John Walker: How we teach D/deaf to students in higher education (and how I don’t teach it)

University of Sussex is one of the several institutions in the UK that teaches Deaf Studies to undergraduate students as part of their degree.

Our students have progressed to become teachers, teaching assistants and communication support workers – it is essential that we get the language right.

Emily Howlett’s article on Limping Chicken yesterday is one of the many who have raised concerns about the use of ‘D/deaf’.

I personally have not use ‘D/deaf’ for 10 years or so, simply because it is not how it was originally defined by the author who created the term.

We need to go back to Woodward in 1975, a social linguist, who came up with this idea.

He wanted to differentiate between ‘the inability to hear’ from the ‘community of deaf people’.

At that time, the focus of academic discourse was on the lack of hearing and not so much about how people lived as deaf people; Woodward wanted to differentiate the two.

Today, we are using the same idea but in a completely different way.

We have created a duality between ‘people who live outside of the Deaf community’ and ‘people who live within the Deaf community’.

Woodward didn’t mention this at all – it is a more recent creation. At the start when we were all using ‘D/deaf’, we wanted to respect both groups and be inclusive of all lived experiences.

But then it went sour. People started asking each other “are you Deaf or deaf?” as if our identities are fixed and immovable – we had to be in one camp or the other.

It was a political message to define the extremes of our identities and draw those political lines.

This issue wasn’t just a problem for deaf people alone, but for every protected characteristic group.

The duality of ‘Gay and Straight’ ignores the fluidity of our sexual identities to be more encompassing and now described as LGBTQ+ or just Queer.

The use of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) still leans to racial assumptions and ignores the complexities of ethnicity and mixed-race groups, so ‘people of colour’ is now used.

More controversially, gender still leans towards the divisions of ‘men and women’, but people who identify as Trans(sexual/gender) and Non-Binary are calling for the separation of physiology, or a person’s sex, from the self-expression of gender.

‘D/deaf’ is the same issue. Deaf people all live differently and we need to accept that the expression of the deaf self is diverse and multifaceted, not a duality.

People who identify as Children of Deaf Adults (CODA), people who phase in and out of community spaces, people find their home in the Deaf community later in life are real experiences that can not just be ignored.

At University of Sussex (and I am aware that other institutions use the same convention), we use the following:

‘deaf’ to describe an individual or a group of individuals – e.g. deaf person, deaf people. The emphasis is that the term describes a person ‘who does not have the physiology to hear (all or in part)’.

‘Deaf’ to describe a collective group – e.g. Deaf community. The emphasis is not on individuals, but the fact that individuals can form a group with similar cultural norms, spaces and the same language.

‘Deaf’ to describe an entity – e.g. Deaf schools, Deaf sector, Deaf sports. The emphasis is that the entity is a physical and cultural asset of that community.

‘Deaf’ to describe a concept – e.g. Deaf world, Deafhood, Deaf culture. The emphasis is on our ideas and how we describe who we are and how we perform our identities.

In a nutshell, I, the author, am not qualified to determine how an individual do express themselves because the decision to take a political position is a personal one.

But I can describe what they do and how they behave in the sentences that I write. It is not a ‘Deaf person’ but a ‘deaf person who is a member of the Deaf community’ or ‘a deaf person who use Deaf spaces’. It is more elaborate and yet more respectful for the diverse expressions of the Deaf self that changes and evolves with time.

We don’t not use ‘D/deaf’ and we haven’t used it for a while now. It would be inconsiderate of me to do so because I would be pitching one group against the other and creating a division.

As an academic that should ‘do no harm’ in whatever I do, it would be harmful if I did.

John Walker is a Lecturer at Sussex Centre for Language Studies at the University of Sussex and the university’s academic lead for disability as part of their ambition for an inclusive university. The centre provides a range of undergraduate and open course programmes, which is growing year on year, in BSL and Deaf culture in Brighton, Sussex. Past projects have included, Eurosigns, Eurosign Interpreter, Signall, Hidden Histories: Intercultural dialogue, and Mapping Deaf Brighton. Deputy Chair of Signature, national awarding body for sign language, applied sign language and communication strategies. The views expressed here are John’s views and his alone, and not those of the organisations he may represent.