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Lessons from Dimity

17 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Hearing and deaf

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

advocacy, Auslan, bilingualism, communication, deaf children, Dimity Dornan, early intervention, family, Hear and Say Centre, language acquisition, speech therapy

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Dimity has been in the news and upset the deaf community again. Nothing like she did last time, but still…

Our outrage is always essentially the same. How can she keep getting away with the things she says about deaf people? How can hearing people keep believing what she says and keep giving her awards?

She keeps on confounding us! She keeps on winning!

So I’ve been thinking: what can we learn from Dimity?

For those who might not have heard of Dimity Dornan, she is a speech pathologist and the founder of the Hear and Say early intervention centres for deaf children. Hear and Say promotes the use of cochlear implants, hearing aids and auditory verbal therapy (AVT) to teach deaf children speech and language. AVT does not allow the use of sign language or any kind of visual cues, including lipreading.

I know Dimity. I’ve met her many times.

Dimity is very charming. She’s very polite. She shows what comes across as a genuine interest in you as a person. She is, dare I say it, classy!

Several years ago after a deaf community uproar over something she said at an awards ceremony, I met with her at her Hear and Say centre in Brisbane to discuss the issues. The Auslan interpreter was a little late arriving so while we waited Dimity and I had a pleasant chat, relying on my speech and lipreading skills.

Our innocuous little chat came around to the subject of teapots. I love teapots. I told her about the beautiful Russian teapot I’d recently brought back from Alaska. Dimity seemed delighted. Did I like china teacups too, she asked. Oh yes!

Several months later, she invited me to talk with her staff about my experiences as a bilingual deaf person and Deaf Australia’s views on bilingualism. Afterwards, a staff member gave me a gift from everyone: two pretty tea mugs, not expensive but charming.

This simple gift conveyed a powerful message. It told me that Dimity is a thoughtful person. She listens. She’s generous and gives you things she knows you will like. She knows how to make you feel good. She knows how to show you she’s a nice person.

Dimity is well-known, well-connected.

Prime Ministers, Premiers, government and influential people know her. She works hard at networking and building relationships. Presumably she is charming with these people too.

Influence is the most effective form of advocacy. Sometimes being tough and demanding and kicking up a stink does work, but in the long term we achieve far more by building respectful, courteous relationships and using our connections to influence decision making.

I once had a conversation with an influential person who, rather indiscreetly, commented on another deaf advocate. The influential person was sympathetic to the issue I had raised and which this other advocate had also discussed with them but, the influential person told me, the other advocate had put them offside by being rude, demanding and aggressive.

So that’s the first thing we can learn from Dimity. Relationships matter. Manners matter. When we are courteous and build respectful relationships, it is harder for other people to dismiss us.

Dimity is positive.

Publicly she doesn’t openly, obviously and directly trash Auslan or deaf people who use it. Instead she talks about how beneficial speech is. She talks about how wonderful her speech and hearing program is and ignores other wonderful programs, especially bilingual programs. She politely and self-deprecatingly shuts down attempts to discuss Auslan: “I don’t sign well. I leave that to others who can.”

Over the years, I learned to be careful how I discuss programs like hers. I learned to compliment her on her speech training program, and to be clear that our issue is not with speech training, but with the exclusion of Auslan and families who want to give their deaf children access to both speech and Auslan.

This is something we do need to be clear about. Often when we talk about the importance of Auslan, people assume we are excluding speech and English. We need to be clear that we are advocating for bilingualism: for deaf children to have early access to both speech/English and Auslan.

Dimity is well groomed. She dresses appropriately well for the occasion and she always looks good.

In my late twenties, I attended a week-long residential leadership training program organised by the Deaf Society of NSW, along with people like Colin Allen and Carol-lee Aquiline, both now well-known deaf leaders. The program included a workshop about grooming and how important it is, for both men and women, if we want to have influence.

One day many years ago, I sat with many other people at a large table at the Australian Human Rights Commission in Sydney, waiting for a meeting to start. My advocacy colleague walked in hurriedly and sat down beside me. I looked at her. She was on time – just – but her hair was messy and her top, a smart, appropriate top, was rumpled.

