Susann Schmid-Giovannini

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Special kindergarten Swiss donation, Vienna (architect Franz Schuster )

Susann Schmid-Giovannini , nee Susann Koliha , (born February 9, 1928 in Vienna ) is an Austrian - Swiss pedagogue , pioneer of auditory-verbal education and hearing training for the cochlear implant .

Life

Susann Koliha had a carefree childhood in Vienna until the Nazis occupied Austria . Her father was sent to war and when she was twelve her mother died. When her parents' house was also bombed , she was left on her own in the devastated Vienna. Nobody dared to take the daughter of an opponent of the Nazis with them for a long time and she only found out after the war that her father was still alive.

Because her father thought that a woman needed a proper education, she became a primary school teacher after the war. Since there was a shortage of teachers, in 1947, after completing her degree, she found a job in the institution for the deaf and dumb in Vienna- Speising . She found children there who were recorded too late and who, because there was no official sign language yet, had a very restricted language. Her uncle, Adolf Freunthaller , a well-known deaf educator , advised her to continue her education, since language development is over by the age of three, as a teacher she cannot help these children. That's why she trained as a kindergarten teacher, hearing impaired teacher and audio teacher.

In the newly created, by the Swiss donation funded special kindergarten Swiss donation in Vienna, the first special kindergarten for the hearing impaired in the German-speaking world, it provided 1,949 to 1,964 deaf with the partial integration children around hearing children a pioneering work. At the same time she attended lectures at the university in psychology and other subjects, trained as a deaf-mute teacher and attended the seminar for speech therapy teachers. In the kindergarten she took over the management of the department for hearing impaired children. In 1953 she received a UNESCO scholarship and traveled to Amsterdam to study, where she attended a counseling center for very young children and their parents. In 1959 she integrated the first school class after two years of sponsorship.

After their marriage in 1964, she moved to Switzerland and worked, among other things, as a therapist at the ENT clinic of the Lucerne Cantonal Hospital.

She had a first deaf foster child because his parents had to flee during the Russian occupation. Two more deaf boys followed. Everyone lived with Giovanninis like a normal family because their own parents could not give them the education they needed.

In 1973 she co-founded the school for hearing-impaired children Meggen, which she ran until she was 70 . The small class of hearing-impaired children was fully integrated (under the same roof) into the primary school in Meggen and works according to the same syllabus. Thanks to support from Susann Schmid in kindergarten, the hearing-impaired children were able to read when they entered first grade. In 1975 she opened an early counseling center in Meggen. On the occasion of a lecture tour through the United States and Canada in 1976, she gained experience of advanced hearing tests for newborns and was confronted with - for her anachronistic - demands for the introduction of sign language for all hearing impaired people.

In 1978 she founded the “International Advisory Center for Parents of Hearing Impaired Children”, which received a lot of international attention, but also received criticism from advocates of other methods . In 1979 she took part in the seminal symposium "Oral EducationToday and Tomorrow" in the Netherlands.

The further development of hearing aid technology and the cochlear implant through Marcus Lenhardt's "soft surgery" together with hearing training using the auditory-verbal method gave deaf or severely hard of hearing children the same development opportunities as hearing people for the first time. In 1989 the first “Auditory-Verbal-International Congress” initiated by her took place in Berchtesgaden, which was followed by others.

In 1985, after the death of her husband, she moved to Meggen, where she lives to this day and continues to run the international counseling center she founded for parents of hearing-impaired children. Schmid-Giovannini published various specialist books, led international congresses and set up advice centers around the world. She was the editor of the newsletter of the Förderverein Internationales Advice Center for Parents of Hearing Impaired Children, Meggen.

Professional activities

When Susann Schmid-Giovannini began her pioneering work, deaf people were able to choose from only five professions because they were often viewed as weakly gifted. Although it was known that mute people would not speak because they could not hear, there were still individual doctors who cut the frenulum of the deaf to "loosen their tongues". The upswing in education for the hearing impaired after the First World War was interrupted by Hitler. At that time they were even forbidden from marrying.

Because she was used to being able to decide about her own life, she wanted to free the deaf children from their dependence on sign language. She wanted to teach them to speak so that they could communicate with hearing people and choose which community they wanted to stay in. Unrestricted language acquisition can only take place in the first few years of life (today we assume so-called "sensitive phases" for language acquisition).

The concept of the special kindergarten was to allow hearing-impaired children to grow up in the vicinity of hearing children in order to keep many future social and professional opportunities open to them with this partial integration. In 1949 no hearing aids were available and the children were given hearing training similar to that described by Viktor Urbantschitsch in his book “About hearing exercises for deaf and dumb and deaf people in later life”. She taught the children the language by having them observe their mouth movements and feeling their own larynx and that of the teacher so that they could understand the meaning of the mouth movements. With her oldest foster son, she trained his residual hearing by sticking a stethoscope in his ears and speaking into the diaphragm.

