Subject Code/Name: EDUC20076: Auslan and Visual Communication Workload: 5 days, 9:00-4:30 with a lecture in the morning, workshops till 3:30, and then a tutorial in the afternoon that reflected on everything from that day.
Assessment: 1 x 'Practical Project' equivalent to 1500 words + a 500 word written explanation; 1 x Essay (2000 words) based on one of three topics
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, just audio which was unfortunate because you missed out on the live interpreting that accompanied each lecture, but was still a useful resource when prepping for assessment.
Past exams available: No exam for this subject.
Textbook Recommendation: None, officially, but
Johnston & Schembri's book is worth a read, and the LMS had a bunch of pdfs that were useful for the second essay. You'll also be using
this a lot
Lecturer(s): Various.
Year & Semester of completion: July 2015
Rating: 4.1 Out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: H1
Comments: First of all, this is a winter intensive that runs over the course of one week with the two assessment pieces due (two weeks and seven weeks, respectively) after the end of that week. It was kind of a pain to come in five days a week when you live as far away as I do, and I was totally exhausted by the end for reason's I'll go into later, but it was still very enjoyable.
I'd also like to note that this is only the second time this subject has been run, so most of my major gripes can be chalked up to teething problems regarding assessment and coordination. Also, just based off
an earlier review as well as what I heard from the tutors, this subject has already changed substantially for the better, and they really value student input. Aside from the regular SES feedback, we were also encouraged to fill in other surveys and written evaluations, and a lot of the tutors were very open about receiving constructive criticism for future cohorts. Given how much they've already improved, I have no doubt it'll only get better since there's a team of highly intelligent and highly committed, interesting people behind this subject.
On to details... I'll explain the days' schedule first, and then go into assessment later.
The first day we had two lectures in the morning, though the first was mostly admin and outlining what the week would entail, so the second was where we learned about the basics of signed communication. A huge plus in the lectures was that, because most of the workshop leaders and staff were deaf and only a few could lip read, every lecture was interpreted live by a signer at the front of the room, so we all got to watch the process of interpretation unfold. This went in both directions too; sometimes the lecturer would be deaf and would sign to an interpreter sitting in the front row, and the interpreter would have a mic that'd be broadcast throughout the room. Other times the lecturer would speak, and the interpreter would face the audience while signing.
Spoiler: I find translation to be incredibly fascinating, so my enjoyment of this subject was significantly bolstered by being submerged in all this interpretation
After that we would be split into our tute groups for the rest of the day. The whole cohort was made up of 175 people with about 25 people in each tute. Most of the afternoon would comprise of 'workshops' where one person would come in and go through a concept like 'deaf culture' or 'deaf protocols.' There were a heap of interesting things that took a while to get used to, like if someone is signing to you through an interpreter, you are supposed to look at the person who's signing to be polite, not the actual interpreter. The same goes for questions, so if I'm communicating with a deaf person via an interpreter, I would just say aloud 'what would you like for dinner' instead of directing my speech at the interpreter like: 'can you ask him what he wants for dinner?' Even simple things like using the word 'deaf' instead of 'hearing impaired;' a lot of us thought the latter was more respectful, but apparently 'deaf' is a lot more inclusive than the negative connotations of the word 'impaired.'
Anyway, we'd have three workshops per day, but they'd alternate between the different tute groups so although everyone would have completed the same tasks by the end of each day, you wouldn't have done them in the same order as everyone else. The most interesting thing about the workshops though was that they were almost all run by a deaf person, and there's only occasionally be an interpreter in the room. This wasn't explained to us at all really, so our first session was super confusing, but a seriously effective way of teaching.
One of the things you'll learn quite quickly about deaf communication is that it's not about memorising hundreds of hand signs and just spelling everything out - much of it comes from contextual clues, facial expressions, and body language (which is why, if you've ever seen an interpreter on TV during an emergency broadcast or anything, they're always highly expressive and gestural. Simply making the hand signal for 'there is a fire nearby' with no other bodily movement whatsoever would actually be really confusing for a deaf person, since things like emotion, urgency, and necessity are most effectively communicated through the whole face and upper body.) Going into the subject, I didn't know many signs beyond some basic Makaton, and most of the people in our course had little to no experience interacting with deaf people either. But you'd be surprised how much can be communicated without sound.
