Co-designing a Learning Environment for Written Representations of a Second Language for and with D/deaf Learners

Many members of the D/deaf community in Brazil use Libras, the country’s official sign language. For most of them, learning Portuguese, the official language of the country’s hearing majority, is a huge challenge. Difficulties related to this challenge appear in such diverse situations as reading open calls for projects or scholarships, or writing an essay for college admission. In this paper, we present the codesign and evaluation of an environment to support the teaching-learning process of written Portuguese as a second language for and with Brazilian citizens who are sign language users. The codesign process allowed the stakeholders to freely explore ideas and scenarios by embodying their personal experiences. The main contribution of this paper is providing evidence of the need to adapt techniques and artifacts to the project’s diverse stakeholders. Experiences from a workshop where D/deaf and hearing participants collaboratively prototyped ideas were documented, as well as the use of the video prototyping technique to produce and evaluate a conceptual proposal. By including various types of interested parties in the entire process –including the prototyping phase–important values can be reinforced, such as ownership of the learning environment and self-determination.