Hi! We are a group of nine second year students who have spent time over the last three months learning British Sign Language (BSL) and educating ourselves about the Deaf community as part of our SSC2b project.
When we started this project in January it’s safe to say the majority of us were complete beginners when it came to BSL. We were a bit hesitant on trying to learn BSL together on an online format – especially as most of us hadn’t worked as a group together. However we found an online beginners course on BSL. This made it a lot easier to split up our learning as we could work through the ten sections of the programme at our own pace.
Learning family members and favourite animals in BSL
To ensure we were still progressing with our group work skills we decided to use part weekly meetings to revise the content we had learned individually the week before. Each week a different member of the group took lead of the revision session. These sessions quickly became a highlight of our project as it gave us the opportunity to learn more about the other members of our group while improving our Sign Language. For example we now know Rebekah has a very big family (which was a bit confusing when she was trying to finger-spell all of their names!) and everyone’s favourite animal signs (which included whale and pig!).
Revision techniques
We used a variety of revision techniques while learning BSL – some more successful than others! We found that using a quiz format was fun and engaging. Often we would surprise ourselves with how many signs we had retained from the previous week but some tricky signs were harder to remember. At the end of the course we had a final revision session where two people took an aspect of the course and revised it with the group in preparation for filming mini conversations that we hoped would show our progress over the project.
Regional variations of BSL
After filming our videos (on Microsoft teams so Covid compliant!) we sent them to our tutor to get some feedback. This feedback was invaluable and provided clarity on many aspects of BSL that the online course did not cover. It also highlighted the regional variation in BSL; the online course we had been using was English based so we were unaware of differences in signs in Scotland. For example the sign we learnt for ‘Saturday’ actually means ‘Park’ in Scotland!
For the other aspect of our project we hoped to learn more about challenges faced by the Deaf community – particularly in healthcare. We decided that creating a poster would be the most effective way of doing this. Our tutor pointed us in the direction of some initial resources, including some of her own blogs. We divided up the tasks and all researched a subtopic before collating our information together.
The topics we decided to research were challenges faced by the Deaf community in healthcare, how healthcare workers can improve accessibility for Deaf people and how COVID-19 has affected the Deaf community.
Project insights
It was insightful to research into these topics. We learned a lot not just about barriers which affect Deaf people but also how we as hearing people and future practitioners can support the Deaf community. We particularly wanted to learn about interpreters – as our tutor had emphasised their importance. We decided to focus our attention on the protocols existing in NHS Lothian and learned about how these services can be accessed. We think it’s really important to spread awareness of this knowledge to other medical students; as we were unaware these services were available.
We would really encourage anyone to try learning sign language. It’s fun and can really make a difference to many peoples’ lives. We can’t wait to keep progressing with our sign language now our project is over!
>> Check out the BSL online course