Our first workshop was about politeness protocols, which was mainly based on the different ways of attracting the attention of a deaf person. We'd all just wandered into the class and our workshop leader waved and invited us all to stand in a circle. Then, he wrote the word 'sports equipment' on the board, turned to us, and pretended to mould an invisible ball of clay into a golf club, then mimed hitting a golf ball. He then moulded the club back into an invisible ball, and handed it on to the next person in the circle. They had to follow suit (which took us a few moments to work out) by presenting their own gesture (eg. stretching out the clay to form a long, thin rope, then pretending to skip, or flattening the thing into a discus and pretending to toss it to someone on the other side of the circle.) By the time it went all the way around, the topic changed to something like 'children's toys' or 'kitchen utensils' and the game carried on. All of this occurred in total silence, and the only way we worked out what was happening was through purely visual means. There were a few kids who didn't get it, and admittedly there were a few drop outs after that morning who just found the whole experience too weird, but I was completely fascinated by how it all unfolded.
So we soon worked out that the whole workshop would be delivered in a combination of gesturing and signing, since many signs in Auslan are fairly intuitive (eg.
bus looks like someone turning a bus' steering wheel;
forget is like taking an idea from your mind and throwing it away, etc.) If there was anything particularly difficult to get across, the workshop leader would signal for one of the interpreters to come in and help us out for five minutes, but aside from that, we had to make do on our own. For instance, we had another activity where we had to silently converse with others on our table and find out their names (we had finger-spelling guides like
this one ) ages, majors, and interests all without any spoken communication. Our workshop leader for that activity happened to only be partially deaf, so he could make out a low murmur when people spoke even though he couldn't hear exact words, meaning we couldn't get away with just muttering to one another
Other workshops included a 'useful phrases' seminar where we got a crash course in about 50 key expressions; modifying signs to express adjectives (eg. if you make the sign for 'apple' while wrinkling your nose, it means the apple is disgusting, whereas if you make the sign with exaggerated hand gestures and blown up cheeks, it means it's really big;) and considering what barriers there are for deaf people in society, the workforce, relationships etc. A highlight here was that at some time in each workshop, an interpreter would come in and the workshop leader would spend about ten minutes telling us about their lives, so we got to hear about the experiences of people who had become deaf in late childhood but were surrounded by hearing friends and family, so often felt isolated and alone, as well as others who were deaf from birth and born to deaf parents, so felt at home in deaf culture but often found it difficult to communicate with new people. There were also quite a few interesting and rather tragic stories of discrimination and bullying; the one that surprised me most was in relation to hearing aids and how deaf children who don't want to learn to speak or have their hearing partially restored are considered failures by mainstream education systems. We spent a lot of time hearing about and later discussing how deaf children are raised and how technology can aid deaf people.
We also had the chance to ask questions through an interpreter, which was a bizarre experience because you're not just communicating automatically like you would with anyone else, but instead start to try and reconfigure your speech so it's as logical as possible and so that the interpreter can communicate it as easily and unambiguously as possible.
The personal experiences really do open your eyes to just how reliant our world is on sounds though. Like, one of our workshop leaders told us about being on the London Underground when there was a terrorist incident, and because he was alone and didn't have anyone to sign/explain what was happening, all he could do was watch people listening to the intercom and then freaking out or running away.
This was made all the more apparent in a later workshop that simulated what it was like to be deaf in a hearing world by placing us in situations where complex signing was taking place and we had no idea how to react. For instance, one of the exercises involved a group of five of us being ushered to various stations around a room with actors playing different roles, one of which was a man sitting at a table who promptly launched into rapid signing, then looked to us for a response. We all just kind of sat there perplexed, shrugging, or trying to make the sign for 'could you repeat that please?' which we'd only learnt the previous day. Then another one of the workshop leaders would come around and start conversing with the man, and we could infer from the gestures that he was frustrated with us and telling her that we were dumb. She nodded, and then signed something to us which was too quick for us to interpret, so we all just sat there wanting to understand and yet being so unable to.
Other stations involved us trying to take out a bank loan, trying to book a table and order food and drinks, and being called into what I think was a principal's office where we were being disciplined for doing... something wrong. Then at one or two random intervals all the leaders would stand up and start freaking the hell out, wildly gesturing in different directions standing at different corners of the room and signing things with panicked expressions. Some of them would occasionally make a sign that seemed like a beckoning gesture, so some people would hesitantly move towards them while the rest of us just stood around dumbfounded.
