Korean Sign Langauge II

On Thursday I went to visit the Seoul National School for the Deaf (국립서울농학교).  Since the school is down the street from KoRoot, Pastor Son and his wife, me and Pastor Kim, director of KoRoot, met at KoRoot and headed out from there.
The school was started in 1913 during the Japanese occupation and will be celebrating its centennial in three years.  We went in and met with the headmaster, who gave us a very through tour of the school museum as well as school/facilities.  The headmaster spoke in Korean, so Pastor Kim translated into English for me and the Pastors wife interpreted for him.  Pastor Kim was really impressed because the headmaster knows every single one of his students name's, which is really uncommon in Korea.  If I understood correctly, the school serves infant through high school and apparently, the school has such good facilities and curriculum that hearing students want to go there too; they currently have 40 hearing students and 131 deaf students enrolled.

artifacts in the museum

 some of the early KSL books

 Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan came to visit the school in 1938!!!  (I think they said Helen Keller is the one on the right)

Pastor Son in the museum

The buildings all seemed really new and the decor inside was sooo nice! Everything was so aesthetically pleasing and pretty!  It looked like a children's museum.
The headmaster took us through the schools museum first.  It was really interesting and gave the history of the school, Korean Sign Language etc.  Interestingly, all the informational signs detailing the schools history were in both Korean and English.  The school was established in 1913 and in 1946, Yoon Baekwon, the first Korean headmaster (I think), created of the Korean manual alphabet. 

 original alphabet created in 1946

 present day alphabet

We also went to their speech and language area and the audiologist said that their equipment is better than any hospital around.  And they had really cool games and computer programs etc.  One of things they had was a pad and when you stepped on a certain colored square, it would show a picture and make a sound of something, like a car horn.  They also had another program that was obviously Korean-made, as it made sounds of various Korean traditional instruments, like the sogo! 

All the classes have SmartBoards (HUGE ones too! LdF, the school I student taught at had them, and at the time I thought they were pretty sizable, but these ones put them to shame. haha!)  We went into one classroom and the teacher was showing us how on the school website they have various videos in KSL, and spoken Korean for the kids to use. They had the national anthem in sign, as well as the text.  And other videos used students telling folktales in KSL etc. It was really cool!  Pastor Son, alumni of that school was really impressed.  We also saw the dorms, and rec room, which are really nice.

Although the school is really nice and equipped with great facilities, I learned that most of the teachers come in not knowing how to sign and learn it from the students as they teach. From my understanding, the deaf ed. programs don't require teachers to learn sign and leave it as an elective.  Plus, until very recently, like the past few years, the school had no deaf teachers.  But I guess the deaf community began protesting so the school hired two to "appease" them.  One of them is Pastor Son's friend, so we went and met with him for a bit.  He teaches high school social studies, and from how I understood it, his curriculum is so good, other schools are starting to implement it. Wow! Kudos, because curriculum development is really hard!

Since I wrote my senior thesis for both my anthropology and education majors on deaf education last year, and spent some time at the Wisconsin School for the Deaf, I was really interested in this school and wanted to check it out.  It was really awesome tour of the school and I felt I learned a lot.