The Johannes-Vatter-Schule

The Johannes-Vatter-school (Johannes-Vatter-Schule)²¹ is a special school that focuses on hearing rehabilitation. It is furthermore a supra-regional consultation and support centre in the service of the German federal state of Hessen. In Germany, educational and rehabilitational matters are organized differently according to which state is responsible. As the school serves the whole state of Hessen, the school incorporates a boarding school for the children who must travel a longer way to reach the school. It furthermore includes a consultation centre, a mobile support centre, a support society, a nursery school and a vocational school. The adjacent Cochlear Implant Zentrum Rhein Main,²² is responsible for the technical support and control of the children’s cochlear implants. The school’s staff is particularly trained in the field of hearing impairment, either as teachers for the deaf or for the hearing impaired.

They receive constant further training in the form of workshops and seminars. The majority of the children at the school have cochlear implants, though there is also a

20 See: http://www.cochlear.com/wps/wcm/connect/intl/home/support/rehabilitation-resources/early-intervention/early-intervention and the guidelines of a project founded by the EU:

http://www.qeswhic.eu/downloads/letter01en.pdf

21 For more information about the school, see: http://www.johannes-vatterschule.de/

22 For more information about the Ci centre see: http://www.cic-rheinmain.de/

class particularly dedicated to children with hearing aids, who have different needs than children with ci.

Each classroom is equipped with an induction loop, which enables the use of assistive listening devices (e.g. FM systems, microphones). These devises transmit sounds directly via a microphone to the children’s processors (see section 1.6.2). A paediatric audiologist and engineer is always on duty, if technical problems occur in the class or with the ci of a child. Each child also receives individual rehabilitation in the ci-centre. The number of children in a class is set for maximum eight children, who usually sit in a semi-circle, thus all can see the teacher.

Based on the philosophy of the school’s patron, Johannes Vatter, the school curriculum is based on the oral method, which means that the students are only taught orally, without the help of any assistive linguistic methods (e.g. manually coded language) or sign language.

2.4.1 The educational staff in the Johannes-Vatter-Schule

Educational staff working with hearing impaired children, as e.g. teachers, are particularly trained to meet the needs of these children. The study of pedagogy or education for the deaf and hearing impaired though, varies broadly, in Germany for example from state to state.

Due to the challenges of hearing with a ci mentioned in the last section and the resulting restricted auditory access the children experience, the teachers have difficulties in scrutinizing the children’s acoustic perception in detail, as this is also individually different. Therefore, teachers make use of certain tools with which to test and improve the language skills of children with ci. This applies particularly for lessons or activities, where the children are more apt to communicate, e.g. the German lessons. The practices and techniques the teachers use are not pedagogically standardized, but are those that have been shown to work better with the children and might differ from teacher to teacher.

One tool to check and improve the language skills of each child in the Johannes-Vatter-Schule is the storytelling of the children, which will be presented in the next section. The storytelling gives the children the opportunity to talk and experience the reactions to their talk and for the teacher to see where and which language difficulties the particular child experiences. Furthermore the storytelling is also supposed to teach the children the principle of having a dialogue.

While a child is telling his or her story, the teacher operates a variety of techniques to display her understanding of the story, or where something was not understandable, and where things need to be corrected or improved. As all teachers in the school are hearing, they also serve as the hearing counterpart, mirroring how people outside the school would understand the child’s talk. In that sense, the teacher has a ‘control’

function, as she also has to prepare the children for a primarily hearing world.

The teacher hence not only checks the children’s language skills one by one, but also projects how communication is done and how its rules are applied. Like in all schools, the teachers are responsible for teaching and modelling social values and norms, but when working with children with ci, this has to be done in a more attentive and structured manner.

Concerning the language checks the teachers do during the storytelling, they use various practices to work on particular problems in the grammar or pronunciation of the child and to make the child/ren aware of any problems. The teachers do not merely function as teachers then, but also as a further step in the rehabilitation of the children, as they apply techniques, which are known from therapy. The teacher’s role as an educator and therapist at the same time is also due to the fact that, in the Johannes-Vatter-Schule a child is not supposed to move to the next grade/class, before she or he has attained certain linguistic and communicative skills. Thus, the teachers, in addition to teaching the basic educational skills, are also expected to

‘treat’ the specific language problems of a child and to support each child in such a way that he or she will be able to move on in school. The activity during which teachers show and apply their twofold agenda is the storytelling, the structure and setting of which will be presented in more detail in the next section.

2.5 The Morgenkreis-storytelling in the Johannes-Vatter-Schule – The object of