It was later explained that this was the equivalent of a fire drill, so on one side of the room, people would be making signs like 'fire,' 'danger,' and 'run away; don't come here' while the others would be signing 'safety,' 'escape,' 'clean air' and 'firetruck,' but in our confusion, a couple of people meandered into the 'fire' zone since none of us knew what was going on
Obviously this was all for the purposes of demonstrating the isolation and confusion that many deaf people face, and most of us worked out quite quickly that we weren't meant to understand what they were saying. But after all this was over and we got to communicate with the leaders through interpreters, it was clear that this really affected some people. There was a guy in our group who said words to the effect of 'it really scared me to be so confused and have no way of knowing how to ask for help.'
For me, the immersion was amazing, though I could understand how it would put some people off the subject, so
don't be fooled! You won't just sit around learning signs in a hearing environment for a week - there's a whole lot of content crammed into this subject and it's presented in heaps of different and creative ways.
Finally, at the end of each day there'd be a one hour session with your groups tutor that would be a regular vocal discussion (to the relief of many!) where you'd talk about everything that had happened that day and get a chance to clear up any uncertainties or questions that we had. Maybe it was just because we had a great tutor, but I always found this to be a valuable conclusion after all the activities since almost every workshop would leave me with a list of several questions that we wouldn't have the time or the ability to ask in those sessions, but could bring up at the end of the day. This led to some really interesting conversations about what deaf people do when they need to call 000 (see below,) whether deaf people have words to describe non-binary genders and sexualities, and whether they can comprehend the idea of rhyming and poetry. (~that last one ended up being the basis of an essay I wrote in another subject, and is a really interesting debate if you're curious.)
Some of the workshops involved incursions and guest speakers too, like a deaf contestant from a reality TV dance show who talked about the performing arts and how deaf people can enjoy music and theatre. There was also a spokesperson from the
National Relay Service (which is a really cool organisation that allow for communication between deaf and mute people via phone) who spoke to us about technological advancements like deaf-friendly smoke alarms and doorbells.
The point I'm getting at is that this subject really isn't restricted to Auslan as a language tool, but rather looks at deafness from a broader perspective and incorporates many modes of visual communication.
The best part , for me, was the second lecture delivered by Adam Schembri who's an Auslan expert and part of La Trobe's Linguistics Department. He went through a whole bunch of misapprehensions people have about deaf languages (like the fact that they're mutually intelligible, or that they were invented by hearing people - neither of which are true) and took us through things from a slightly more analytic perspective. Linguistics isn't a prereq for this course, so he obviously couldn't go into much detail with the terminology, but having spoken to him afterwards and read some of his stuff, there are a heap of really interesting questions surrounding Auslan that he's looked into. I'm quite partial to this kind of thing, so I'd continued to research the analytic side of things more than the socio-cultural stuff, but the assessment allowed you to focus on whatever you preferred which was pretty generous.
I think the sheer breadth of the course is probably the most attractive thing though. It felt hectic, but not disorganised, though thinking back on that week now, I have no idea how they crammed in so much learning so efficiently, and again, given this is such a new subject with people coming at it from so many different degrees and levels of ability, the staff really do deserve all the commendation in the world for being able to pull this off.
Downsides: I'm going to talk about the assessment here even though it wasn't all bad, but I believe that's the main area that would need improvement before I give this subject my wholehearted recommendation.
The first task is due two weeks after the intensive week - a big improvement over having it due at the end of the intensive week like it was last year, apparently - and was by far the most vague thing we had to do. It was described as a 'Record of Learning' where we had to document the things we'd learned in a form that suited our learning style, and then write a rationale as to why we did so (??) I gathered they wanted us to make a poster or ten minute video or something, but after three or four days of fielding questions in the afternoon tute, our tutor just basically said we could write an essay if we wanted to, and to my knowledge, that's what everyone in our class did.
I figured this would be a fairly reflective piece, though we were advised to avoid the first person as a formality, but the feedback I got from that essay was mainly about how I needed more citations to strengthen my piece, especially in the written explanation where we were apparently meant to make references to 'learning theories' to justify ourselves (eg. 'Professor Soandso argues that verbal learners understand concepts best when they have to articulate them in written form; I am a verbal learner, hence I have written an essay.') This wasn't made too clear, but the marking was fairly lenient provided you expressed the points clearly and accurately. Try to incorporate as much as you can from your week's experiences though, since those who just picked a narrow focus were apparently penalised a bit.
