SpringFest

This week was SpringFest at RIT, a week in Rochester that was much colder than the week of FreezeFest! The college activities board had a great line up of activities to celebrate Spring including concerts, tie-dying, barbecues, jumping castles (also known as a bouncy house), and the annual Dance in the Dark. On Sunday morning the Zeta Tau Alpha Sorority organised the "Paint me Pink 5km" which eventually started after being delayed by pouring rain and freezing temperatures. I finished, which was amazing given how many important body parts I could not feel ... hands, feet, ears! I didn't even break a sweat!

Painted pink at the end of the run

RIT Fulbright Student Association Elections

Incoming e-board: Yussu Guy, Gantsetseg Myagmarjav,
Issa Victor Hafiri, Evgenia Tranevskaya and Edward Tetteh

Visit to the University of Oulu

I was fortunate to meet Dr Taina Välimaa from the University of Oulu in Central Finland at the European Cochlear Implant Users Symposium in Helsinki last week. She invited to me to travel to Oulu to visit the university and meet with faculty and doctoral students. 

Dr Taina Välimaa, Professor Sari Kunnari, and Kate with traditional Suomi outfits

We had a great day discussing our previous and future research and identifying areas of potential collaboration for future projects. I was treated to a tour of Oulu and surrounds including being able to walk on the bay at Toppilansaari which was still frozen solid at the end of April. I also tried some traditional Finish foods typical of central Finland including reindeer and leipäjuusto, a Finnish cheese dish that is baked for dessert.

Kate standing on the bay at Toppilansaari

Leipäjuusto with cloudberry jam

Visit to Estonia

Just because I could, I took the ferry from Helsinki to Estonia for a Sunday exploring the fascinating historic city of Tallinn. I visited many museums to learn about the long history of this region of Europe and the city of Tallinn, including the Great Guild Hall, the Estonian Theatre and Music Museum, Kalev Marzipan Museum, Tallinn Town Wall and St Nicholas' Church and Museum.

View from atop the Town Wall

Tallinn Old Town

As well as exploring the old city, I took the tram to see the house of Peter The Great where a museum is now housed, and the Kadriorg Palace and Art Museum.

The summer house of Peter The Great and Catherine I

The Baroque Kadriorg Palace

European Cochlear Implant Users Symposium

I'm in Helsinki for the European Cochlear Implant Users (EURO-CIU) Symposium. The EURO-CIU Symposium brings together Cochlear Implant users and professionals around Finland and Europe. The Symposium brings together presented who will focus on six topics related to living with a cochlear implant: Health Economics, Music and Cognitive Development, Peer Support and Rehabilitation, Accessibility to Education and Lifelong Learning, Multilingualism, and Design for All.

My keynote presentation was "Hei! 你好! !مرحبا: Language acquisition in a multilingual world". As the conference was multilingual my presentation was simultaneously interpreted into spoken Finnish and Finnish Sign Language and real-time captioned in Finnish and English. 

Here is the abstract:

The growing diversity of D/deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners creates challenges for educators and clinicians. With close to 8,000 language spoken in the world and increasing levels of mobility, the linguistic diversity of DHH learners accessing education and therapy services has never been greater. This presentation will describe parental and professional perspectives on choices about communication mode and language use for DHH children. Current perspectives on multilingualism, focusing on spoken language multilingualism, will be described and related to DHH learners and their families, and the educators and clinicians who work with them. The available research describing the speech and language outcomes for DHH children living and learning in multilingual environments will also be summarized. The need for interdisciplinary collaboration for supporting, assessing, and monitoring the speech and language development of DHH multilingual learners will be discussed.

Rochester: Day 5

Today was my parents last day in Rochester and we had fun scheduled. First coffee with Professor Marschark and Georgianna at the CERP lab, and then The Strong National Museum of Play! The Strong is an interactive, collections-based museum devoted to play and houses the world’s largest collection of historical materials related to play, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the National Toy Hall of Fame, the World Video Game Hall of Fame, and the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. We were lucky enough to get a behind the scenes tour of the museum from my friend Tara, who showed us the library and the archives and told us many amazing facts about the collections held at The Strong. We finished our day with dinner with my good friend Dawn from CERP.

Sesame Street allows children to explore letters, words, numbers, and diversity

Reading Adventure Land is like walking inside an artifact-rich, life-size pop-up book 

The Berenstain Bears: Down a Sunny Dirt Road

Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden

Rochester: Day 4

Mount Hope Cemetery is a remarkable Victorian cemetery located on 196 acres of parkland in central Rochester. It was dedicated in 1838 and has 80 mausoleums, Egyptian obelisks, fountains, gothic chapels and over 350,000 graves. Many people important to both Rochester and the US rest at Mount Hope including Frederick Douglass (African-American social reformer who escaped slavery in Maryland to become a national leader of the abolitionist movement) and Susan B. Anthony (Social reformer, women's rights activist, and leader of the women's suffrage movement who anti-slavery petitions and became New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society).

Frederick Douglass

Susan B. Anthony

Civil War Graves

Next, lunch at Lake Ontario Beach Park and then onto the Rochester Museum and Science Center. This museum's mission is to "stimulates broad community interest and understanding of science and technology, and their impact — past, present, and future — on our lives" and it delivered. The highlight for me was seeing the Bridges for Brain Injury Wildlife Rockstars. It is not often that you get up close to a porcupine munching on a granola bar or a coyote!

Snowflakes Up Close exhibit by RIT Professor Michael Peres

A perfect day was finished off with dinner with my parents and Professor Marschark and Tommie Sarchet from CERP at the best Italian restaurant in Rochester!