Cartography in Studying the Environment: Bilingual Practice Aiming at the Inclusion of Deaf Pupils - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 270

linguistic equality and knowledge acquisition. It was this short experience that
motivated me to investigate the subject and explore issues relating to this situation.
This paper includes the proposals of this research.
The objective of this research is to plan and develop teaching activities focusing
on geography, in particular with regard to spatial perception, which relates to the
different methodological and linguistic needs of a mixed class of regular schools
with deaf pupils.
For several centuries, the deaf have been struggling to articulate their goals of
conquering space for participation, engagement and dialogue in our society. Just by
understanding them as a cultural group that shares the history and linguistic
situation, the paper we will adopt the terminology deaf . To cite Skliar ( 2001 ),
sign language nullifies the deficiency and allows that the deaf are, then, a linguistic
minority community different and not a deviation from normality. This proposal
aims to share the experiences of working methodology with other professional
teachers who were faced daily with deaf pupils in their classes. First, the practices
related to this research would be directed to study and activities with maps, charts
and aerial images, however, the mapping developed in this work was very far from
activities with coordinates, scales and types of representations.
As the project was developed and as it unfolded, new activities have emerged
and been proposed in an attempt to better understand and also to encourage deaf
pupils in their perceptions of living space. However, with regard to the effective-
ness of the process of school integration, we must emphasize that this necessarily
depends on the cooperation of everyone involved: from the teachers to the pupils
participating in the activities. As the qualitative research proposed, the information
is not collected to confirm or disprove hypotheses constructed previously. The
abstractions were built as private data were gathered (Bogdan and Bilken 1994 ).
Based on Bogdan and Biklen ( 1994 ), our planning was done throughout the
research and data analysis. The data have been analyzed more systematically in
the final stages of research. It is also important that the bases for the planning of
learning activities are well defined, as well the materials and teaching methods
adopted, “interlacing the individual parts” (Bogdan and Biklen 1994 ). For being
deaf children with their own language and culture, it was essential that the content
of available resources can be expressed in Portuguese and in sign language. Photos,
games drawings and field work were accompanied by an interpreter of the Brazilian
sign language. The teaching sequences were developed to meet the needs of a class
with deaf and hearing pupils with the theme, “The Urban Environmental Problems:
From the world to my school”.
22.2 Games, Pictures and Cartography
This work is not aimed to explore all the central elements of cartography (such as
projections, scales, coordinates and mathematical relationships). Rather, this
research considered cartography a tool to enhance the knowledge of the world