Presenters

More presenter information will be added as soon as it becomes available.

Pawlos Kassu Abebe (Nigeria)

Pawlos K. Abebe is a deaf educationist by profession and is from Ethiopia. Currently he is a graduate student at the University of Jos, Nigeria. He has worked with and among the deaf in Ethiopia, Nigeria and briefly in Cameroon. He is also the author of COLD VERSION, a widely read novel on the lives of deaf people in Africa.

Brandon Arthur (USA)

Brandon is the founder of Visual Language Interpreting (VLI), has been a professional sign language interpreter for eleven years. As a nationally credentialed interpreter and business owner, Brandon has an understanding of the many varied components that contribute to successful communication outcomes.

Lynne Barnes (UK)

Lynne taught deaf children and supported deaf students in a number of colleges around the country before setting up the Deaf Studies degree programme at UCLan in 1993. As Subject Co-ordinator she leads a team comprising both deaf and hearing colleagues who individually and collectively have established a national and international reputation for excellence in teaching and research. In addition, Lynne is also an Adviser for Deaf Students within the university, drawing upon her experience within this field. Her main research focus has been on issues relating to deaf students in Higher Education, particularly understanding the particular learning issues faced by deaf students and exploring the pedagogic implications for the deliverer and learner.

Pam Berman (USA)

Pamela D. Berman is an instructional designer and developer at the Institute for Interactive Technologies and an adjunct faculty member for the Department of Instructional Technology at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Richard A. Brumberg (USA)

Richard is a, B.A., CI and CT, has been working in the field of interpreting since 1992. In 1997, he received his first RID certification and in 2005, he achieved dual certification. Though he has experience in various settings, his specialty is in educational settings- from pre-K to high school in NY, NC and GA. In New York, Richard worked as a staff interpreter for a Deaf-owned interpreting agency and as an interpreter in the school systems. In North Carolina, he served on the board of Coastal RID as Educational Liaison and worked to create ties between educational interpreters in the southeastern region of NC. He was also on the planning committee and interpreting team for the 2004 NCAD/NCRID Convention. While in Georgia, he was the educational liaison for a school in one county. Richard was also part of a team in conjunction with the Georgia Department of Education's GDEAF program to help working educational interpreters obtain qualification or certification. He was one of the keynote presenters for Supporting Deaf People 2006, and presented that paper at the 2007 World Federation of the Deaf Congress in Madrid, Spain. As of this date, Richard has presented in North Carolina, Nevada and Florida. Currently, Richard lives in Atlanta, GA and interprets full-time between an elementary and a middle school.

Carol Convertino (USA)

Carol has an M.S. in Secondary Education of Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, is a certified sign language interpreter and a research associate in the Center for Education Research Partnerships at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on deaf students' language, literacy, and learning in college classrooms. Projects include learning via sign language interpreting and cognitive foundations of learning.

Margie English (USA)

Margie coordinates the marketing and outreach efforts for VLI. She holds five years in sales and a MBA. Margie began her professional career advocating for community-based treatments in VT and then in NY.

Kendra Keller (USA)

Kendra Keller, CI/CT, M.S., is a full-time freelance interpreter, adjunct faculty in an interpreter training program, and serves as an interpreter mentor. Specializing in mental health interpreting, she has worked in a variety of settings including school programs from pre-school to post-doctorate. Her interest in interpreting began with her studies in language assessment, language development and communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She currently resides in Santa Cruz, California.

Patricia Lessard (USA)

Patricia has been a certified member of RID for 28 years. She has worked as a professional interpreter for at least that long, and for the last 16 years as an interpreter trainer. She has interpreted in a variety of educational settings ranging from early childhood classes, post-secondary settings, undergraduate and graduate courses as well as Doctoral programs. For the last three years, she has been working on adding self-study components for interpreters and ASL students as a complement to her interactive curriculum, Classifiers: A Closer Look. Currently Patricia divides her time between her appointment as an instructor in the interpreting program at Ohlone College, a workshop presenter, various freelance commitments, and her understanding husband and dogs. She resides in Fremont, California, USA.

