For students, the classroom setting is vital for learning and development, as are the interactions with other students and teachers. For deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students, particularly the visual environment is of importance. For example, psychological studies have shown that DHH people’s visual attention differs from hearing people’s, particularly regarding things that happen in the periphery (Dye m.fl. 2008, 2009; Loke och Song 1991), and point out that teachers of DHH students have reported that they are impulsive and easily disturbed by things that appear or are ongoing in the classroom or are visible outside. 

The act of being instructed through a sign language requires visual attention skills because the students have to switch between the teacher and the whiteboard, including PowerPoint slides, pictures, tools, etc., simultaneously. The act is even more complicated in an interpreted classroom setting. Therefore, teachers need to be aware of visual and linguistic prerequisites in order to create an accessible and visually oriented learning environment for DHH students (cf. Holmström & Schönström 2018). However, it seems that many hearing teachers have a lack of knowledge of such visual strategies.

In educational settings where the instruction is conducted by deaf teachers, the knowledge of visual strategies, however, appears to be well established, as we will show in this presentation. Building upon data from three different classroom contexts, we have examined the visual strategies used by deaf teachers. The classroom contexts are i) a higher education setting where deaf teachers are instructing DHH students, ii) a higher education setting where deaf teachers are instructing hearing students Swedish Sign Language (STS) as a second language and iii) adult education for deaf migrants where deaf teachers are instructing deaf adults. The analysis shows that deaf teachers use a range of visual strategies in their teaching (i.e., gestures, pointing, chaining, turn-taking, etc.), and draw from their own deaf-visual experience in order to support the students in understanding the teaching content. The deaf teachers appear to be very skilled in both STS and Swedish (and also English), and they translanguage between these languages in a flexible and visible way in the classrooms. These findings can be very informative for other (hearing) teachers, and an essential contribution to teacher training programs.