[sw-l] SignWriting in the Netherlands ;-)

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
December 12, 2004

Suzanne Pach wrote:
> I want to focus on the Dutch deaf education and answer the
> question whether it should be a good idea to start
> teaching SignWriting to deaf children there. My plan is to
> design a questionnaire to ask different (dutch) groups
> about this question. Those groups could be: deaf children,
> deaf adults, deaf-school teachers, linquists.....


Dear SW List, Stefan, Tini and Suzanne!
Welcome to the SignWriting List, Susanne...smile...Yes, you are one of
the first from the Netherlands to do a study on SignWriting. There are
others in the Netherlands who have used SignWriting in the past, but
right now, yours is the only project I personally know about...

Did you know that there are two countries right next to you, that have
classrooms of Deaf children using SignWriting? There is Germany. I know
Stefan has already mentioned his classrooms in Osnabruck, Germany. And
then there is Flanders, right next door to the Netherlands...

Regarding Flanders, the Kasterlinden School for Deaf Children in
Brussells, Belgium, is now using SignWriting in the classroom with
Flemish Deaf children:

Kasterlinden School for the Deaf
SignWriting Literacy Project
http://www.SignWriting.org/belgium/kasterlinden01.html

Start with the web page above and then click on the links to the next
pages...There are at least 10 web pages of photos of the Deaf children
using SignWriting in Flanders...

And since the spoken language in the classroom is Dutch (Flemish), it
would be great if you could go to Brussells to visit their
classrooms...I realize that Dutch Sign Language and Flemish Sign
Language are probably different languages, but at least you have a
common spoken language...You can write Dutch reports about the Flemish
School system using SignWriting, and then make suggestions to Dutch
schools, that perhaps they could do the same as well. Maybe you could
find one classroom in the Netherlands that would want to communicate
with the children in Flanders...and the two schools could become
"sister-SignWriting-schools"... writing to each other in SignWriting
like pen pals...


The Flemish teachers to contact are:

Kathleen Heylen
Kathjeleen at hotmail.com

Sara Geudens
katjesaar at hotmail.com

More about Deaf children in Germany next...

Val ;-)


Valerie Sutton
Sutton at SignWriting.org

1. SignWritingSite
http://www.SignWriting.org
Read & Write Sign Languages

2. SignBankSite
http://www.SignBank.org
Sign Language Dictionaries
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 2595 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20041212/76d3e924/attachment.bin>