Deaf/HOH with CI-Singing Handel’s Messiah Hallelujah with FECG Choir 12/2024
*Sudden Adult Deafness-You wake up one morning and you loss your hearing
*Thank God for Cochlear, I can hear again…digitally! And to sing again.
South African project helps deaf people build farming skills and find jobs | Africanews
At the Westonaria Agri-Park east of the South African city of Johannesburg, farm workers are busy tilling the soil and planting tomatoes and lettuce.
But despite the hive of activity, there is silence.
This is because most of the people working there are deaf and communicate using sign language.
They are members of the Voiceout Deaf farming collective started by entrepreneur Matebogo Victoria, who has a hearing disability herself.
She understands the challenges they face. During her studies, she had to attend her classes with a hearing partner as her university could not make the lectures accessible for her.
Victoria, who used to work for one of the country’s major banks, decided to leave her corporate job and start Voiceout to allow deaf people to gain agricultural skills.
“Before I left my job, I saw a lot of deaf people staying at home and unemployed. They have accessibility challenges. Communication is the biggest challenge in the deaf community,” she says.
These artists are busting the myth that deaf people live in a world of silence. They’re very good at listening | abc.net.au
There is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence.
But many people who are deaf retain some hearing. Some, such as Australia’s former Prime Minister John Howard, make successful careers in a world full of noise.
This also includes the music industry.
Increasingly, the music world is recognising that deafness doesn’t stop people from loving music as much as the hearing community. In fact, there are many deaf musicians.
One of the highest profile artists today is Dame Evelyn Glennie, a Scottish percussionist and composer. She has collaborated with many musicians including Icelandic singer Björk and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett.
During the 2012 London Olympics, Glennie led 1,000 drummers to perform in the Opening Ceremony.
She’s performed as a soloist with the best orchestras in the world, and released more than 60 albums ranging from concertos for percussion to improvisations with folk and pop bands.
In her latest project, Glennie is exploring the sound world of people who are deaf alongside poet Raymond Antrobus.
While Antrobus, who is also deaf, read his poems aloud, Glennie improvised on pre-selected percussion instruments.
“The whole thing really was pretty much one take recorded live right in the moment,” Antrobus tells Radio National’s The Music Show.
Why I want my deaf daughter to have the best of both worlds | Aeon Essays
I knew my daughter could hear: not just because she loved music, but because she had perfect rhythm. She punched her fists in the air like a human metronome, and brought a doughy heel to the ground precisely on each down beat. I had thrown off the yoke of milestone-tracking months earlier, having become fixated on her inability to roll during the precise developmental week for rolling. So when she didn’t form consonants at the prescribed time, I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. It didn’t occur to me that deafness might not be an either/or binary, and that certain vibrations and pitches – the down beat of a Wiggles song, say – could be apprehended, while other subtle speech sounds might be snatched out of a sentence. So it was a couple of months after her first birthday when we discovered our Botticellian baby had mild hearing loss, and two years after that when she lost almost all of her remaining hearing entirely.
Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or Deaf1 culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the premiere of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in the film Jerry Maguire (1996); Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs. This bleak landscape of ignorance and misinformation is often the lookout from which parents begin making decisions, as D/deaf critics have rightly pointed out. But although I began educating myself belatedly, it didn’t take long for the calcified layers of assumptions and approximations to disintegrate. Chief among them was the unquestioned belief that hearing loss, for an early deafened person, is even a loss at all.
In a recent interview with the news site Truthout, the Deaf philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke argues that the language of tragic loss seems particularly ill-fitting for a deaf child: ‘Some of us do not share this experience [of loss] at all, but only know what it is to be in our bodies as they have always existed.’ News headlines about childhood deafness and hearing technology often slip into the ‘from deaf tragedy to hearing miracle’ narrative, missing this crucial point about self-concept entirely. For many parents, this has intuitive clarity too. Absolutely smitten with my baby’s many tiny perfections, I had a stubborn sense that her deafness was not a pit she had fallen into, but just one of many extraordinary discoveries about her that I was making every day. It was a comforting certainty to cling to in the wee hours, when I was beset by a looping reel of terrors about the shadowy obstacles she would undeservedly face, and that I would be impotent to protect her from. Even accepting the reality of life’s vicissitudes, most of us hope for a relatively smooth course for our children. Unfettered sensorial access to the world being at the bottom of a hierarchy of wishes, and fundamental to the rest. The idea that so much was arbitrarily denied a baby so new to the world was, at times, almost impossible to withstand.
