Story dramas: an exploratory study toward a deaf-led arts-integration model

This paper examines the ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments of a deaf-led team, which informs their implementation of story dramas with deaf preschoolers in a Western Canadian preschool. A bimodal bilingual teaching team co-constructed a story drama delivery model for deaf children based on training provided by the researcher to the instructional staff at the preschool. The training presented story drama interventions originally developed with hearing preschoolers and elementary students. To examine the ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments of the deaf-led instructional team, the researcher observed how the deaf-led team applied the training to their story dramas delivery to their deaf preschool students. Multimodal discourse analysis of video recorded classroom sessions of story dramas with deaf preschoolers revealed how the deaf-led team provided a strong ocularcentric, multimodal, and interactive approach to story drama, which differed significantly from the training model developed from sources on story dramas for non-deaf children. The study also included interviews with the deaf-led instructional team, which were coded according to themes arising from the interviews. The study interviews explore the deaf-led team's perceptions of the impact of their delivery of three story dramas on their deaf students, reporting significant changes in their students, including increased linguistic production, development of concepts, collaborative behaviors, and social and emotional development. The study recommends a deaf story drama training model for deaf preschoolers according to deaf ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments of deaf-led instructors and teams.