Adaptation and pilot testing of the Early Learning Outcome Measure (ELOM) (4&5) Years Assessment tool in South African Sign Language.

Early Childhood Development is a key national priority in South Africa which has developed the Early Learning Outcome Measure (ELOM 4&5) specifically designed to measure the progress of 4- and 5-year-old children across 5 domains of early childhood development. This age-validated, population-standardised instrument has been shown to have measurement equivalence and lack of bias across South Africa's 11 official spoken languages. In 2023, South African Sign Language was formally recognised as 12th official language of South Africa, but no ELOM (4&5) exists in SASL despite over 6,000 deaf children being born annually.

'The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper' (WB Yeats): enhancing resilience among deaf young people in South Africa through photography and filmmaking.

This article concerns deaf children and young people living in South Africa who are South African Sign Language users and who participated in an interdisciplinary research project using the medium of teaching film and photography with the goal of enhancing resilience. Specifically, this paper explores three questions that emerged from the deaf young people's experience and involvement with the project: (i) What is disclosed about deaf young people's worldmaking through the filmic and photographic modality? (ii) What specific impacts do deaf young people's ontologically visual habitations of the world have on the production of their film/photographic works? (iii) How does deaf young people's visual, embodied praxis through film and photography enable resilience? The presentation of findings and related theoretical discussion is organised around three key themes: (i) 'writing' into reality through photographic practice, (ii) filmmaking as embodied emotional praxis and (iii) enhancing resilience through visual methodologies. The discussion is interspersed with examples of the young people's own work.