When you talk to Teresa Maiolo (MEd(SpecEd) ’13) about deaf education, you feel her passion for helping deaf children achieve all that they are capable of.
As President of the Australian Association of Teachers of the Deaf (SA) and an award-winning co-creator of the MorThemes literacy program, Teresa has helped reshape reading outcomes for deaf high school students in South Australia and beyond. But her journey into teaching, Auslan, and learning program design began long before she ever stepped into a classroom.
Teresa didn’t grow up with Auslan. “I don’t have anyone deaf in my immediate family,” she explains. Auslan came later, as a young adult, when she and a high school friend decided to take a night class together.
“We had just graduated high school and weren’t seeing each-other at school every day now, so we decided to do a night class so we would still see each other regularly.”
What started as a practical way to stay connected with a friend became the beginning of a new career.
As a young child Teresa wanted to be an archaeologist, then in high school worked towards becoming a dentist. But even while she explored other options, teaching kept resurfacing.
“I think teaching was always the one. I’d say, ‘if I’m not an archaeologist, I’ll probably be a teacher. If I’m not a dentist, I’ll probably be a teacher.’ I remember being on holiday in Italy when I decided dentistry wasn’t the career for me. I had to find a computer to get on to the internet to change my uni preferences to teaching!”
After finishing her undergraduate degree, she didn’t feel quite ready for a classroom.
“At the time, I felt like I wasn’t grown up enough. I also knew I wanted to be a teacher of the deaf, but there are no deaf education degrees in South Australia, so I enrolled in a Master of Special Education at Flinders University. That extra year made me feel much more prepared to be a teacher, and a teacher of deaf students.”
Her postgraduate studies shaped more than her career path. They reshaped her view of what teaching requires. “Every class has diverse learners. Inclusion is real. What works for kids with special needs works for everyone. When you overlay special-education pedagogy to mainstream class learning, nothing you do to meet one child’s needs will make it worse for another child.”
Addressing a gap in deaf education for high schoolers
As the Director of the Centre of Deaf Education at Avenues College, Windsor Gardens, South Australia, Teresa teaches across small, mixed-age classes of secondary students.
“There are specific ways you teach a deaf student,” she says, noting that language access, morphology, and visual clarity matter deeply for students who grow up with limited early language exposure.
The biggest frustration she and her colleagues faced came from a lack of teaching materials. “There are so few options out there for deaf kids, especially for older deaf kids. Many of the materials are American or English. We found almost nothing was Australian and nothing was designed for secondary students.”
They tried phonics and fingerspelling. “To some extent everything we tried worked, because if you teach a kid a thing, they’ll learn the thing. But the retention and transferability weren’t there. They weren’t able to apply what they’d learned to reading comprehension.”
About five years ago, Teresa and a colleague sat down together and decided enough was enough. “We said there’s nothing for our students, so we’ll just have to invent something.”
MorThemes combined theme-based learning with morphology. “Phonics is great for younger children, but for a 13-year-old who can’t hear the phonics, you need something else. Morphemes* are accessible. I can explain what ‘-ist’ means. If they know ‘-ist’ makes a person, then ‘art-ist’ becomes an art person. Suddenly they can decode new words.”
It worked. And then it kept working.
When the team began sharing results with other deaf education centres in South Australia, interest grew quickly. “Everyone wanted to try it, and wherever it was being used it was getting consistently good results.”
A conference presentation about the program opened doors and the program is now being delivered in New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand. “Other people heard and said, maybe this could work for my students.”
While uptake of MorThemes continues to grow, Teresa’s sights are set on the next challenge. “Sadly, we often find that deaf teenagers are reading at a level several years below their hearing friends. These kids are very capable, and now that they can get foundational vocab and grammar through MorThemes, I want to work on helping them achieve at a higher level in other areas.”
Her message to future educators
For those considering studying special education, Teresa is direct. “There are infinite pathways. And even if you don’t plan to be a specialist, the skills are essential. Every class has students with diverse needs, that’s the reality of teaching.”
*Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language, like word parts or whole words, that can’t be broken down further without losing meaning, such as ‘un-‘, ‘-ist’, or ‘-able’.
In 2025, Teresa won a Schools Plus Teaching Fellow Award for her work in the field of deaf education, which is transforming literacy outcomes for some of the most underserved students in Australia.
Are you interested in studying Education, Student Inclusion, Autism and Complex Disabilities or Disability and Developmental Education? Find out more about Flinders undergraduate and postgraduate education courses.