Conference Program

The history of deaf education in Italy is one of inclusion combined with or alternated by isolation and differentiation (Stokoe, 1960; Chiricò, De Monte, 2025). In the past 50 years, general education in Italy has been profoundly transformed by laws tending to the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream education, creating professional roles to support their path to socialization and learning (such as support teachers and communication assistants; De Monte, 2023; 2025). However, despite the experience gained over the years, inclusion still seems far off for those students coming from a multilingual background or showing particular difficulties with spoken Italian. In the case of deaf students, these findings are also consistent with international literature on deaf literacy in spoken and written language. Deaf children, in fact, experience difficulties that are often correlated to the limits in the exposure to language, as well as possible differences in the way written and spoken languages are cognitively processed (Marschark, Knoors, 2020; Anastasiou et al., 2015; Fabbretti, Tomasuolo, 2006). Deaf children, later adults, thus experience limits in their opportunities, which is the opposite of what democratic learning should look like.

To better understand the social, cultural, and scholastic system in which deaf children grow, and the way in which it sets a background for deaf literacy, further investigation into the scholastic path of deaf children is necessary. In a recent research on the linguistic needs of deaf students in mainstream education in Italy, data were also collected on their family background, as well as the preparation of teachers on deaf-related topics and sign language. The results confirmed literacy problems in the deaf learners (De Monte, 2025; 2026), as well as the importance of building a solid network of prepared professionals around the deaf pupil. In Italy, such professionals are support teachers and communication assistants; the former are part of the school staff, the latter are hired only in case of children with specific communication issues, such as, often, deaf children. As the name recalls, communication assistants are hired to mediate communication within the classroom, often specializing in sign language and deaf-related issues. Given their preparation, they act in a way that is often similar to school interpreters. Yet, they are poorly considered professionally and economically, their formation lacking standard and their inclusion in the scholastic system often left to cooperatives that manage their allocation but not their recognition. As a consequence, deaf learners lose another chance for inclusion.

In this presentation, an overview of the national situation regarding the inclusion of deaf children in mainstream education will be provided to discuss the meaning of democratic learning in a context where languages are not equally represented nor accessible for deaf children. In support of the discussion, the first-hand experience of a deaf communication assistant with a bimodal bilingual background will be introduced and discussed, to show how scholastic dynamics and low professional recognition affect the well-being of deaf learners at school.