A Socio-cognitive Approach to How Children with Deafblindness Understand Symbols

Children with congenital deafblindness are a population of learners who may need intervention in order to develop symbolic understanding. They experience a combination of vision and hearing impairments that can affect how they make sense of the world, develop relationships, and understand symbols. In this article, the author reviewed a socio-cognitive framework of symbolic understanding and suggested it as one way to organise the extant research on symbolic development of children with deafblindness. A socio-cognitive framework describes the development of children's individual skills and how their abilities are supported by active participation in social and cultural experiences. Symbolic understanding is not an isolated cognitive skill, but rather a complex socio-cognitive developmental process that is intimately supported by meaningful interactions. A socio-cognitive framework may help teachers to support the symbolic understanding of school-aged children with deafblindness. Teachers of children with deafblindness can use the framework to understand their students' individual socio-cognitive abilities and their social interactions. In other words, a socio-cognitive framework may support teachers of children with deafblindness to understand the abilities and environments that are critical to the development of symbolic understanding.