Co-signing: Whose Action Is It Anyway?

HeatherWithrow

8/28/2016 4:21 AM

Note: I’m speaking from my experience and observations as a mother of a DeafBlind child who is physically able to use his hands and as a Deaf person who loves using her hands for communication. I still believe that anything is possible, no matter how a child uses his hands and would love to learn about adapting for a person who uses their hands differently.

Co-signing: Whose action is it anyway? Not the DeafBlind child, that’s for sure.

Co-signing or co-active signing is when another person uses hand-over-hand (HOH), taking full control of the child’s hands with your hands, to manipulate or shape the child’s hands and make their hands do something that is not by the child’s effort.

When Orion was a wee infant, we'd learned that hand over hand will cause dependency on another person including needing to have someone else sign your words and you'd confirm/object. That's what we gathered as parents. As the years went by raising Orion, we realized that dependency wasn't the biggest issue and we'll discuss his autonomy here.

The Respectful Exception

Co-signing can be respectfully used with DeafBlind individuals with their expressed consent or their request how to position their fingers or hands into a sign or handshape. Hand-over-hand is also an exploration option for a student and intervener for safety purposes, again this is possible because of the student’s permission. The DeafBlind individuals described here likely have reached conventional communication and language levels. It is very “interesting" to get permission from an emerging communicator which my son, Orion, is. He withdrew his hands and resisted during the few times, that I can count by the fingers on both my hands, in his 6 young years that we tried to co-sign. With him, we had far more success with Hand-Under-Hand (HUH) and lots of patience.

We did some co-signing for fun with my oldest son, Skyler, who is 11 and profoundly deaf. When he started sitting up, not yet a year old, a dear CODA* family friend of ours sat Skyler on her lap with him facing away from her, she took his wrists and moved his hands around as if Skyler were signing. Like a puppet. Skyler was fascinated with what was going on, looking at his hands and at us looking at him.

Try an experiment with yourself and another person. Close your eyes and imagine you are deaf as well, have your friend manipulate your fingers into a handshape and perhaps do an activity that the other person is full in control of using your hands. What do you notice more through touch? The position your fingers were molded into or the person’s fingers working over your hands? Do you notice the activity underneath your fingers or the other person’s hands on top of yours? Or perhaps both?

Communication and Exploration Models

What’s different between Skyler, a Deaf child who has usable vision, and a totally DeafBlind child like Orion is that Skyler still had visual access to language models in his community using American Sign Language 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We need to make sure that our DeafBlind children also have access to any mode of communication that works the best for him, what is natural and practical for him to use, for example, along with tactile sign language that is used by conventional to language users, there's touch cues/signing on their body for our emerging communicators. In addition to that, I encourage Hand-Under-Hand for exploration and observation, not only at school and home, but anywhere in between… on the school bus, at the store, in the coffee shop drive-thru… anywhere! To make this possible, it is very important for the school personnel and family to be consistent with communication strategies and exploration.

Attention

Co-signing does not have the same access, independence and easy verification of the DeafBlind person’s attention as tactile sign language use does. When you grasp the child’s hands and manipulate them (HOH), you do not know how much they are paying attention. When you use hand-under-hand (HUH), where the child “rides” the back of your hands or fingers, you’ll know the child is observing what you are doing or signing simply by the fact their hands continue to voluntarily follow your movements. When they pull away during HUH, you know they’re not watching.

This is just like the quote, “You can lead a horse to the water but you cannot make him drink it.”

Motivation

How do you entice the Deafblind child to “drink the water”? Find out what he loves doing and the things he likes, avoid the things he dislikes because that will be his internal motivation to participate in hand-under-hand observation and even him using his own hands to explore the object, person and environment. We are very particular about keeping Orion’s “Likes and Dislikes” inventory updated. (It is available via Washington Sensory Disabilities Services’ website.) Another way to get his interest is to do an action right next to him. Bump his forearm with yours. You can even accept that he just touch your forearm because eventually curiosity will get the best of him and he'll move over to your hands, then your fingers and the goal is to take over what you were doing and do it himself.

A video that I created over the summer in my parents' beautiful Pacific Northwest backyard, "Orion Picks A Tomato",shows me using hand-under-hand with Orion to try and pick a tomato. He did lose contact and pulled away and I allowed him to do that and then we tried again. I also attempted to model/label the tomato with the sign for tomato. He did not seem too attentive to the sign, however I was happy his left hand stayed in the vicinity of my signs compared to just "looking" for one second, like he did in the past.

Measuring your student's goals

When a proposed objective mentioned "co-signing" in one of Orion’s past IEPs, we had an enlightening discussion among the IEP team members about who you really are measuring when you’re working on your student’s goals and objectives. We would be measuring the adult in the co-signing situation, not the child. For example, “The child will co-sign (whatever the word is) 2 out of 3 trials”. Thankfully the team amicably agreed to toss it out.

Just for pretend, if one actually put that in the IEP and used it to measure the child, one has not only measured themselves, they've also measured that the child has submitted himself, releasing control over his own body, 2 out of 3 trials. We do not want that at all! Co-signing may be a strategy but not one I would want with my children and definitely leave it out of the IEP.

For measurements, look at the student's responses and efforts. His actual signs, body language, vocalizations, gestures, his comandeering of your hand to indicate what he wants and the like. In addition to the Communication Matrix, there are other ways to assess communication, as shared in Charity Rowland's Community Collection. As a parent, I appreciate the organization and labeling of the matrix and have used it... as a parent! It tells me where Orion is right now, how far he has come and what to watch for and nurture.

When the child expresses himself in whatever purpose and level of communication it is, you’ll know it is his independent action.

*CODA: Child Of Deaf Adults

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