The second essay was strictly academic with a BIG emphasis on referencing. It ended up being the most citation-heavy piece I've ever written, and I was still told to use more sources and go into more detail (despite already being over the word count
) but all things considered, it was much more straightforward than the previous one. Topics we got were:
1) Discuss some of the different ways meaning is created in Auslan including at least one area of sign linguistics in your discussion.
2) Discuss the cultural perspective of deafness and how this relates to the community and its language.
3) Compare spoken and signed languages, describing the similarities and differences.
I went with the third one since that offered the most by way of linguistic-y discussion, but as you can see they're all pretty flexible. It wasn't due until seven weeks after the week had finished though, which ended up being the fourth week of Semester 2 or so, meaning that it's best to finish this early while you still remember things than try and come back to it while you're busy with the first major round of assessment with your other subjects.
Finally, there was a hurdle requirement that wasn't marked, but was due at the end of the week, and that was a performative exercise. Now, I've always hated drama classes and being forced to "act" in front of people, but even I didn't mind this activity. Basically we got into groups and were given a fairytale (eg. ours was Cinderella) and between the ~5 of us, we had to find a way to tell this story visually. There's a whole list of things we had to try to include, like an example of a deaf character struggling to communicate, or an example of technology helping/hindering the communication process, and we had a lot of freedom in our staging. Some groups assigned each person a role and then acted out the story using occasional signing, others (like us) took it in turns to tell a fifth of the story before handing over to the next person. You don't really get credit for dramatic ability, and they advised against just getting up and signing a memorised speech; instead you have to 'establish' characters visually and doing what's called 'role switching.' For instance, my chunk of the story involved Cinderella meeting the Prince at the ball, so I'd first make the sign for 'dress' and 'pretty' and then mime walking in a really dainty way, and then have to 'switch' to the prince by altering my body language, signing 'crown' and then doing a manly-walk. Another person in my group had to portray the ugly step sisters in her part, so she'd put on a really horrific facial expression and a hunchback while making signs like 'mean' and 'big nose.' Creativity was encouraged, but so was clarity, and the idea was that we'd be performing this to some of the deaf workshop leaders as well as the rest of our class, so we had to strike a balance between incorporating the requisite amount of signing and other aspects, and the general understanding of the audience.
I got a special mention for my depiction of the pumpkin growing into a carriage, which takes me back to my primary school days of being cast as the hay in the manger for the nativity play. If I, with my hay-like acting ability can get a special mention for a performance, that tells you they're sure as hell not favouring the dramatically gifted
Also, there were a bunch of shy science/arts kids in my group who weren't super keen on either group work or drama, but you're given about two hours of class time (which comes out of the afternoon tutes) as well as optional time during the lunch break to sort out your performance, and everyone was willing to do their bit. We ended up making a google doc and trading email addresses so we could just assign bits of the story and then work on our stuff separately for time's sake, and that worked pretty well for us. The groups that were doing one big simultaneous performance had a tougher time, but everyone in our class did surprisingly well for a bunch of non-actors/non-fluent-signers/people-who'd-only-known-each-other-for-four-days.
The only other downside for me was that the final day was mostly taken up with sports exercises. This was interesting to a lot of people, especially when we were hearing from deaf athletes who told us about how sports like swimming and basketball are modified to suit the Deaf, but my feelings towards sport in general are lukewarm at best. (See:
this ) I think by that time the winter chill and long days + commute had just worn me down to the point of just wanting to nap... so much so that when I looked over all the notes I had for this subject review, I realise I'd given it a 2 overall which really wasn't fair in hindsight. Just be warned that this is a deceptively demanding subject and you will be hella tired once it's over.
I never realised how exhausting it is to just be
watching all day. You'd think, because you're always looking at
something that it wouldn't be that tiring, but when your auditory input is just cut off for most of the workshop hours, suddenly your brain has to compensate through other senses, so you're gaze has to transition from intently watching a lecturer or interpreter to one another or to something they're gesturing to and back again. That, coupled with the fact that you're essentially immersed in a foreign language environment albeit with a bit of English input means you'll probably be mentally zonked even if you've experienced learning second or third languages before.
All in all though, this was one of the most interesting subjects I've done so far, and aside from a few issues with the clarity surrounding assessment, I'd still say it's worth it if you've got a free week in mid-July, and the intelligence and competency of everyone involved leaves me in no doubt that they'll continue to improve this for future cohorts.
Bonus
it's ASL not Auslan but cool nonetheless. Also someone pointed out that this girl looks a lot like me; now I can't unsee it and it kinda freaks me out O.o VIDEO