Welcome to the August 2008 issue of Learning from Each Other.
We'd like to extend an even bigger welcome to those who have recently joined Our Network. We hope that you'll find it to be a useful forum for sharing experiences with others who work with deaf children and their families around the world.
This issue of Learning from Each Other is focused on family communication. Young children spend more time with their families than with anyone else but most deaf children are born into hearing families with no knowledge of deafness. Consequently, many parents are unable to communicate with their children and deaf children can feel isolated and excluded.
Research has shown that offering families support can greatly improve the quality of communication with their young children. This can have a profound effect on a child’s early development and their sense of inclusion within the family. In particular, families can provide children with language relating to their home environment, culture and community.
Changing attitudes - parents speak out
As many families have very low expectations for their deaf children, learning sign language and meeting other deaf people can really change attitudes.
We wanted to share feedback from families who received support in building communication with their children:
"I never realised my son had so much to say. In fact, I never realised he had anything to say." Mother, Kenya
"We used to fight terribly with our four-year-old daughter. Now, we've learned that facial expressions really help. We no longer shout and get frustrated like we did before taking this course." Father, South Africa
"Before this project, I had few hopes for my son, but he is capable of so much. I hope that he will be able to go to university and learn to teach other deaf children." Father, Samoa
"Now that we are learning Sign Language, our son is more of a complete person than before. His little mind absorbs every sign he sees. As he grows up, we are growing with him, learning his language." Mother, South Africa
We hope that this feedback will inspire you to think more about how you can work to support deaf children and their families to communicate more effectively.
This innovative project has trained seven teachers to facilitate communicative play between parents and young deaf children.
This is a novel approach for Rwanda but has proved to be a brilliant way of building communication between parents and young deaf children.
“Here in Rwanda," said one parent, "this is the first time we have been encouraged to play with our children.”
This method helps parents to develop confidence in their own ability to help their children learn. As well as helping the parents with play and communication skills, the project team have devised play materials that make use of ordinary household objects.
A real breakthrough came when families started to learn signs that they can use with their children. Led by Felix, an adult deaf man from the support team, every parent and child got a new sign name. This was the first time that children had a name that they could use themselves.
Overcoming communication barriers at home in Colombia
A school for the deaf in Bogota, Colombia, is supporting families of deaf children to improve their communication at home.
The school realised that many of the difficulties faced by the children are related to their home and family environments.
Accordingly, parents have been learning sign language and receiving information on different aspects of deafness. They have found the opportunity to meet each other to be useful and are now supporting each other.
"The most important thing," said Patricia, the mother of a 13-year-old deaf boy, "is learning to communicate with deaf children in their language. That way, they feel that their family is with them and loves them, if not they will feel rejected."
Want to train families in sign language but don’t know where to start?
How many people should you train at once?
Who should lead the training?
What topics should you select?
Where should you hold the training?
What kind of follow-up should you do?
All of these questions and more are addressed in our Basic Principles on Sign Language training.
Produced using the knowledge and materials gained by supporting lots of family sign language projects, the full details of these are published in chapter three of our new book: Family Friendly! Working with deaf children and their communities worldwide
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In Uganda, Deaf Child Worldwide funded a project which established an association of parents and teachers of deaf children called Silent Voices. This project continues to grow.
In the beginning, they decided to focus on Sign Language lessons, ensuring that topics relevant to the daily life of parents and children were covered - objects in the kitchen; in the house; around and in the school; shop and market; hospital; family and so on.
This included a DVD and flipchart with tips to help families learn not only the basics of South African Sign Language but also how to care for their young deaf children. Deaf Child Worldwide is now supporting DeafSA to train their community workers to use the toolkit with families.
To coincide with celebrations for International Deaf Awareness Week (22 to 27 September 2008), the next issue of this newsletter will focus on raising awareness of deafness in our communities.
Deaf children and their families often miss out on essential services such as healthcare and education and the social and cultural lives of their communities, because of stigma, poverty and lack of information.
Do you work on making community activities accessible to deaf children and their families and/or on raising awareness of their rights? If so, we'd like to hear about your experiences.
We'll include the information you send to info@deafchildworldwide.org in our next newsletter or on our website.