‘I needed ASL to better understand myself’: the power of sign language | WUNC
American sign language is the third most commonly used language in the U.S., but for many Deaf folks, it’s about so much more than communication. An author, a poet and two scholars share the history and culture of ASL.
Transcript of this episode
Sara Nović was 12 years old when she failed her first hearing test at school. As a self-proclaimed nerd, this was a serious blow. Sara tried to hide the evidence by flushing her test results down the toilet, but she couldn’t bury the feeling that something deep within her was broken. Then Sara started to learn American Sign Language, and through signing, Sara found her community and her voice.
Sara is an author, advocate and educator who explored Deaf culture and joy in her latest novel “True Biz”. Sara educates host Anita Rao about the history of ASL, tracing its roots from 19th century Martha’s Vineyard to modern day classrooms. Plus, Sara details how she represented ASL on the pages of “True Biz.”
Performer Douglas Ridloff also joins the conversation, demonstrating how the flow and dimensionality of sign is depicted in ASL poetry. Douglas is the executive director of the nonprofit ASL Slam, as well as an ASL master working on film sets like Marvel’s “Eternals” and “A Quiet Place.” Together, Sara and Douglas share the importance of ASL within their own families and what they are keeping in mind when raising their young children.
Meet the face behind Los Medanos Colleges ASL program | Experience
Upon entering any classroom on campus, you would expect to hear the loud chatter of a class discussion, oral lecture, or students talking among themselves. But when you walk into Jennifer Finnigan’s SIGN-051 class, you discover complete silence while Professor Finnigan demonstrates a sign for her students to mirror.
Finnigan has taught American Sign Language for 24 of her 53 years. However, she never initially set out to become a college professor. The seed was planted inside her when she was a deaf child growing up in Fresno, California where a frustrated Finnigan sought communication from her family, friends and peers.
“Growing up I loved numbers, actually,” said Finnigan through her interpreter. “I thought maybe I would do something in accounting or something related more with math, but I noticed that I always wanted to teach my hearing friends signs. I wanted that from an early age because I wanted to be able to communicate and I wanted that barrier to be gone.”
In a family of six, and as the oldest of four siblings, Finnigan grew up as the only deaf person in her family. She navigated her home life through home signs, fingerspelling and SEE signs to communicate with her parents, sister, and two brothers.
“Looking back, I’m really grateful to my parents, because they were there for me, and they really did try their best to communicate with me, in ASL, and in sign language,” said Finnigan. “We did a lot of what’s called SEE sign, it’s signing in exact English. So it’s a little bit different than the actual language of ASL. SEE sign is more word for word… And I used SEE signs a lot in my community, because a lot of my neighbors and the kids that were my age would learn SEE signs so that they could communicate with me. That’s actually what inspired me to become a teacher, but I didn’t really know it at the time.”
Her motivation to teach in the classroom came from the influence of her mother, and a friend. That led to her finding herself entering the doors of Fresno City College at 29 years old, where she fell in love with teaching.
“I was very scared as I was feeling unsure of how to teach ASL in front of 30 students for the first time,” said Finnigan. “I had been teaching friends, family, and neighbors sign language for multiple years and I was not sure how to teach ASL as a language for the college.”
Teacher of the Week created school’s ASL program decades ago and still teaches in same classroom | WZZM13.com
A first for the 13 ON YOUR SIDE Teacher of the Week: One West Michigan educator is teaching students a valuable skill that isn’t offered in every district.
Students at Forest Hills Central High School gathered in the media center to surprise Kimberly Anderson.
“I was very touched and so surprised because I had no idea,” she said. “When you teach, there’s just a lot of love and a lot of emotion but I have never seen it all in one spot.”
Principal Jonathan Haga told 13 ON YOUR SIDE, “You know, when I saw it was Ms. Anderson’s name, I was thrilled to be able to really set up an experience for her which – she was a little blindsided – but that she’s going to remember for a long time.”
Anderson was hired in 2013 to start the American Sign Language (ASL) program at Forest Hills Central High.