The Unesco scholarship enabled Schmid-Giovannini to get to know the first electronic pocket hearing aids in Holland and England in 1953. She campaigned for her children to receive such devices because she saw them as a great advantage for their personal development.

The successes achieved in the special kindergarten with the practiced combination of pedagogy with hearing aid acoustics made Schmid-Giovanni internationally known. Your special form of audio-verbal therapy can be described with the term audio pedagogy.

When the first cochlear implants (CI) were implanted in hearing-impaired children at Zurich University Hospital in 1987, Schmid-Gionvannini soon recognized the potential of electronic hearing stimulation. After the implantation, the child first had to learn what these hearing impressions mean. The hearing center was still untrained because it had not yet received any hearing impressions in the womb or the deaf months of life. This marked the beginning of an intensive and successful collaboration with the CI clinics. The spoken language method complemented the advances in electronics and hearing prosthetics. For the first time a way was opened that enables deaf or hearing impaired children to live in the same world as their hearing parents.

With the congresses for auditory verbal education (AV congresses) organized by her from 1989 to 1999, she wanted to make the principle of spoken language education known to a wider public by inviting interdisciplinary experts, the hearing impaired and affected parents.

Susann Schmid-Giovannini only sent the children to mainstream school when they had sufficient language, made good use of their hearing and were able to follow the lesson without supervision. With early fitting of hearing aids or the cochlear implant in the first year of life, the children can learn the language normally in daily life through the ear and develop their knowledge normally. However, children should be provided with hearing aids by the age of two months at the latest. If a doctor suggests a cochlear implant, parents should not hesitate and seek out a therapist for auditory-verbal education. Thanks to the cochlear implant there were fewer and fewer children and therefore the school in Meggen was closed.

“ With her unique initiative and her excellent empathy, Ms. Susanna Schmid-Giovannini has set new standards in the early treatment of hearing-impaired babies and toddlers. After in-depth curative education studies in Vienna on deaf and hard of hearing children, she gained practical experience in language initiation for hearing impaired children as head of the department for hearing impaired children in a special kindergarten for over 15 years. Building on this, as an audio pedagogue at the Lucerne Cantonal Hospital and later as a teacher and director of the foundation school for hearing-impaired children in Meggen, she created the concept of early language initiation for deaf and hearing-impaired babies and toddlers, which, with the help of parents, leads to integration into the world of the speaking. By founding the International Advisory Center for Parents of Hearing Impaired Children and through international training activities, she pushed through these programs of early language initiation, in some cases against considerable resistance, so that deaf children were given a new opportunity to be integrated into the world of the healthy through a normal language become. "

- Theodor Hellbrügge Foundation "Sunshine Medal - Growing Together" 1982

Honors

  • 1953 UNESCO scholarship
  • 1982 "Sunshine Medal - Growing Together" from the Theodor Hellbrügge Foundation for her unique initiative and her excellent empathy with which she set new standards in the early treatment of hearing-impaired babies and toddlers .
  • In 1987 she was elected to represent Europe in the committee of the newly founded association Auditory-Verbal International .
  • 2003 Tribute to Susann Schmid-Giovannini at the CI meeting on Saturday, August 30, 2003 in Dübendorf. ORL University Clinic Zurich : 75 years Susann Schmid-Giovannini.
  • 2003 Theodor Hellbrügge Award for her lifelong commitment to disabled children.

International Schmid Giovannini Award

In 1999 the Schmid-Giovannini-Preis (Susann Schmid-Giovannini Award for International Excellence in Auditory-Verbal Practice) - a golden cochlea - was awarded for the first time.

The previous winners are:

  • 1999 Warren Estabrooks , Canada
  • 2001 Elke Winkelkötter, Germany
  • 2002 Jacquelin Stockes, Great Britain
  • 2003 Angela MVS Alves, Brazil
  • 2005 Barbara Streicher, Germany
  • 2008 Ulrike Rülicke, Austria

Publications (selection)

