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Pathways to Resilience: Perspectives from the Guamanian Sign Language Community

Low-resource communities in both developed and developing countries are fraught with risks and adversity. Regardless there is an emerging body of theoretical and empirical work that suggests deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people not only survive the circumstance but thrive in their environment. The present paper will address the following: 1) provide an overview of resilience theory; 2) provide examples of resiliency in DHH individuals; 3) and present original research conducted with a low-resource community a Pacific Island territory. This paper builds upon our current understanding of resilience as a bi-directional individual and cultural-contextual process that leads to health and wellbeing. Lastly, discussion will focus on best practices in promoting systemic ecological resilience in seemingly low-resource communities within different contexts (e.g. family, education, government). Heather Zimmerman, MA, CSEDL PhD Candidate, heather.zimmerman@gallaudet.edu

Heather Zimmerman (POC,Primary Presenter), Gallaudet University, heather.zimmerman@gallaudet.edu;
Heather Zimmerman M.A., has bachelors in ASL/English interpreting and masters in International Development with a focus on People with Disabilities in Small Island Developing States. As a doctoral candidate in the Critical Studies of the Education of Deaf Learners program, Zimmerman's research focuses on resilient deaf children and youth. She is particularly interested in individual-ecological resiliency in developing countries. Zimmerman has presented and published on topics related to resilience and transformative research & evaluation. In 2011, Zimmerman founded the Månha Project—an intergenerational, intercultural community based initiatives that aim at enhancing the wellbeing of Guam’s sign language community.

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