Marc Marschark (USA)

Marc is a Professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, where he directs the Center for Education Research Partnerships. He also has appointments at the Moray School of Education at the University of Edinburgh and the School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. Active in research concerning deaf individuals since the 1980s, his primary interest is in relations among language, learning, and development. His current research focuses on such relations by deaf children and adults in formal and informal educational settings. He founded and edits the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education and the Perspectives on Deafness series, both published by Oxford University Press. His previous books include Psychological Development of Deaf Children, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, and Educating Deaf Students: From Research to Practice (with H. Lang & J. Albertini).

Geoff Minshull (Technical Support)

Geoff works for Direct Learn Services. He has been in further education since 1983, mainly in the UK, during which time he has worked with a wide range of businesses and organisations. He has also worked and lectured extensively in Southern Africa, Central America, and the USA. Geoff has been involved in online education for many years, and has worked with LEAs, colleges and universities, as well as national educational organisations. He has been running online conferences and other online events since 2001. His first degree was from Sussex University in Economics, and he has an MSc from Loughborough University in Computers and Education.

Judith Mole (Conference chair)

Judith founded Direct Learn Services in 2001 after working in education since 1992. A graduate of the University of Derby, she started working with Deaf students while at college and has since managed support units for Deaf students both at Sheffield Hallam University and at the University of Wolverhampton, where she was also a member of the board of governors. She has worked both in the higher and further education sector. She has managed a number of projects for the University of Wolverhampton which created online BSL/English dictionaries for art, science and engineering as well as a BSL/English dictionary for ICT for the DfES Standards Unit. She has written a number of publications and books on supporting Deaf students. Judith has a first degree in Drama, Film and Television Studies as well as a PG Cert in TESOL from Sheffield Hallam University.

Kath Mowe (UK)

Kath studied for her first degree in Deaf Studies with Education Studies at The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), UK, graduating in 1999. She subsequently qualified as an interpreter, in 2003, by completing a Post Graduate Diploma in British Sign Language/English Interpreting. Over the next four years, she gained experience of working in various domains as a freelance community interpreter while continuing to work part-time at UCLan and specialising in educational interpreting. She recently returned to working full-time at UCLan as one of the two senior interpreters in the team of six in-house interpreters based there. As part of her ongoing professional development she is aiming, in 2008, to undertake further study in the field of translation and interpreting studies.

Maureen Nicholson (UK)

Maureen qualified as an interpreter through the NVQ Interpreting Programme with Signed Solutions in 2004 and also completed the UCLAN Post Graduate Diploma in BSL/English Interpreting in 2006. She worked in the community in a freelance capacity before engaging as a full time member of the University in-house interpreting team in May 2003, recently undertaking the shared post of Senior Interpreter. She is keen to maintain and further research standards of excellence within this specialised domain.

Debra Russell (Canada)

Debra is a Canadian nationally certified interpreter, maintaining an active interpreting and consulting practice. Deb participates in several interpreting organizations at the provincial, national and international levels and currently serves as the North American Representative to WASLI. As an interpreter educator, she has taught across Canada, and has presented workshops and papers throughout the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. She holds the David Peikoff Chair of Deaf Studies at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation examined the nature of consecutive and simultaneous interpretation in courtrooms. Deb has also played a key role in the development of several interpreter assessment tools. She is currently conducting a study of interpreters working in public school settings.

Knut Rune Saltnes (Norway)

Knut is an Advisor at The Signo Foundation and works with international projects and partners. He has a master of philosophy degree and has experience from different areas of deaf education for the last 20 years.

The Signo Foundation offers service to deaf and deafblind people. The foundation has the last 10 years also participated in different international projects.

Patty Sapere (USA)

Patty is an RID Certified Interpreter, B.S. in Business Administration, and a practicing interpreter for 24 years. She spent the 10 years as the Coordinator of Professional Development and In-Service Training in the Department of Interpreting Services at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, NY, and was Special Assistant to the Dean of NTID for two of those years. As co-author on the grant "Improving Access to STEM Education for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students", Patty currently is Research Associate on the project, housed in the Center for Education Research Partnerships (CERP) at NTID.

