Invited Speakers

Marc Marschark, Ph.D., is a Professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, where he directs the Center for Education Research Partnerships. He also has appointments at the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh and the School of  Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. Active in research concerning deaf individuals since the 1980s, his primary interest is in relations among language, learning, and development. His current research focuses on relations of language and learning by deaf children and adults in formal and informal educational settings. He founded and edits the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education and the Perspectives on Deafness series, both published by Oxford University Press. His 17 written and edited books include Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, Educating Deaf Students: From Research to Practice, and Deaf Cognition: Foundations and Outcomes.

Website

http://www.rit.edu/ntid/cerp

Attachments

• Grade Expectations: Educating Deaf Students in the Mainstream
• Myths and Misunderstandings in Educating Deaf Students

Alice Eriks-Brophy is an associate professor in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Toronto, where she teaches courses in aural rehabilitation and articulation development and disorders.  Her research examines the role of parental involvement in early intervention for children with hearing loss, along with outcomes of early identification and intervention programs for orally educated children with hearing loss.  An ongoing research project examines communication outcomes for sixty preschool children enrolled in AVT programs in the Greater Toronto Area who represent five minority language groupings that include Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Urdu and Somali.  A recently completed project examined the use of videoconferencing in the provision of culturally appropriate S-LP assessments with twenty First Nations children in remote and isolated regions of northern Ontario.  Prior to embarking on an academic career, Alice worked as an itinerant teacher of the deaf and heard of hearing for the Montreal Oral School for the Deaf.  She was also an elementary classroom teacher on several First Nations reserves in northern and southern Québec.

About Dr Connie Mayer

Dr. Mayer is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, cross appointed to the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She teaches courses related to language and literacy learning in the graduate program and in the Teacher Preparation Program in the Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HH) students. Prior to coming to York, Dr. Mayer worked for more than twenty years in Ontario as a consultant, administrator and teacher of deaf and hard of hearing students from preschool through to post-secondary. She has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education and is currently a member of the editorial board of the American Annals of the Deaf. In 2007, her article Can the Linguistic Interdependence Theory support a Bilingual-Bicultural Model of Literacy Education for Deaf Students? was selected by Oxford University Press as one of its seminal papers published in the past century. Past projects include a five year investigation of the use of two-way text messaging with D/HH adolescents and a four year study of signed classroom discourse. Current studies focus on the relationships among cognition, auditory skills and early literacy development in D/HH children, and on the written language development of learners with cochlear implants.

Professor Greg Leigh is Chair of RIDBC Renwick Centre for Research and Professional Education. The Centre, located in Sydney, is administered by  the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children in affiliation with The University of Newcastle, Australia. He holds degrees in Special Education from Griffith University; a Master of Science (Speech and Hearing) degree from Washington University (Central Institute for the Deaf) in the USA; and a PhD in Special Education from Monash University. He is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators.
 
Professor Leigh has had a distinguished career in education of the deaf and has published widely in this field. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Deafness and Education International and Phonetics and Speech Sciences. He serves on numerous Australian government consultative committees on issues related to deafness and is currently chairman of the Australian National Newborn Hearing Screening Committee.  He is a former National President of the Education Commission for the World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf and is Chair of the International Steering Committees of both the Asia-Pacific Congress on Deafness (APCD) and the International Congress on Education of the Deaf (ICED). He has held positions in several Australian universities and was an International Visiting Scholar at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (Rochester Institute of Technology) in Rochester, New York.