Explore the growing digital archive of deaf history in Australia.

For Teachers

Looking for lesson plans and activities for your students? Our carefully curated collection of activities spans various subjects and grade levels, designed to spark curiosity and inspire meaningful learning in your classroom. You can download and use these lessons and activities including any handouts. Our lesson plans align with the national curriculum. 

Toggle between subjects and age groups to find the right activities for your classroom.

Teaching Resources

Unsolved Mysteries

VET Resources

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  • SUBJECT
  • YEAR LEVEL(S)
  • TYPE
  • Students view and discuss two images ‘A Visit to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, St. Kilda Road’ and South Australian Institution Collage to gain information about a school at a particular time. They then create a similar art work based on their own school and share their artwork with the class, assessing their peers.

    Students analyse a text to identify how it uses language with the aim of involving and empowering people.

    Students work in pairs, using James Smith’s Certificate of Freedom to develop a police identikit so that they can catch James Smith, who has absconded (again!). Click “download activity” to get the full instructions and printable handout.

    Students work together to create descriptive scenes showing how James got his many scars, injuries, and tattoos. Click “download activity” to get the full instructions and printable handout.

    Socialising: Describe activities and experiences and share and respond to ideas and feelings
    about people they know, their daily lives, social worlds and school community
    Creating: Create or adapt imaginative texts and live or filmed expressive performances that
    involve imagined experiences and feature different characters, amusing experiences or
    special effects

    Students look at pictures of their school and old schools for deaf children.

    Students create their own artwork of school life.

    Students present their own artwork of school life.

    Students analyse a ‘manifesto’ about the value of writing for a minority group – deaf people – to identify the author’s strategies for appealing to shared cultural knowledge, values and beliefs, and the experience of marginalization.
    Students then analyse 2-3 historical texts for examples of language that includes or marginalizes deaf people.

  • SUBJECT
  • YEAR LEVEL(S)
  • TYPE
  • Socialising: Describe activities and experiences and share and respond to ideas and feelings
    about people they know, their daily lives, social worlds and school community
    Creating: Create or adapt imaginative texts and live or filmed expressive performances that
    involve imagined experiences and feature different characters, amusing experiences or
    special effects

    Students work in pairs, using James Smith’s Certificate of Freedom to develop a police identikit so that they can catch James Smith, who has absconded (again!). Click “download activity” to get the full instructions and printable handout.

    Students compare texts to identify how they use language to include or marginalise people.

    Students work together to create descriptive scenes showing how James got his many scars, injuries, and tattoos. Click “download activity” to get the full instructions and printable handout.

    Students view and discuss two images ‘A Visit to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, St. Kilda Road’ and South Australian Institution Collage to gain information about a school at a particular time. They then create a similar art work based on their own school and share their artwork with the class, assessing their peers.

    Students analyse a text to identify how it uses language with the aim of involving and empowering people.

    Students present their own artwork of school life.

    Students create their own artwork of school life.

    Students look at pictures of their school and old schools for deaf children.

    History is full of mysteries. Why was Stonehenge built? Was King Arthur a real person? Who killed John F. Kennedy?  

    Deaf history has mysteries too! Click on the items below to learn more about some of our Australian deaf history mysteries. Maybe you will be the one to solve them?  

    But be careful and be prepared to check and double-check! Not all the documents tell the real story…   

    Certificate III in Auslan - Deaf History Unit

    Teachers and students of Certificate III in Auslan may find the following information helpful for the Deaf History unit. Click on the tiles to find resources related to each topic. Please see our Copyright and Usage page for information about citing the pages you refer to.

    If you need to access any of the articles listed in “Further Reading”, you may need to become a member of your local state library in order to gain access to the journal databases. This is usually free and you can ask a librarian to help you locate items if needed.

     

    Welcome to the Deaf History Collections

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of Country throughout Australia and pay our respects to Elders past and present. We extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors to our site, recognising the long, rich, complex and unjustly disregarded histories of First Nations peoples in Australia.
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