“Did you iron that top?” I signed quietly.

“I know!” she signed apologetically. “I ran out of time to iron it! Sorry!”

A messy, rumpled appearance, whatever our gender, gives the message that we are disorganised, possibly incompetent.

I believe my colleague has since learned this lesson; whenever I see her now she looks smart and well groomed.

Whether or not we agree that grooming should be important, in our society it is.

Dimity has won many awards and she and her Hear and Say Centres are often in the news.

Now, I know that getting on the news is not easy. It’s probably easier to win awards. Winning awards can actually be a good way to get on the news.

To win awards we need someone to nominate us, or nominate ourselves.

The deaf community is not good at this. We don’t nominate enough of our achievers for awards. We don’t nominate successful programs and organisations for awards. Instead of criticising, which our community is very good at, we need to show pride in our achievers and promote them.

People often criticise achievers for having a big ego. Some do have large egos, but being an achiever doesn’t automatically mean a person has an outrageously large ego.

I once watched a TV interviewer ask Bob Hawke about his ego.

Bob Hawke replied, “If you don’t have confidence in yourself, how the hell can anyone else have confidence in you?”

Our deaf community needs to understand this. Without confidence in themselves, i.e., a certain measure of healthy ego, our deaf achievers aren’t able to go out there and be achievers. When they go out there and achieve things, they promote a positive image of the rest of us and our deaf community. When we publicly criticise them, we diminish not only them but ourselves and our community. When we support them and promote them, we also support and promote all of us and our community.

Dimity is careful with research.

She publishes research on children who graduate from her Hear and Say program and this research shows the program is highly successful. There are many deaf children with cochlear implants and hearing aids who do develop good speech and listening skills and good English language skills by the time they start school.

Many people impressed by this research do not realise that it excludes children who do not do well. These children leave the program and move into other programs elsewhere, usually bilingual or sign-based ones, before they reach school age. The research reports do not acknowledge that this happens. Instead, if they do mention them, they say that X number of children tested at the beginning of the research “moved away or were unavailable for testing”(1) later in the research.

It’s tempting to say that other types of early intervention programs could do something similar. Since many children in bilingual and sign-based early intervention programs start off in speech and hearing programs like Hear and Say and enter other programs late, their delayed language development adversely affects these other programs’ reports, making them appear less successful. So these programs could exclude these late-entry children from research.

But it’s not that simple. Bilingual and sign-based programs include children with many more variables than those in auditory-verbal programs like Hear and Say. Still, it’s food for thought. At the very least, we need to be making this information about research more widely known.

Dimity does not try to persuade bilingual supporters that they are wrong. She ignores them. She doesn’t talk about bilingualism, she gives it no airtime.

Maybe it’s time we stopped trying to persuade Dimity and professionals working in programs like hers that they are wrong to exclude Auslan. Instead we could focus on promoting the importance and benefits of bilingualism to a wider audience.

Once, in a meeting with Bill Shorten, when he was Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and I was trying to persuade him to provide government support for bilingual early intervention, he said, “I know nothing about these programs. What do they look like?”

I briefly explained how they work and suggested he visit the Aurora School in Melbourne. But I didn’t feel I had answered his question well.

We need to be better prepared to answer questions like this. We need to be able to show bilingualism in operation. We need video clips of successful bilingual deaf children. We need these video clips on line and in TV shows and adverts. We need to be at the point where people don’t have to ask us the question Bill Shorten asked, because they have seen videos of bilingual programs often.

And we should stop spending so much energy trying to persuade professionals to provide ‘unbiased’ information to parents.

They won’t. We’ve been trying to do this for decades and the only thing we have achieved is biased professionals who pay lipservice to bilingualism and Auslan with comments such as “I have nothing against sign language.”

Instead we need to be educating parents to recognise and understand the biases and why particular people have particular biases – including our own biases towards bilingualism. This would help parents be more fully informed and empowered.

Most of all what we can learn from Dimity is to stop worrying about what other people say.

Does Dimity spend a lot of time worrying and talking and protesting about what we say? I doubt it. She is too busy focussing on achieving and promoting the things she believes.

