Gestural communication in deafblind children encompasses pre-intentional body signals, personally invented hand movements, and formal tactile sign systems—the primary language through which these children express themselves and connect with the world. The van Dijk approach provides the central framework, emphasizing resonance, co-active movement, predictable routines, and responsive partnership as the foundation for communication development.
Imagine a five-year-old named Maya. She cannot see the expression on your face from across the room, and she cannot hear you call her name. But when you sit beside her at the water table and rest your hand near hers, she reaches out and guides your hand toward the tap — a clear, purposeful request: more water, please. In that moment, Maya is communicating. She is doing it with her body, through gesture, in the only channel that is fully available to her. This course is about understanding exactly what is happening in moments like that one — and about equipping you to recognize, honor, and build on them.
This course focuses on gestural communication in children who are deafblind — children who have a combined vision and hearing loss that, together, creates communication and developmental needs unlike those caused by either sensory loss alone. The word gestural here is used broadly. It encompasses the earliest pre-intentional body signals a child produces without knowing anyone is watching, the personally invented hand movements a child uses only with people who know them well, the reaching and pushing and guiding that emerge as the child discovers communication, and — for some children — formal tactile sign systems built from those foundations. Gesture is not one rung on a ladder to be climbed and left behind. For many children who are deafblind, it is the primary language of their lives.
The course is designed for a wide audience: educators, early intervention specialists, therapists, parents, and caregivers. No prior background in deafblindness or communication science is assumed. What is assumed is that you care deeply about a child in your life or work and want to understand them more fully.
For sighted, hearing children, language development is largely invisible. A baby absorbs words by overhearing conversations across the room. A toddler learns to point by watching older siblings point and seeing adults follow their gaze. The constant, effortless stream of background information — faces, gestures, voices, events happening at a distance — is called incidental learning, and it does an enormous amount of the work of language acquisition without anyone intending to teach anything.
Children who are deafblind are cut off from nearly all of that stream. They cannot overhear. They cannot watch from a distance. Every piece of information about the world must be brought within reach, made tangible, or actively interpreted by a knowledgeable partner. This makes the communication partner — not technology, not curriculum, not any device — the single most important variable in a deafblind child's communication development.
In this environment, the body becomes the primary medium. Touch, movement, posture, muscle tension, and proximity are the channels through which a child who is deafblind first receives information and first begins to send it. This is not a deficit. It is a developmentally coherent adaptation to a sensory world that is organized very differently from the one sighted, hearing children inhabit. Understanding it as such — as real, sophisticated communication deserving of serious study — is the foundational commitment of this course.
Gestural communication does not appear fully formed. It develops along a continuum, and understanding that continuum allows you to locate any child on it, recognize what they are already doing, and know what meaningful next steps look like.
At the earliest end are pre-intentional signals: a relaxation of muscle tone when a familiar person arrives, a stiffening of the body when a routine is disrupted, a reaching movement made without any awareness that it affects others. These signals are read by responsive partners as meaningful before the child knows they are communicating — and that responsiveness is precisely what teaches the child that their body has power in the social world.
As communicative awareness develops, children begin producing idiosyncratic gestures — personally invented signals that are real communication but are only readable by people who know the child well. A particular head tilt might mean I want more. A specific hand movement might mean I'm done. These are not random. They are a child's first vocabulary.
Next come natural gestures: reaching toward something desired, pushing away something unwanted, placing an adult's hand on an object to request action, giving an object to share it. These gestures emerge across all human cultures and represent a major developmental achievement — the child now understands that movement directed at another person can reliably produce an effect in the world.
For some children, this gestural foundation leads toward conventional tactile sign systems — formal sign languages produced and received through touch. For others, it develops alongside tangible symbols (objects or textures that represent activities or places) and object cues (a piece of a swimsuit that means swimming is coming). None of these forms is superior to the others; what matters is that every communicative form the child uses is recognized and honored.
The gestural communication continuum — from early pre-intentional body signals to formal tactile sign systems. Most children who are deafblind communicate across multiple levels simultaneously, and many spend their lives primarily in the middle of this continuum.
The curriculum and intervention framework at the center of this course is the van Dijk approach, developed by Dutch educator and researcher Jan van Dijk beginning in the 1960s through direct, long-term work with children deafblinded by the rubella epidemic. It is the most widely cited and practiced framework in the field of deafblind education worldwide.
The van Dijk approach insists on a set of principles that run through every concept in this course:
Start with the child. Before anything else, you observe carefully, systematically, and without agenda. What does this child already do? What moves them? What do they avoid? How do they signal comfort and discomfort? The child's current behavior is the starting point — not a developmental checklist, not a grade-level expectation.
Resonance and co-active movement. Van Dijk introduced the concept of resonance — moving with a child, physically synchronizing with their movements — as the foundation for building shared experience. From resonance grows co-active movement, in which adult and child act on an object or move through an activity side by side or with hands gently in contact. This is explicitly distinguished from hand-over-hand guidance, in which the adult physically manipulates the child's hands, which is now understood to undermine the child's agency and provide little useful learning.
Predictable routines. Repeated, consistent interaction routines are the primary vehicle through which early communication develops. When a child can anticipate what comes next, they can signal — and that signal is communication. A deliberate pause at a predictable moment in a routine creates what practitioners call a communicative slot: an opening for the child to say something.
The relationship as the medium. Every element of development, in the van Dijk approach, happens through a warm, consistent, responsive relationship. The adult is not a delivery mechanism for input; they are the environment in which communication grows.
Alongside the van Dijk approach, several other frameworks and tools provide essential support:
The Communication Matrix (developed by Charity Rowland at Oregon Health & Science University) is a free, research-based assessment tool that maps a child's communicative behaviors across the full continuum from pre-intentional to symbolic. It is one of the most widely used tools in the field for documenting where a child is and tracking progress over time.
Hand-under-hand interaction — in which the adult rests their hand gently beneath the child's, following rather than directing — has largely replaced hand-over-hand guidance in best practice. It preserves the child's agency while providing tactile connection and modeling.
Lilli Nielsen's Active Learning framework, which emphasizes self-initiated exploration in a richly designed tactile environment, complements van Dijk principles particularly for children with additional physical or cognitive disabilities.
The intervener model recognizes that many children who are deafblind require a trained, consistent one-to-one support person throughout their school day — someone whose primary role is to mediate the environment, interpret it tactilely, and serve as a skilled communication partner.
The research is unambiguous: partner behavior is the most powerful variable in a deafblind child's communication development. Several partner skills recur throughout this course:
Throughout this course, one conviction runs beneath everything: gestural communication is not a phase to move past. It is not a consolation prize for children who cannot access spoken language. It is a sophisticated, valid, and often lifelong primary mode of communication — as worthy of careful study, respectful interpretation, and wholehearted support as any other language system.
When you learn to read Maya's hand-guiding movement at the water table, you are not waiting for her to do something better. You are meeting her exactly where she is, in the language she is already speaking.