Development of a Curriculum to Teach the “Soft Skills” Necessary for the Future Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Laboratory Technician Workforce

There is often a particular void in the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students who intend to become competent working laboratory technicians. Inasmuch as certain basic professional skills (“soft skills”, in this case) are not generally taught in traditional science courses, a new curriculum has been developed in order to enforce these skills. The “soft skills” of focus in this study are safety awareness, technical writing, and teamwork/conflict resolution. The development of the pedagogical tools used to teach these specific “soft skills” are discussed, as well as an assessment of the augmentation in student understanding in each skill area. By incorporating an interdisciplinary approach that enforces “soft skills”, students should find greater success while on co-operative work experiences and have more prominent career opportunities. This curriculum was produced for the Chemical Technology-like program, Laboratory Science Technology, at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf- one of the eight colleges of the Rochester Institute of Technology, but the concepts are transferable to other technical-based programs