We need to do the same.

 

1. http://www.hearandsayresearchandinnovation.com.au/UserFiles/files/Publications/Dornan%20et%20al_,%202010_%20Is%20Auditory%20Verbal%20Therapy%20Effective%20for%20children%20with%20hearing%20loss.pdf p365

‘Tis the season for forgiveness

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Karen Lloyd AM in Hearing and deaf

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

acceptance, advocacy, Christmas, communication, deaf, family, forgiveness

 

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Soon it will be Christmas. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and spend time with loved ones. For most of us deaf people it’s also the season for great angst – as I wrote last year:  https://lifeanddeaf.net/2015/12/09/christmas-angst-is-coming-to-town/

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about acceptance and forgiveness.

When I was in my thirties, a friend, let’s call him Sam, hurt me deeply and I struggled to deal with my emotions about it. Sam wanted to meet to discuss what had happened but I just wanted to shut him out. During a conversation with a mutual friend, let’s call her Jane, I asked: “What does forgiveness mean?”

Sam could, I told her, tell me he was sorry, he could say sorry a thousand times but it wouldn’t change what he had done and it wouldn’t remove the emotions I was feeling.

Jane said she thought forgiveness meant giving Sam the chance to talk things over with me, sharing with him what I was feeling and the effect his actions had on me; it was about allowing him into my confidence, not shutting him out.

I thought about it and agreed to meet Sam and we talked for a long time. Sam struggled to understand my point of view because he genuinely was sorry and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t let it go, but he listened. And finally he said: “I understand now. I have lost your trust. And I need to work to rebuild that trust.”

Sam and I are still friends. Our friendship is different and both our lives have changed, but we are still friends.

From that experience I learnt a lot about forgiveness, lessons that have made my life much richer.  But forgiveness and acceptance mean different things in different situations and relationships and I’m still learning new things about it.

My father died a few months ago.  He was a lovely man in so many ways, kind, generous, tolerant, and I loved him deeply, just as I know he loved me. But ours was not an easy relationship simply because I am deaf and communication was difficult. As is common with many fathers of deaf children, he largely left the communication to my mother. 

After I left home, my parents often visited me wherever I was living. Most years I spent some time, usually in the summer, with them at the Far North Queensland sugar farm where I grew up. I went swimming with Mum and watched the cricket with Dad. It was the only time I ever enjoyed cricket. 

As we got older, Dad and I both made more effort to communicate more directly with each other but our communication was always more limited and never as easy as that enjoyed between him and my siblings.

Of course I could say that he could have learned to sign, as could all of my family. I just never expected that of my childhood hearing family. I was born hearing and became deaf when I was eight, after I had already acquired fluent English and speech.  As happens for so many people, the ‘experts’ told my parents not to let me sign. When I did learn Auslan in my twenties my mother asked one day if it would help if she too learned.  Although touched and grateful for her offer, I told her not to worry about it. She and I already had quite easy communication. I just always accepted that signing isn’t part of my relationship with my parents and siblings.

My father was 88 when he died and I was almost 60.  For others an easy man to know, he was much loved within our large extended family and his local community. Throughout my life I thought a lot about our relationship and I grieved for it, I wished we could be more close.

A few years before his passing, I realised that our relationship wasn’t going to change, there wasn’t really anything either he or I could do to change it.  It was what it was. 

I also realised that I actually did have a good relationship with my father and I did know him well.  My knowing him was based less on verbal communication and more on observing, doing, sharing and just hanging out together. 

And so I reached acceptance and forgiveness – of both him and myself – and I was able to let my father go with love. Now I grieve only that he is no longer here. This will be our first Christmas without him.

The feeling of not being close to or knowing our parents well, especially our fathers, seems to be common among deaf people who grow up in hearing families.  Recently I was discussing this with a deaf friend who told me that at her father’s funeral her siblings shared stories about him that she hadn’t known before.  One day she mentioned to a mutual acquaintance, a very down to earth deaf woman, that she’d recently been to her father’s funeral. Before she could say anything about it, this understanding woman said kindly: “And you learned something.”

