UNF professor represents USA as IDeALL international cooperation partner

Dr. Caroline Guardino, professor of deaf education at the University of North Florida, is part of an international research collaboration on deaf language education. She recently presented a data analysis and a written manuscript at the University of Cologne, Germany as part of the Immigrant d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Additional Language Learners(IDeALL) project.

The IDeALL projectaims to develop an interdisciplinary and international research network that studies and promotes research on language learning and teaching for d/Deaf Multilingual Learners (DML) students and to provide recommendations for teachers, parents, pedagogical specialists and learners.

Guardino was invited to join the IDeALL initiative in 2022 as the only U.S. representative after her research partner and colleague, Joanna Cannon from the University of British Columbia, Canada, shared their collaborative work with the European research network. Together, Guardino and Cannon led the research project on culturally linguistic responsive teaching strategies (CLRT) by interviewing teachers, gathering video vignettes of teachers engaged in CLRT strategies and conducting international focus groups. The project aims to create a repository containing strategies that teachers and immigrant parents can use with DMLs.

Guardino has been able to provide the most data to the project because of the size of the U.S. and the number of immigrants across the country. Together with the international team of researchers and doctoral candidates, the team has presented the preliminary findings at seven international conferences, six statewide teacher conferences and is currently working on two manuscripts to further disseminate recommendations for working with DML learners.