I used to work with this kid a while ago–I’ll call him Mike. I can only give the briefest details of his background: he was born in a Third World country and his parents were killed in a civil conflict when he was very young. Distant relatives in America took him in, but due to the fact that Deaf Education programs were non-existent where he was from, by the age of thirteen he had almost no spoken, signed, or written language skills of any kind. Not in the language of his homeland, and certainly not in English or ASL.

But he could draw. For the first week that we worked together he drew nothing but pictures of tanks with bodies sprawled all around them. I have no idea if this was a scene from actual memory, or if war themes were just something he was into at the time. Nonetheless I was struck by the detail in his sketches. He captured everything, right down to the serial numbers on the hatches of the tanks and, a bit more gruesomely, what appeared to be notches carved into the rifle butts in the soldiers’ hands.

I have a bit of skill with drawing, so I decided to communicate with him first in that way. When we were introduced he told me his name sign, so I decided to teach him mine. I drew a quick sketch of my face and held it up, placing it on my chest and tapping it a few times until he got the idea: This is me. Then I sketched him and signed “Mike.” He appeared to like the drawings and repeated his own name sign.

I then made my own name sign: a “C” held up to the right side of my forehead. He didn’t copy it, so I indicated that I’d like to help him make the hand shape of a “C,” and when he allowed me to do this, I gently guided his hand up so he’d touch it to his forehead. When he completed the sign I grinned and touched the sketch of my face again, then my chest. That’s right, that’s my name. I’m Chris.

He grinned back, and we were on our way.

He made the leap from pictures to signs very quickly. He learned quite a few new signs in three months. He also learned a lot of new printed English words. He was at his best whenever drawing was a part of what he had to do. If I drew a sketch of a kangaroo above a blank box, for example, he learned relatively quickly to print K-A-N-G-A-R-O-O in it, and vice versa. Spell ‘kangaroo’ out over the top of the blank box, and he’d draw a picture of one. All very basic stuff. Eventually we progressed to him being able to draw the hand shapes that finger-spelled whatever picture was above the blank box, as well as draw a sketch of a person making the ASL sign for the corresponding printed English word. Once we moved up to sentences, no matter how weird I made them (“A sad kangaroo kicks a blue ice cream cone” and so forth), he was able to draw a cartoon showing all of this happening.

However, a lot of that depended on him being able to see two different things at the same time–the picture and the English text in order to make the sign, or the picture and the finger-spelling hand shape sketches in order to make the sign. As a way of testing his growing proficiency, I started making note cards with drawings on one side and sketches of corresponding finger-spelled hand shapes or English text on the other. If I pointed at the finger-spelling of “kangaroo,” for example, all he had to do was give me the corresponding sign and, if he got it right, we’d flip the card over and there the drawing would be. That was our system of elimination… when all of the cards had been flipped over, he’d be done with the exercise.

He really struggled with not being able to see the pictures. And I didn’t know why he couldn’t make the leap. Why couldn’t he retain the information faster, and be able to see just the spelling of a word—either in English or in finger spelling—and be able to remember the picture or sign that these things represented?

The answer became clear, oddly enough, from a memory that I had of watching Sesame Street when I was a kid. The spelling for “bed” came on the screen, with the line of the lower-case “b” forming the headboard, the top of the “e” forming the mattress, and the line of the lower-case “d” forming the footboard. Put a sleeping man on top of it, and presto, something powerful enough happened in my mind to make the image stay with me for another twenty-five years. Maybe he wasn’t making the leap from pictures to text because, as a society, we had long ago separated pictures from text. Maybe what we need to do is put them back together.

I started utilizing that technique with him. All printed English text now became a part of the drawing rather than staying separate from it. I didn’t just print the word “caboose” under a drawing of one, in other words. The “c” and the “a” became its front wheels, the “b” part of its doorframe, and the remaining letters became more wheels. Draw the outline of a caboose around the rest of the word, and we were set.

His retention of vocabulary more than quadrupled after that. So did the rate at which he absorbed new words, especially after I started having him incorporate letters of words into his own drawings. It’s fortunate that we both enjoyed art so much, because I had to create almost all of our materials from scratch. And what’s more, I had a devil of a time tracking down these specific types of materials on the internet. I found the word “rebus” within twenty minutes of searching, but even that didn’t have exactly what I wanted. You could always find drawings with words under them. You could always find drawings above blank boxes where the student was meant to print the corresponding word. But Mike needed text within drawings.

Even more frustrating, no materials of this type appeared to exist for finger-spelled hand shapes, even though the technique itself worked here, as well. For example, as his vocabulary grew, and the spellings of some words started looking very much like the spellings of other words (as well as the signs—such as “lunch” and “munch”), we found that he’d remember the word better if he could take a marker and not only trace on paper the letter that was different in each word (the “l” and “m”), but also trace those letters on the fingers he would use to make their corresponding finger-spelled hand shapes.

His hands would literally become rainbows of color by the end of the day, but so what? When I showed him a picture of someone munching, the wad of food in his mouth making a barely noticeable “m” shaped bump under the skin of his stuffed cheek, Mike only needed to see faintest remaining traces of the three lines he’d made on the middle three fingers of his hand to remember the appropriate spelling. Within a day he didn’t even need that (and thank God, too, or his hands would never have been clean again). But more importantly, a month later he would still remember that that this was the drawing for “munch” and not “lunch.” During the final three weeks of our time together, he acquired well over a hundred new words–and continued to retain them–whereas previously he had only been learning at less than half that rate and was retaining very little.

He was soaking language up like a sponge. Being able to see the letters in the drawings was his bridge across a gap that, until now, had been unsurpassable.

It’s a couple of years later now, and I haven’t seen Mike in a while. He transferred to a new school. I wonder how his literacy skills have progressed. Did these specialized lessons continue? Given how hard it was for me to find even a partially accurate name for the technique, and given the fact that I could find hardly any materials… I don’t know. Where would his reading skills be today if those types of lessons had continued? Where would he be if he’d had exposure to those types of materials when he was much younger?

I wonder how much of a dent we could make in fourth grade reading levels in deaf students if we started thinking about literacy in new ways… not just in terms of English, and not even in terms of ASL, or even strictly in terms of Bi-Bi approaches… but also in terms of art. Not just words and pictures drawn separately, but words in pictures, transmitted—and acquired— simultaneously. How much could deaf children benefit?

Mike, I think, might have benefited enormously.

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