A Socio-cognitive Approach to How Children with Deafblindness Understand Symbols

Abstract

Children with congenital deafblindness are a population of learners who may need intervention in order to develop symbolic understanding. They experience a combination of vision and hearing impairments that can affect how they make sense of the world, develop relationships, and understand symbols. In this article, the author reviewed a socio-cognitive framework of symbolic understanding and suggested it as one way to organise the extant research on symbolic development of children with deafblindness. A socio-cognitive framework describes the development of children’s individual skills and how their abilities are supported by active participation in social and cultural experiences. Symbolic understanding is not an isolated cognitive skill, but rather a complex socio-cognitive developmental process that is intimately supported by meaningful interactions. A socio-cognitive framework may help teachers to support the symbolic understanding of school-aged children with deafblindness. Teachers of children with deafblindness can use the framework to understand their students’ individual socio-cognitive abilities and their social interactions. In other words, a socio-cognitive framework may support teachers of children with deafblindness to understand the abilities and environments that are critical to the development of symbolic understanding.

Keywords:

• child development
• children with disabilities
• cognitive theory
• communication
• congenital deafblindness
• deafblind
• socio-intentionality
• symbolic understanding

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the contribution to this article made by Gloria Soto, Frank Worrell, and Susan Bruce. There was no research funding for this study, and no restrictions have been imposed on free access to, or publication of, the research data.

Notes

1. The term teachers is used in this section and throughout the rest of the article to refer to all adults who may support a deafblind child’s development and learning in educational settings, including but not limited to a special educator, teacher of the visually impaired, teacher of the deaf/hard of hearing, speech and language pathologist, general educator, paraprofessional, early interventionist, intervener, and/or translator.