“There’s no high school curriculum for ASL, really, out there. So, yes, everything you see was masterminded by me,” said Anderson.
She’s been in the same classroom ever since and explained, “We talk about how beneficial sign language is and how it can be used anytime with anybody.”
Most hospitals don’t have interpreters for the deaf. This one does. | Mosaic
During a typical shift at Newark’s University Hospital, Diely Martinez often slips into a patient’s room upon request to translate questions or convey concerns to a doctor. Sometimes, that involves translating between English and Spanish, while other times, she interprets for deaf, hard of hearing, or blind and deaf patients in American Sign Language (ASL).
“I am a trilingual interpreter, “English, ASL, and Spanish,” said Martinez of her role for the past five years at the Level I Trauma Center, located at Bergen Street and South Orange Avenue, serving Northern New Jersey, Newark International Airport and its seaports.
Effective communication between patients and providers in health care settings is essential for accurate diagnosis, care and treatment. But not all hospitals have human interpreters to assist deaf, hard of hearing, or deaf-blind patients.
“The inclusion of ASL interpreters as part of our team is absolutely a critical asset,” said Lois Greene, senior vice president of DEI and Wellness at University Hospital. “Not only does it ensure that we are offering equitable access to health care for those who rely on sign language for communication, but it also reinforces our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s crucial to recognize that disabilities are a significant part of the DEI conversation, and yet they are often overlooked.”
Steven McCoy, a deaf and blind journalist who lives in Newark, said human interpreters are a good idea. He said he did not have access to ASL interpreters when he was growing up, and no one recommended that he or his family learn it.
BalletNext’s ASL production connected company with a young performer who is deaf | Park Record
BalletNext, Park City’s resident dance company, is currently hosting its 2024 Summer Intensive sessions that run through Aug. 10 at the Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.
One of the dancers is 10-year-old Dahlia Sessions, who hails from Traverse City, Michigan. She has been dancing for the past four years and has performed in productions presented by a local studio, Dance Arts Academy.
Dahlia is also deaf.
“I’ve been deaf since I was born,” she said through her mother Cheri Sessions, who is also an American Sign Language interpreter. “I was born in China, and my mother adopted me. And I have been dancing ever since I was 6.”
Since Dahlia started competitive company a year ago, Cheri started to seek support to help her find programs for her daughter that included correct sign-language interpretations and language.
“I’m not a dancer, and I know nothing of dance, but since I interpret for Dahlia, something I call ‘mom-terpreting,’ I always try to find programs with appropriate signs for dance, and it’s hard.”
What Cheri has found is that most everyone who teaches ballet is confined in a regimented box.
Deaf entrepreneurs around the world | Hearing Like Me
Many deaf individuals are following their passions and becoming their own boss. This is especially notable because it’s hard enough for anyone in this day and age, let alone being a deaf entrepreneur. We live in a time where economic, political, and social landscapes are vastly evolving, all amidst a global pandemic that drastically reduced job opportunities. For members of the deaf community, there exists a whole scope of other challenges to consider, including employers not complying with anti-discrimination laws.
This month Hearing Like Me set out to find deaf-led businesses around the globe. I was astounded at the accomplishments I encountered, and the brilliant people behind them. Here are the deaf entrepreneurs breaking down the stigmas that surround deafness and working life.
Mark Burke, Jon Cetrano, and Sam Costner
First on our list of deaf entrepreneurs are Mark Burke, Jon Cetrano, and Sam Costner, the three deaf founders and owners of Streetcar 82 Brewery in Hyattsville, Maryland. Located just a stone’s throw away from Gallaudet University, (where all three of them graduated) the brewery has the support of a large deaf community.
After a brief stint away from home, all three men found themselves back on the East coast. One night when they were all together drinking their home brewed beer, they realized there was nothing stopping them from doing it professionally. From there, they did the necessary research and made their business pitch at Gallaudet. They didn’t win first place, but they did win Audience’s Favorite. This was proof that the beer brought the community together, and the push they needed to keep going. It wasn’t long before they opened Streetcar 82 in a converted auto repair garage. It has become hugely successful and remains the only deaf-owned brewery on the East coast.
All of the staff is deaf and use American Sign Language (ASL). In addition to providing job opportunities for the deaf community, the owners collaborate with Gallaudet to mentor younger students who want to build their own businesses.