Some of you already know this, but I'm participating in Gallaudet's Peer Mentoring Certificate Program, which trains adults with hearing loss on mentoring others with hearing loss. The original idea was for mentoring adults with acquired hearing loss (i.e. people who grew up hearing, and then became... not hearing). However, as someone who grew up oral deaf and knows how complex it can be to figure out the whole d/Deaf/HoH identity thing as a young, early-career adult... I also hope to work with folks like me.

And honestly, part of the reason I'm doing this is that I need this too. I do not have this figured out. Physiology does not come with a cultural/linguistic instruction manual. And if I'm going to explore this with my students and in my research, I darn well better prepare to explore this in ways that might go beyond... um... the usual professional/scholarly boundaries. We don't ever fully separate our studies from ourselves -- we just sometimes pretend we do. In this case, the professional and personal are so obviously interlinked that I need to be extremely thoughtful about how I do and don't do them. Boundaries. They're gonna happen.

So far, we've had a weekend at Gallaudet getting to meet each other in person -- and then we meet in text chat once a week to discuss readings. The weekend meeting was super fun. The other members of my (tiny!) cohort are from all over the place, lots of diversity of experience -- all of us are really good at getting through the hearing world, and have varying sorts of involvement in the HoH and Deaf worlds. Academics, engineers, doctors, HLAA officers, fluent signers, teachers of the Deaf, careers completely not-related to ASL/hearing/Deafness, curious non-signers, FM users, CI users, hearing aid users, people who prefer captions, people who prefer lipreading, people who prefer interpreting... so much fluidity! To my surprise, I found that I can codeswitch and mediate (read: "infomally interpret") way more fluently than I'd thought... turns out that when I'm not incredibly anxious about signing (which is almost every single time I sign), my language skills increase considerably. (The anxiety bit is very much its own post; I may write it someday, I may not.)

As someone who is used to being the only non-hearing person in the room, it was definitely very, very weird (in a good way) to be in a room where there were people using so many different kinds of access. I do wish the quality of captions had been better; I was thankful for the great interpreters we had, and noticed a clear discrepancy between the quality of access provided by the two modalities (because of provider skill -- we could have had lousy terps and a great captioner, and the situation would have been the other way around). I wonder what it was like for my classmates who don't understand ASL and who were relying on captions. We all had to learn and practice advocating for our needs as the weekend went along, which -- seriously, good skill to practice, especially in the context of mentoring other people with hearing loss (we'll have to model this sort of behavior, and it starts with being able to do it ourselves).

Another good thing: when communication wrinkles came up -- which they did, because the captioners dropped things, and the interpreters got tired, and the T-coil loop didn't always work -- we stopped, we worked to fix it, we didn't just keep going and leave people out. We tried really, really hard to not just quietly tolerate it... we thanked each other for noticing, for asking. For some of us, it was a profound experience -- some people had never been thanked for that before, especially in a world where asking people to repeat, etc. is often framed as "why are you so bothersome, you annoying deaf person, asking for things?" It was a good learning opportunity for all of us. A good chance for us to practice what we preach, with all the awkwardness and "but how do we account for this delay in what we'd planned to do?" that it entails.

Our first class this fall (it feels more like a lightweight reading group -- compared to grad school, super chill!) is on hearing loss in America -- lots of historical/cultural/legal overviews. I'm going to get caught up with those readings now, since it's Sunday afternoon and I'm tired and want something light and fun to do. So we'll see where this goes! I make no promises about regular updates, but if people ask, I'm more likely to blog about the program.