Brenda Schick (USA)

Brenda studies the development of language, including sign language, as well as its relationship to cognition in deaf children. Recent work has focused on the development of a Theory of Mind in deaf children and how it relates to a child’s language skills. She is also interested in the factors that affect learning in an interpreted education. She is the co-developer of the Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment (EIPA), a tool designed to evaluate the skills of interpreters in public schools and the developer of www.classroominterpreting.org. She is the co-developer of a sign language curriculum designed for parents, Sign With Me, as well as a series of children’s books that have been translated into ASL by deaf adults and children, Read With Me. She has served as the school board president for Rocky Mountain Deaf School, a bilingual charter school for deaf children in metro Denver. She was a classroom teacher for deaf children. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in the area of child language development.

Samuel Slike (USA)

Dr. Samuel B. Slike is Professor and Curriculum Coordinator of the Education of the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Sam has been training teachers of the deaf at Bloomsburg University for 28 years. His publications include two CD-ROM projects: "Introduction to Sign Language: A CD-ROM Approach," and "Speechreading Challenges on CD-ROM," which are both nationally marketed by Harris Communications (USA). Sam is credited with writing the proposal for and the establishment of the first 4-year interpreter training program in the state of Pennsylvania in 1982. His research interests include the co-creation (with his colleague, Pam Berman) of an online system for equal access of information for deaf and hard of hearing students which will be presented in a webinar for this conference.

Melanie Thorley (UK)

Melanie has been a qualified note-taker for 9 years.She has been working within higher education for this time. She is also the ‘Aspire' disability project workerwhich is part of AimHigher, responsible for the disability strand of the Greenwich University ambassador programme. She believes passionately in access to education which is the main reason she is undertaking the mammoth task of a doctorate exploring note-taking support in higher education. She also concentrated on D/deaf higher education for my masters degree in SEN as half of her work over the last nine years has been supporting D/deaf students.

Arnfinn Muruvik Vonen (Norway)

Arnfinn has a doctorate in linguistics (University of Oslo, 1994) and professor (since 1997) in the Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo, Norway, where he is currently responsible for basic courses in sign language theory. His research in Deaf Studies has focused on linguistic and educational issues of bilingualism involving a signed and a spoken language, mostly in affiliation with Skådalen Resource Centre, a state-run centre for the education of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and deafblind individuals in Oslo. He is involved with the Signo Foundation (Norway) and the Amity Foundation (PR China) in a bilingual deaf education project in China ("SigAm"). His research interests include also the grammar of Norwegian Sign Language.

Dawn Watts (USA)

Dawn K. Watts is an Interpreter Educator for ISLR. She held CDI-P (Certified Deaf Interpreter Provisional) certification for 12 years from RID and holds ASLTA Provisional level certification and a substitute educational interpreter license from the State of Ohio. She is on the Local Professional Development Committee for ISLR. She has completed graduate coursework in ASL linguistics at The Ohio State University. Dawn was born deaf to Deaf parents of Cleveland, Ohio. She graduated from Mayfield High School. She is mother of four hearing children.

She holds a B.A. in psychology from Gallaudet University. She has been interpreting since 1990, working for seven years as a freelance interpreter with Gallaudet Interpreting Services. She has also been an ASL instructor since 1987 and teaches Highly Visual Language at Columbus Community State College. She was the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) Region III representative for the Deaf/Blind Interpreting special interest group and currently vice-president for the RID Deaf Caucus. In addition, she was a Consultant and SSP/Interpreter Coordinator for Ohio Association for the Deaf/Blind for the past 5 years. She is the chairperson for the Deaf Mentor Program for the Ohio Association of the Deaf/Big Brother Big Sister program. And, she is one of the committees for Task Force for Senior Citizens of Deaf America, Inc. She is member of NAD,OAD, OCRID, ASLTA, and OASLTA as President and Past Professional Development Workshop Coordinator.

Loes Wauters (Netherlands)

Loes is a researcher in the field of deaf education and reading development in deaf students. Her doctoral dissertation focused on reading comprehension in deaf children at the Radboud University Nijmegen. After her doctorate she conducted post-doctoral work at the same university in the field of deaf education evaluating an inclusion project for deaf children.In 2006/2007 she worked at the Center for Education Research Partnerships at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY) focusing on inferential processing in English and American Sign Language in deaf and hearing college students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, RIT.

Loes is currently associated with the Institute of Signs, Language and Deaf Studies at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, the Netherlands and with Pontem/Viataal, Sint-Michielsgestel, the Netherlands.