EYE-OPENING EXHIBITION
Thom Collegiate students view hearing world through a different lens in The Deaf Forest
In a downtown Regina art gallery, a dense forest of painted burgundy, brown and blue tree trunks is interlaced with ribbons of text. her … at … eeth … u hav … ha hush … e al … ll do … ut … ff … eir … ils w …a … rvi … nife. ck fell … own and … roke his crow …
It’s a struggle to fill in the blanks of these disjointed fairy-tale verses:
Grandmother, what big teeth you have. Husha husha, we all fall down. Cut off their tails with a carving knife. Jack fell down and broke his crown.
This area of the art installation is called the hard-of-hearing forest, and it’s a metaphor for life as experienced by the students in Thom Collegiate’s deaf and hard of hearing program.
As the artistic collective Deaf Crows, 11 high school students created The Deaf Forest, an art exhibition on now at Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery.
“It’s tough because you struggle with studying and understanding language and missing words,” said Grade 11 student Fatima Nafisa.
Her voice was but a whisper, her hands in constant motion, as teacher Michelle Grodecki interpreted Nafisa’s sign language.
“We’re trying to tell people what’s going on inside our heads,” said Joanne Weber, a teacher who guided the students in the project, along with artists Chrystene Ells and Berny Hi.
“You’re going to see all that confusion,” said Nafisa. “There’s words that are missing, you are going to feel angry and you’re going to be like, ‘What is going on here? Why is that there? I don’t know what that means.’”
The Deaf Forest is an eye-opening exhibition for a hearing person.
The section dubbed the hearing forest opens with jagged black and white trees, signifying a potential for danger and hurt, said Weber, “because of the inability to hear and also the lack of comprehension.”
The trees are trimmed with socalled “dead faces,” blank white masks. Beyond, there is a wall of photos, close-ups of hands in pockets, crossed arms and hands blocking mouths.
These are all hindrances for deaf people who read lips, or communicate with the expressive American Sign Language (ASL), a body language using animated facial expressions and hand gestures.
“Part of the ASL grammar involves facial expression,” said Weber, “so when the faces are dead, we lose a lot of information.”
“If you watch hearing people talk to each other, they’ll start a sentence and then they’ll turn and walk away,” said Ells, “and that doesn’t work in the deaf community. You have to finish your sentence while you’re making eye contact.”
The Deaf Forest is on through Oct. 29 at the Dunlop Art Gallery, in the Regina Public Library’s Central branch.
Tour the exhibition with teacher Joanne Weber on
Oct. 14, 1:30-3:30 p.m., followed by a presentation on the historic deaf settlers of Lipton. See the students perform during a deaf poetry slam at the Regent library branch, Oct. 18, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
“When you’re communicating (with ASL), things just seem so much more alive in your communication,” added fellow artist-inresidence Hi.
“It makes me think maybe even in the hearing world we should be connecting more.”
Weber has struggled all her life as a deaf person in a hearing world.
In her 2013 memoir The Deaf House, Weber describes the 200304 school year, her first as a teacher at Thom: The students could barely communicate. Some refused to sign because they disliked the Signed English that the interpreters used (a more difficult sign language than ASL). Most didn’t know how to sign at all, as they’d been brought up to hone their speech.
Fourteen years later, many of Weber’s students are immigrants — Nafisa being one of them.
“They have grown up essentially language-less, so you’re starting from scratch,” said Weber. “You’re starting from learning their homemade sign, and then slowly replacing their homemade sign with something a bit more standard so they can make themselves understood in the deaf community.”
“I look at the students now and they seem to be lacking in communication skills, they seem to be quite passive, not knowing what to do,” said deaf elder Allard Thomas, who works with the students at Thom.
The almost-71-year-old attended the R.J.D. Williams School for the Deaf, a boarding school in Saskatoon that immersed students in a deaf community.
Students today are “very different from the deaf school where we grew up,” Thomas said, his signs vocalized by interpreter Weber.
“We have so many students that enter high school who have had very little access to sign language and then they kind of find their community and it’s like, ‘Wow, this is where we want to be,’” said Grodecki, who began teaching in the Thom program in September.
