Our purpose

Motivation

In the era of rapid changing technology, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) studies and careers still fail to attract interest while the gap in labour-market needs in STEM-related sectors remains significant. The deaf and hard of hearing, remain even more underrepresented in the STEM fields as the lack of visually accessible language in early and school education leaves a high percentage of deaf children lagging non-deaf peers in educational outcomes and is shown to pose serious issues for STEM learning.

The literature review some facts that teachers and experts have already experienced:

• Deaf students are under-enrolled in STEM classes fail to connect with STEM.
• Many of the teachers of the Deaf have limited preparation to teach STEM content, use inconsistent instructional strategies, and the modifications provided to deaf STEM learners are limited.
• Language issues frequently hinder communication between teachers and deaf students, as teachers are often not well prepared to teach disciplines like STEM and limit discussions around concepts with which they do not feel comfortable.
• Deaf students may think about STEM concepts in fundamentally different ways from hearing students, possibly due to lack of exposure to science through popular media that may be less accessible or inaccessible to deaf individuals.

Consequently, even when they make it to tertiary education, deaf students have to work with hearing faculty, lacking experience with deaf students and awareness of Deaf culture, which unintentionally impacts their research experiences in STEM. Deaf students are faced with challenges such as learning different signs for the same STEM concept or signs that are not easily comprehensible and conceptually inaccurate.

As a response to these challenges, ‘STEMSiL’ comes to fill in this void having a threefold aim as it’s described below