Acquaintance with profession: Using internship as a tool for hearing-impaired university students

Abstract

Vocational education is an important stage of one’s educational process and this multi-layered process prepares an individual to his/her future profession. It is underlined that in this process, a hearing-impaired individual has problems to plan and manage his/her career, due to many reasons, like; communication difficulties in workplaces and lack of recognition about hearing-impaired as a category of disability in work environments. Internship is one of the important opportunities to acquaint with the profession and its effective use in vocational education of hearing-impaired students is significant. In this study, internship is handled as an integrated process which covers before, during, and after activities as a whole. The research aims at effective use of internship in the familiarizing process of hearing-impaired senior students of Anadolu University, School for the Handicapped (SFH) with work places. The research was conducted as action research. For efficient use of internship process in SFH, some steps were defined targeting before, during and after periods of internship and various subactivities were planned and applied for strengthening each step and for effective contribution of internship experience to vocational education. The research indicated that through the activities, performed in internship process, hearing-impaired students improved their career perceptions and they had attempted to recognise work environments. The research results are expected to provide a new perspective to teachers of hearing-impaired students and consultants, who are working for the formation of vocational education programs of the hearing-impaired and also it is thought that the results will provide huge motivation to hearing-impaired students in the familiarizing process with the profession.

Keywords: Hearing impaired, action research, vocational education, special education, career planning.