Making Higher Education more Deaf-friendly

Through its Policy Forum, LIdIA is developing a series of position statements and papers which leverage the expertise of members of the unit to make significant contributions to policy formation and implementation in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

The Policy Forum’s inaugural project addresses the issue of Deaf students and academic staff in HEIs, making a series of recommendations about how to make HEIs more Deaf-friendly.

Dr Chris Hall, Associate Professor and Reader in Applied Linguistics at York St John , co-authored the statement and associated paper with Dr Dai O’Brien, Lecturer in BSL and Deaf Studies, and other members of the forum.

Dr Hall said: “Scholars in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics are very conscious of the widespread public misunderstandings about sign languages. BSL and the more than 130 other sign languages used around the world have the same structural complexity and expressive potential as spoken languages.

“Yet many people in the UK assume that BSL is just a mimed version of English, not appropriate for pursuing academic study.”

A distinctive feature of the LIdIA position statement and paper is that they stress Deaf people’s linguistic rights, as users of the UK’s only non-regional indigenous minority language, rather than focusing only on deafness as a disability issue.

Dr O’Brien said: “The Deaf community do not consider themselves to be disabled, but rather members of a socio-linguistic minority.  However, the lack of consideration that this is given can create many barriers to Deaf people’s participation in HE. 

“By emphasising the linguistic rights of this population we hope to re-frame the debate about access to HE and encourage HEIs to make themselves much more accessible to both Deaf students and Deaf academics in the future.”

Future projects to be tackled by the Policy Forum will cover the use of inclusive language in HEIs and the problems and opportunities of managing multilingual HE classrooms.