Teaching Literacy through Movement: A Transformative Partnership

At the New York School for the Deaf, Fanwood, students participated in a school-based community arts program designed to use creative movement to enhance deaf and hard of hearing children's literacy skills. This program brought together professionals from a variety of disciplines, including deaf education, speech-language pathology, and dance education. These professionals, with a team of teachers, teaching assistants, and administrators, developed and implemented an innovative curriculum that has the potential to transform the way deaf and hard of hearing students from across ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds experience literacy instruction while increasing access to dance education. This article describes some of the activities tried, the lessons learned, and the questions still encountered.