  • Picture stories for deaf, hard of hearing and speech impaired children. Using the signal method of Adolf Freunthaller . Jungbrunnen Publishing House, Vienna 1964
  • Kindergarten for the hearing impaired, from practice and perception, little tips for kindergarten teachers , approx. 1970
  • Talk to me. A holistic spoken language method for toddlers aged 0 - 7 for parents and educators of hearing-impaired toddlers . Verlag Marhold, Berlin 1976/1980, ISBN 3-7864-4205-3
  • Habla conmigo: método para que padres y educadores ensenen a hablar an ninos con trastornos auditivos, de O a 7 anos . Kapelusz, Buenos Aires, 1980.
  • Effects of aural-oral early therapy on the personal development and learning success of hearing-impaired children. Social Pediatrics 12, 1982.
  • Beszélj velem: egységes hangosbeszédtanítási módszer 0-7 éves hallássérält kisgyermekek szülői és nevelői számára: Országos Pedagógiai Intézet, Budapest 1985
  • Advice and guidance .. "Booklet 1 (0-2 years). Advice and guidance for parents and educators of hearing-impaired children . International advisory center for parents of hearing impaired, KinderInternationales Advisory Center, Meggen 1985
  • Advice and guidance .. "Booklet 2 (2-14 years). Advice and guidance for parents and educators of hearing-impaired children, International Advice Center for Parents of Hearing-Impaired Children. International Advice Center, Meggen 1986
  • From the series Counsel and guidance for parents and teachers of hearing impaired children . International Counseling Center for Parents of Hearing Impaired Children, Zollikon 1986
  • The art of teaching and learning to speak: Summary of the results of the three workshops , Zurich 1987
  • 1st Congress in Europe: October 2-4, 1989 in Berchtesgaden . International advisory center. Meggen 1989
  • 2nd Congress in Europe: October 23-25, 1992 in Essen. Auditory-verbal education in Europe . International Advisory Center, Meggen 1992
  • Listening and speaking. Instructions for the auditory-verbal education of hearing-impaired children . International Advisory Center, Meggen 1996.
  • with Armin Löwe: The cognitive support of hearing-impaired children . International Advisory Center Schmidt-Giovanni, Meggen 1997
  • Special edition cochlear implant. Testimonials from parents whose children wear a CI. Newsletter International Advice Center for Parents of Hearing Impaired Children, Newsletter 66/1997 Meggen
  • 4th Auditory-Verbal Congress from October 8th - 10th, 1999 in Berchtesgaden: auditory-verbal education includes cognitive support from babies to adults . International advisory center. Meggen 1999
  • with Armin Löwe: Language-promoting games for hearing-impaired and language-impaired children: Instructions for parents, speech therapy practice, kindergarten, clinic and school . International Advisory Center Schmid-Giovannini, Meggen 1999
  • From stethoscope to cochlear implant. History and stories from sixty years of professional life . Verlag S. Schmid-Giovannini, Meggen 2007
  • European Commission - Socrates Education and Culture: Study Guide 7: Susann Schmid-Giovannini: Auditiv-verbal therapy (COMENIUS 2.1 ACTION Qualification of educational staff working with hearing-impaired children QESWHIC) (PDF; 209 kB)
  • Listening and speaking. Instructions for the auditory-verbal education of hearing-impaired children . Replica as eBook and print edition, Edizio Verlag, Meggen 2014, ISBN 978-3-9524315-0-4

literature

  • Viktor Urbantschitsch: About listening exercises for deaf and dumb and deaf people in later life . Urban & Schwarzenberg publishing house, Vienna 1895
  • Armin Löwe: Education for the hearing impaired internationally. History - countries - people - congresses. An introduction for parents, teachers and therapists of hearing impaired children. HVA Schindele, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-89149-183-2
  • Fiona Bollag: The girl who came out of silence . Verlag Ehrenwirth, Bergisch Gladbach 2006, ISBN 3-431-03685-6 (life story of a former student of Susann Schmid-Giovannini)
  • If you rest, you rust . Interview with Susann Schmid-Giovannini. Central Switzerland on Sunday 28 August 2011, pages 49 and 51

Web links

Film and audio broadcast:

  • The sound of silence , documentary
  • [2] WDR 5 “Experienced Stories” from February 2, 2020: Susann Schmid-Giovannini, deaf teacher. 23 minutes. Available until January 30, 2030

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Special kindergarten Schweizer Spende, Vienna
  2. ↑ Cochlea Implantat Austria of January 29, 2019: Memories of the deaf education of the post-war period
  3. ^ Theodor Hellbrügge Foundation: Sunshine Medal
  4. ↑ European Commission - Socrates Education and Culture: Study Guide 7: Susann Schmid-Giovannini: Auditory-Verbal Therapy (PDF; 209 kB)
  5. ↑ Belonging: Schmid-Giovannini-Award ( Memento from March 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Replica of hearing and speaking. Instructions for the auditory-verbal education of hearing-impaired children reissued as an e-book
  7. ↑ [1] Publishing Edizio: A Life for the hearing-impaired and hearing-impaired child , accessed on 21 December 2019
  8. ↑ Focus online January 27, 2007: Cochlear Implant - The End of Silence
personal data
SURNAME Schmid-Giovannini, Susann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Koliha, Susann (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-Swiss deaf educator
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna