We analyzed each strategy and categorized them into three areas: (1) facilitating environmental and physical access; (2) facilitating linguistic and cognitive access; and (3) facilitating formative and summative assessment access. We further categorized each strategy as to their potential applications to other science courses, STEAM courses, and/or more broadly. We present our findings as a description of each strategy, explaining how it was implemented and our observations of its outcomes for access, teaching and learning. We recognize that while our autoethnographic approach provides a rich accounting of these strategies, the efficacy of this study is limited by our individual and collective memory and the lack of consistent, formalized student feedback to further validate these findings. Therefore, we call for additional research to evaluate the efficacy and applicability of these and other instructional strategies across STEAM educational settings.