“And we have hard-of-hearing kids who are oral, they speak, but they also want that ASL to be able to communicate with their deaf peers, but also to add understanding.”
An ability to communicate has fostered community among the students, propelled by their artistic work.
The students bonded as they began to conceive the Deaf Crows theatre production in 2015, the same year the school division’s three programs for deaf students were amalgamated and centralized at Thom.
Talking about their experiences of bullying, exclusion, sadness and isolation growing up, they realized their shared experiences.
That seed has grown to the point that now the students greet each other at the start of the school day, and ask each other questions.
The last line of the play is “we are not animals anymore.”
“They’re coming out of a state where they almost felt like they were not human,” said Ells, “and now they’re being seen as human beings and they feel like human beings.
“Deaf kids don’t really have that cultural experience of incidental learning,” added Ells: They didn’t grow up hearing their parents’ conversations; they didn’t have an immersive socialization.
“They’re starting to have these understandings of social interactions that they didn’t have.”
Nafisa spent three years in mainstream elementary school classes, after moving to Regina from Bangladesh.
When she entered Grade 9, “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy. All of these students here are deaf?’ I had never known that there were that many deaf people,” said Nafisa. “I started to really feel like I was finding out who I was.”
She started to learn sign language and interact with her classmates.
“Then we realized that all of the students, we all shared the same feelings and the same experiences about what happened growing up with a hearing loss and it just empowered me,” said Nafisa.
“I felt, ‘Wow, I am the same as everyone else, we all have that same experience,’ so I started to understand that it was OK to sign.”
The Deaf Forest began last November as Weber instructed the students to create abstract art, informed by their feelings about being deaf.
Instead of abstract pictures, though, they drew trees. Rocks and rivers too, but mostly trees.
Trees in the hearing forest are black and white and bleak. Those in the hard-of-hearing forest are murky and crowded.
There is but one tree in the area called the deaf forest. It is big and bright, made of quilted fabric, with paper flowers blooming on its multi-coloured branches. It was painstaking to create, involving 10 days of sewing in Weber’s garage.
It’s “an environment where communication is not such a struggle,” said Weber.
Also within the deaf forest, there are drawings of ASL hand signs and splatter paintings by students in the Henry Janzen School elementary program for deaf and hard of hearing students.
The message beneath a colourful crow on the wall reads, “I feel so poetry when I paint my feel.”
It is not grammatically correct English, nor is it ASL phrasing, said Weber, but something between two languages — and a nice sentiment.
“When you have full access, you can come alive,” said Weber. “Here, they can learn.”
This is Mustafa Alabssi’s experience in the community.
“I entered the deaf forest and wow! It was just so amazing, there’s vocabulary and language,” said Alabssi, a newcomer from Syria, avidly signing to Grodecki.
“So in here you see these trees and it’s so welcoming, you enter, the deaf community embraces you and gives you things you need.”
Grodecki agreed. She was welcomed the same way as the mother of a deaf son. In that capacity, she said The Deaf Forest is a “powerful” experience.
“Before we found out (Oscar) was deaf, we always wondered, ‘Why doesn’t he respond to us? He never laughs, he never does anything.’ Well, when the kids explain their experience, then we go, ‘Oh yeah, my hearing world was pretty boring to him.’”
Even after learning of her son’s hearing loss, “we expected that if we just talked louder, or slower, that he could hear what was happening.”
Now, Grodecki, her husband Nick and Oscar’s twin brother James all sign.
Making art has improved the students’ ability to communicate with their families, in part because their projects have opened up a conversation.
“They’re able now to tell their families and their friends how they really feel,” said Weber, who speaks from experience.
“When I wrote my book called The Deaf House, (my parents) were shocked, they said they had no idea what it was like … what kinds of challenges in the community I go through.
“So the big thing about Deaf Crows last year was the parents just were shocked, the same way my parents were shocked. They just really didn’t know what their kids were going through.”
Nafisa said art has helped give her a voice.
“Now I’m having huge, long conversations with my family because art has really helped me to understand my life and understand my problems,” she said. “Art really helped me to improve my confusion. I was able to learn about colours and using those colours helped me to learn vocabulary.”
