Listening ACCESSability

A number of people have asked us how we replicate what we have achieved over the last 18 months. How do they make a High School more accessible for those with hearing loss? How do they create student advocates, and staff who understand some of what it means to have a sensory loss?

The answer in this requires that we backtrack a little to the fall of 2021, when I had the honor of teaching a Student with hearing loss who I wanted to include more into group conversations. I’d already been sent the video here, but I wanted to learn more, so I reached out to my student’s Itinerant Teacher of the Deaf, who happened to be Tracey. We talked about a range of strategies, and I left with some tips and advice. We also continued to talk and bonded over the important topic of Universal Accessibility and Universal Newborn Hearing Screening (did you know that less than 50% of Newborns in Quebec are routinely screened for hearing loss? In the USA it’s 99%!), and we still talk about this topic to this day, and dream of a day when things change for the better.

As I started to learn and discover more, we began to talk (hypothetically at first) and implement projects together including an Instagram takeover on hearing loss, an assistive listening project in our auditorium (you can read a little about that here), featuring a student with hearing loss in our school open house videos, a whole school initiative for Better Speech and Hearing Month and more. We slowly became friends, and we realised that we work well together. Bouncing ideas off of one another was easy, and it led to new aspirations and ideas. At one point, we had a Google Keep (a great collaborative tool for lists of any kind) note which was about 25 items long of the things that we wanted to achieve or do. We also adopted the mantra of “What is Essential for Some is Beneficial for All”

By recognizing and using each other’s skillsets, me pulling on Tracey’s knowledge of hearing loss and LSL (Listening and Spoken Language) and her using my knowledge of technology, we’ve been able to effect change in ways larger than we imagined. Not to mentioned, we’ve networked (meeting with Phonak was a huge deal!) and been afforded opportunities to share our knowledge with others, be published, be featured on social media and discover new and innovative was to use assistive listening technology already commercially available.

We continue to ask difficult questions, look for solutions to small problems, and to advocate for our mantra. However, we also struggle to answer the question that we were originally asked “How do we replicate this in other schools?”. The simple answer is, you cannot I’m not sure. The hard answer is, by working on and building relationships! If you put in a lot of time and effort, and support people in getting to know one another, the students, and build relationships between and with specialists and school teams, then you will be surprised at what you can achieve through collaboration and friendship.