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Designing inclusive education for deaf learners is a complex dilemma affecting multiple spheres and agents. In the US and Canada, despite considerable work by students, parents, educators, school administrators, curriculum developers, and lawmakers to address education policy about deaf bilingual literacy, the provision of deaf education through open access educational resources is a wicked problem exacerbated by gaps in curriculum and pedagogy. Despite increasingly hypermodern technologies and mandated early assessment, most deaf high schoolers in North America have unsatisfactory literacy skills (Qi & Mitchell, 2012). To better manage this “wicked problem,” involving policy, pedagogical methods, and curriculum design, we explore how aesthetic forms of knowledge and deaf positive design operations are used in conjunction with Open Educational Resources (OER). We reviewed the literature and constructed a novel framework about OER and e-books in deaf education. The synthesis generated three key takeaways that assisted our understanding of the complex issue. We presented our new framework alongside structured questions to 382 attendees hailing from 20 nations at the WUN/UNESCO Conference (2021, October), focused on inclusive and open access education technologies. We empirically analyzed this rich corpus using qualitative coding and represented our findings using a multipart Ecocycle Model. Following basic analysis, we describe four broader implications for deaf education research about teaching and curriculum using OER and e-book materials. Our analysis shows that deaf curriculum design is an educational problem embedded in a larger policy debate concerning methods and philosophies of pedagogy.

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Vygotsky's (1993) Fundamentals of Defectology is a radical's handbook of deaf and disability studies. Vygotsky's overall research program views disabilities, including deafness, from an integrated biosocial and critical theory standpoint. In two movements, I introduce an American Annals of the Deaf Special Issue on Vygotskian perspectives in deaf education focused mainly on his Defectology volume. Movement One describes Vygotsky's life, research, death, and posthumous impact by situating his deaf pedagogy research as one node in a network of defectological pedology , translated as applied special educational psychology. Movement Two describes how Vygotsky's project has been extended, synthesized, and developed in modern and postmodern contexts of deaf education and disability studies. Throughout, I synthesize Vygotsky's claims and update his terms by juxtaposing them with contemporary terms and theories to provide sociohistorical context for the new scholarship comprising this Special Issue's unique contribution to Vygotskian deaf research.

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