Hearing Awareness
July 17th, 2009
Exactly what is Hearing Awareness and how will it help? I posted a question on my Facebook for ideas on what could be included in a hearing awareness workshop. Some interesting comments and great ideas but most of them centred on what deaf people have learnt about their hearing colleagues and friends. Perhaps we need to ask hearing people (who have some experience of working with, or living with, deaf people) what they would like to see included in a course for deaf people to learn more about hearing people. I am thinking back to previous conversations I’ve had with hearing colleagues and they have tended to say things like “deaf people think we can hear things a mile away – actually we can’t!” (slight exaggeration there but you get the gist), “I can’t talk to you & the person on the phone at the same time”, “I get annoyed when the deaf person expects me to drop everything and focus on them” (we could argue the toss with that one) and so forth. There are some very valid points for hearing people to make and I really would be interested in what these might be (and why). Over to you!
