Página de Luísa Gockel

28/07/2009
ICTs and minorities: Deaf students no longer excluded from IT

From March 3 to July 10 2009, the first training in IT Essentials by the Cisco Networking Academy for a group including six deaf participants took place in Merida, Venezuela.

This course was a milestone for the deaf in our city, who not only acquired basic tools for their individual development, but also the mechanisms to transmit the acquired knowledge to other deaf people in the community. This experience was an initiative by the Latin American Networks School Foundation and was funded by the Internet Society, whose main tenet is that minorities can benefit from information and communication technologies to access new employment opportunities and achieve personal growth.

Deaf communities inmost developing countries face similar problems. One of them is the lack of programmes specifically designed for the local Sign Languages of their communities. In Venezuela for example, although the Constitution states the right of linguistic minorities (and the deaf community is globally regarded as such) to receive education in their own language, in practice this is rarely accomplished because, on the one hand, there are no professionals who appropriately handle the two languages involved: Spanish and Venezuelan Sign Language (LSV) and, on the other hand, there are no curricula tailored to the needs of the deaf.

This experience, successfully completed with four deaf students certified by the Cisco Networking Academy in the IT Essentials program is unique in our country, and we believe it could be exported to other communities.