This experience with my father has changed how I think about these things. I understand that many (but by no means all) deaf people do experience very difficult relationships with their parents. But I wonder now if we give too much emphasis to the verbal communication aspects and see things too much only from our own point of view.

I do believe that most parents try to do the best they can for their children. They don’t always get it right or get good advice from experts or the support they need.  It can be incredibly hard and heartbreaking for them.

I wonder now if perhaps more of us would find acceptance and forgiveness, be happier and healthier if we tried to understand our parents’ experience as well as our own and if we treasured more the non-verbal and doing aspects of our relationships with them. 

Every relationship is different, as is every acceptance and forgiveness. Some things we accept and forgive without fully realising it. For people who are regularly treated poorly, this can become something we do automatically as a form of self-preservation. It isn’t good for our own health to get upset about every insult and injustice.

In the early 1990s when I was a librarian at the State Library of NSW I was out one day with my hearing boss. I had purchased my ticket for some forgotten event and was waiting nearby for Val to buy hers.  Preoccupied with people-watching, I was startled when Val joined me, all upset. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I just told that ticket seller off,” she said. “Did you know how rude she was to you when you were buying your ticket and had trouble understanding what she was saying?”

“Oh that?” I said. “That stuff happens all the time.”

“Really? I had no idea! How can you put up with it?” she asked, shocked.

“You just do,” I said. “If I got upset about it every time it happens I’d be a nervous wreck.”

We might turn a blind eye to people who are rude to us because it’s not worth the emotional energy of trying to – usually unsuccessfully – challenge it. Sometimes forgiveness means letting go and moving on.

But it doesn’t mean giving up and putting up with all the terrible ways that people and society often treat us.  

It was Val who one day told me that in every difficult situation we always have three choices: accept it, change it, or leave it. I have often used this bit of wisdom in all kinds of situations and generally I find it to be true.

But sometimes it isn’t practical. Not for us deaf people.  Some things are unacceptable, leaving the situation may not be in our best interests and changing it is difficult because change depends on other people changing their behaviour.

This is true of things like abuse of our rights, poor education, prejudice, discrimination in the workplace, exclusion from the community.  In these situations we can adopt a form of acceptance and forgiveness (“for they know not what they do”) while we do the long-term work of changing it. 

Many deaf people find this very hard to do. So many are angry. So many are terribly hurt and damaged by the treatment we receive. Quite understandably they rail against the injustice and demand their rights in ways that achieve little if any change. And so many struggle with mental health issues.

For 30 years I dedicated my life to advocating for the human rights of deaf people. I loved it and am proud of the advances I helped achieve. In many ways life is better for us now than it was 30 years ago. In some ways it isn’t and some of our achievements are being eroded, especially by mean-spirited governments. There are still a lot of ignorant and uncaring people out there and we still have a long way to go.

I believe now that our society is not yet mature enough to accept deaf people, or indeed disabled people in general, as equals.  Hopefully one day it will be, and it’s important that we all continue to work towards this, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Have I given up now that I’ve retired from active full-time advocacy? No way!  I still believe advocacy is vital and I still help Deaf Australia a bit behind the scenes, still support and encourage friends in their advocacy efforts.

But I believe that we all need to find some kind of acceptance and forgiveness that makes it easier to live our lives in positive, healthy ways.  I believe that we all spend too much energy focussing too much on the hurt and the negatives. We need to change how we think.  We need to focus more on the positives in our lives.

The negatives will still be there and we will still need to work at changing them.  But when we accept, forgive and count our blessings (and we all have some) we are stronger and more able to cope with the negatives.  We are more able to keep them at a distance and live our lives with health and happiness.

A good place to start is with our own families this festive season. We could do what Sam and I did all those years ago. We could allow them into our confidence, talk things over with them, share with them what we feel and listen to their point of view. We might be surprised by what we learn.

Or if that’s too hard, and for many people it will be, we could do what I did with my father. We could think about how love takes many forms. It’s not all spoken. Much of it is based not on verbal communication, but on observing, doing, sharing and just hanging out together. 

I wish you all a joyous and forgiving Christmas!

 

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