3. SignTeach: the Project
SignTeach was a 3-year project, the starting date was September 2014.
Consortium
The consortium consisted of 11 organisations from 8 European countries. You can find the names of the partners on the final page of this report and on the SignTeach website.
Most of the participants are members of the project’s target group: deaf sign language teachers.
Transnational consortium meetings were always interesting and stimulating. Many of the photos in this report were taken at these meetings.
Good examples
The original plan had been to interview sign language teachers and sign language students. This plan was immediately rejected at the kick-off meeting. Too static, not visual enough. Our target group wants to SEE what we want to tell them. So partners recorded what we call “Good Examples”: short videos of sign language teachers interacting with different learner groups. To make the videos more accessible, we added introductions in International Sign and the national sign language of the teacher in the video.
To give more background information, we also added Comment videos. During the lifetime of the project, 40 Good Examples were produced and posted on the website.
Resources
We collected information about the sign languages of Europe, about relevant organisations, funding options, materials.
Teacher Skills
We discussed “Teacher Skills”: what are the skills that a sign language teacher needs? Together, we selected 4 * 7 skills, and produced videos to describe these.
Podcasts
Last but not least, partners produced 40 video “podcasts”: short presentations in International Sign with information that they want to share with colleagues across the EU.
Website, Facebook
This report is the final output of the SignTeach project. Partners will remain active, follow-up projects are being planned. You can find all information on the website,
www.signteach.eu and on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/signteach/
The SignTeach consortium, Antwerp (BE), February 2017