The article “The Aesthetics of OER, Deaf Pedagogy, and Curriculum Design Contra the 'Wicked' Policy of Deaf Education” by Joanne Weber and Michael Skyer offers an in-depth exploration of a persistent issue in Deaf education in North America: the difficulty of creating truly inclusive and effective pedagogies and curricula.
Despite technological advances and legislation such as IDEA, most Deaf high school students graduate with low levels of literacy. The authors frame this situation as a “wicked problem”—a complex challenge without clear or definitive solutions, shaped by conflicting interests, policies, and educational practices.
In response to this complexity, Weber and Skyer propose an innovative approach that combines the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and digital books with aesthetic and epistemological principles rooted in Deaf communities.
They developed a theoretical framework, which they presented and tested in a series of international seminars organized by WUN and UNESCO. Through the analysis of responses from over 380 participants across 20 countries, the researchers identified key barriers, including the lack of Deaf leadership in material development and the uncritical application of Universal Design principles that overlook the visual and multimodal learning needs of Deaf students.
The study concludes that, to effectively address the challenges of Deaf education, curriculum design must be reimagined through a Deaf aesthetic—one that embraces the linguistic and cultural richness of the Deaf community. The authors also stress the urgent need for inclusive policies that go beyond mere translation to foster genuine Deaf participation in content creation.
In this way, their proposal transcends technical fixes and calls for a fundamental shift in how inclusive education is conceptualized—recognizing deafness as a cultural difference, not a deficiency to be corrected.
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How to Cite: Weber, J., & Skyer, M. (2022). The Aesthetics of OER, Deaf Pedagogy, and Curriculum Design Contra the “Wicked” Policy of Deaf Education. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 25(2), 73–96. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.25.2.33083