“Arts is a passageway, it’s a portal to deeper thinking, to better knowledge,” said Wendy Peart, curator of education and community outreach at the Dunlop Art Gallery. “It has a way of expressing things that cannot always be said in words.”
The coursework overlaps, with students obtaining credit for English along with art or drama as different curriculum outcomes are met.
“It’s sort of across-the-curriculum approach,” said Weber, and a different approach to deaf education.
When the R.J.D. Williams School for the Deaf closed in 1991 due to lack of funding, there was already a push to integrate deaf children into mainstream classrooms.
In those classrooms, students had interpreters to help them, taking notes and translating the spoken lessons. That still occurs today, as some students at Thom spend about half of their time outside of the deaf classroom.
Like Weber, they “faithfully” wear hearing aids or cochlear implants.
But having interpreters didn’t help the students build community.
As Weber wrote in The Deaf House of her 2003-04 class: “Those kids do not share anybody. They want undivided attention from me or the interpreters. … They won’t talk among themselves. They won’t converse in a group.”
Further, the interpreters weren’t present during social situations with hearing students.
Weber knows the importance of having a deaf community, as she lacked it through much of her life.
Growing up in Wilkie with two supportive parents, both of whom were teachers, Weber was a “mainstream” student. Wearing a hearing aid, she can hear some sounds. She can speak. She learned to read lips.
But it was such a chore to sit in class, where she was bored and unable to hear anything. She ended up teaching herself a lot of what she knows, even through her first three university degrees.
“My approach to deaf education is about building community, because the community will provide that information,” said Weber.
“Socializing is very important in the deaf community,” said Thomas. “But the mainstream kids don’t have access to that additional knowledge.”
Hearing people can learn easily, picking up information in random encounters.
“That’s not how deaf people learn,” added Thomas. “Deaf people are not hearing people that can’t hear very well. We think differently, we learn differently, and we learn mostly through community.”
“We are very much shaped by what we can’t hear,” said Weber. “Our bodies are reacting and responding in different ways; our hearts and our minds are thinking and processing in different ways.”
Misperceptions about deaf people are problematic, said Weber, “especially when you’re dealing with people who are making decisions about education.”
“They make decisions about us without even talking to us, so we’re saying, ‘Whoa-whoa-whoa, you need to listen to us, and we have our own solutions to things,’” she added.
“I think the government needs to know that sign language can lead to better English,” said Thomas, who taught ASL for about 40 years. “There’s too much language deprivation when you emphasize speech only. Also social deprivation, communication deprivation, is much worse.”
The recent cancellation of a Regina Public School Division communication preschool program for deaf children, due to lack of provincial government funding, is a “huge, huge issue,” Weber added.
“When you don’t have a full access to language, then you develop cognitive deficit. So, basically, the government has decided to destroy little kids’ brains by withholding the funds for the preschool,” said Weber.
Saskatchewan’s 28 school divisions reported that 256 students required support for hearing loss in 2016-17.
This school year, the education ministry is providing school divisions with $277.5 million in supports for learning funding, which is meant to fund staff and programming in areas ranging from English as an additional language, to counselling, to physical therapists, to community engagement initiatives, to deaf and hard of hearing programs.
Weber hopes that The Deaf Forest will open people’s minds about deaf people.
“We’re not just a bunch of weird people that deserve a lot of pity and support,” she said. “We are people who have the ability to do so many wonderful, amazing things, but if you’re not going to give us language, you’re going to pay later for that, big time.
“You’re going to have problems in the justice system, the health system, social services and education — people will be paying through the nose.”
“We want to share with you the world, because we see the world a little bit differently,” said Alabssi.
“There’s more to life than words and there’s more to who I am than being able to give you words. I want you to enter the gallery and see that deaf people can do the same as everyone else and that we are able to help you as well.”
Opposite the hearing forest’s grim outlook, cut-outs of colourful birds are stationed along a wall, Weber said, spelling hope.
“There’s always potential for more language. Birds will fly anywhere … There’s always the unexpected.”
We’re not just a bunch of weird people that deserve a lot of pity and support. We are people who have the ability to do so many wonderful, amazing things ...