Doani Emanuela Bertan teaches in Campinas to mixed classes of deaf and hearing students and was selected among 12,000 applicants across more than 140 countries.
The Brazilian woman Doani Emanuela Bertan it is among the ten finalists of the 2020 Global Teacher Prize, organized by the Varkey Foundation in partnership with UNESCO. The announcement was made on Wednesday (4). She is a teacher of inclusive education and Portuguese and was selected from among 12,000 applicants from more than 140 countries. The winner will be announced on December 3. The prize is US$1 million.
In addition to Doani, two other Brazilians were among the pre-selected candidates for the Global Teacher Prize: Francisco Celso Freitas, teacher of the DF socio-educational system; and Lília Melo, from the outskirts of Belém (PA).
“Congratulations to Doani Emanuela Bertan for being among the 10 finalists from an extensive list of talented and dedicated teachers. I hope her story inspires those who wish to become teachers and also highlights the incredible work carried out daily by Brazilian teachers and educators around the world,” says Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, a partner organization of the award.
Bilingual education in Brazilian Sign Language and Portuguese
Doani teaches in mixed elementary school classes at a municipal school in Campinas (SP). This year, she is teaching a third-grade class that includes nine deaf students and two with hearing impairments, who need to use hearing aids to hear better. With them, she is making bilingual literacy in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and Portuguese possible. Whether for hearing or deaf students, everyone learns to communicate through signs.
Doani’s main strategy was to record videos to answer students’ questions, which came in via WhatsApp. Since she didn’t have time to answer all of them as soon as they came in, she began creating scripts for educational videos in Libras about the classroom material, thereby saving time and ensuring that the content reached more people.
With the support of students and parents—who said they were learning more and more vocabulary in Libras—she continued to refine the idea. As a result, deaf students began to better understand the classroom material. The Portuguese narration accompanying the images enabled hearing students to associate the content with the signs in Libras, completing the cycle of inclusion and bilingual education.
“We live in a society today with a bit more empathy than before. We have a huge struggle to break the paradigm that a person with a disability is an ‘inefficient’ person. They have their efficiency, but we also have to know how to look at where that efficiency lies,” reflects Doani.
“Today we have a bilingual education program designed for the deaf because they can’t hear—that’s a fact—but that isn’t their biggest limitation. The biggest limitation is that they aren’t part of the group that uses Libras. The obstacle lies in the communication barrier,” says the teacher.
“When deaf individuals are offered the proposal of having Libras as their first language and Portuguese as their second, there is a linguistic prestige between them. In the case of children, [the teaching takes place] with the greatest possible pleasure, with a lot of joy, so that they have autonomy and want to return to the classroom the next day,” she says.
Doani's initiatives are not restricted to the students at the school in Campinas. The practice that was born in Doani's room eight, at the Julio Mesquita Filho Municipal School, was “transported” to the internet. It became the Sala8 video channel, which has existed for three years. According to the teacher, the videos have more than a thousand daily views.
If announced as the grand winner of the Global Teacher Prize, Doani says she intends to use the prize money to expand her internet channel by broadening the content, as well as to train and professionalize deaf individuals in video production and editing, turning the creation of the channel itself into a tool for inclusion and opening doors to the job market.
Inspiration
Doani says that his first exposure to Libras was when he was still a child in Vinhedo, a city just under 20 kilometers from Campinas, where he was born.
“When I was a child, it was very common to see deaf people selling little keychains, and on the back of the packaging, there was always an image showing the sign language alphabet. I would form the words with my hands, practicing as if I thought those printed images were in 3D,” says Doani.
In addition, Doani had another source of inspiration. Xuxa, a children’s TV host from the 1980s, released the song “Xuxa’s Alphabet.” The promotional music video and the host’s live shows feature the letters being presented in Brazilian Sign Language, following the song’s lyrics: “A for love, B for softly, C for heart.”.
“I already knew how to write some of the letters. With others, I thought I knew how, but I was doing them wrong. I learned the rest by watching TV.”
