Deaf children in Norway have had rights to sign-bilingual education since 1998, but a proper education for sign language teachers has been missing. The presentation describes the steps Oslo Metropolitan University is taking towards building sign language teacher education programs and a professional practice community for sign language teachers.
While there clearly is a will to secure the rights of deaf children and students in Norway to a sign-bilingual education, active measures for making sure these students have well educated teachers who are fluent in sign language have been neglected. Oslo Metropolitan University has, through a Sign Language Boost-project, been working to address the current discrepancy between legislation and practice in sign language teacher education. The presentation will discuss the steps we have taken and planned for towards building sustainable sign language teacher education programs. Building on the requirements for teacher education of other specializations, we will present some of the challenges we face. Among the steps we are taking; 1) cooperating nationwide with the other providers of sign language education, 2) building the specialization for sign language teaching within the teacher education of other specializations, 3) establishing partnership and close cooperation with the field of practice by giving Vetland "sign language school" status as «university school» – working to improve practice training and R&D cooperation, secure the quality of study programmes and campus lectures by receiving continuous feedback from the field of practice, and to build a professional community for future and current sign language teachers (a third space, e.g. Zeichner, 2010), 4) initiating research that can aggregate a corpus of sign language data from educational settings to expand research on sign language teaching practices and sign language didactics, and 5) building course content on newer trends in; sign language linguistics, interactional linguistics, gesture studies, and multimodal approaches to studies of languaging, learning, and teaching. By offering (current and future) sign language teachers with research-based knowledge grounded within a largely unified theoretical framework (e.g. Rampton, 2020), we aim to provide tools for reflecting on teaching practices and for building a professional practice community among teachers.
