Donna Jo Napoli, professor of linguistics and social justice, and Gene Mirus, professor of deaf studies at Gallaudet, with their students from Swarthmore and Gallaudet University are transforming the pre-literacy options for deaf children — which will help them learn to read. Their project, Reading Involves Shared Experiences (RISE), was awarded the Comenius EduMedia Award by the Media Society for Pedagogy, Information, and Media (GPI). The medal recognizes exemplary digital educational media in terms of pedagogy, content, and design.

There are 34 million deaf children in the world, and estimates suggest that fewer than 2% of them have received early childhood exposure to a sign language. Internationally, deaf children lag behind their hearing peers with regard to academic work, says Napoli, and many point to that lack of exposure to a sign language as a likely culprit. Children need accessible language early, and for the deaf child, a sign language is the only clearly accessible type of language. Once children have language, she says, they can move ahead to achieve academic success.

A barrier for deaf children in gaining literacy is that reading text written in an alphabet is fundamentally built for hearing children. If a child is learning to read English, for example, they only have to learn 26 letters and the sounds those letters correspond to. But deaf children must learn a separate sign for every individual word.

Napoli and Mirus’ work stood out. GPI’s expert jury of academics, experts, and educational practitioners evaluated about 170 educational products. RISE is one of only 15 projects to receive the EduMedia Medal, GPI’s highest honor. It is also the only U.S.-based project to receive an honor from GPI in 2025. The award, highly regarded across Europe and Asia, is named for 17th-century educator Johann Amos Comenius, a pioneer of accessible, visual-based education.

RISE produces bimodal-bilingual video books that support literacy in deaf children by offering a fun way to gain the pre-literacy skills of recognizing narrative form, understanding characterization (which helps develop Theory of Mind), and making inferences. The videobooks have text, illustrations, and, most importantly, visual storytelling. Since 2013, RISE has created video books in 35 sign languages (with text in the ambient spoken language), covering more than 70 titles (many of which are in several languages).

Some featured titles include Napoli’s own As Night Falls: Creatures That Go Wild After Dark (Penguin Random House), which was named a 2023 Best Illustrated Children’s Book by The New York Times and the New York Public Library.