FEATURE: CENTRE FOR DEAF STUDIES

LET YOUR HANDS DO THE TALKING

THE CENTRE FOR DEAF STUDIES STARTED AS A DREAM OF ONE WOMAN, BUT TODAY IT HAS GROWN INTO AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY IT SERVES.

BY UFRIEDA HO

There’s a wooden puppet hand on Professor Claudine Storbeck’s desk and the fingers are curled in the sign for love.

It’s an almost perfect summing up of what has underpinned her journey at the Wits Centre for Deaf Studies in the past two decades. The centre’s evolution over 23 years can’t be separated from her personal driving force, passion and purpose.

Professor Storbeck is director at the centre, which she started as a one-woman show. She joined Wits after leaving a teaching career of about six years at St Vincent’s School for the Deaf in Johannesburg.

One of her first decisions as director was to reach out to a friend and fellow teacher, Dr Lucas Magongwa (BA Ed 1994, BA Ed Hons 2004, MA 2008, PhD 2020). Dr Magongwa was a teacher and one of the first deaf principals in the country at the time. She convinced him to join her on the journey in tertiary education in 2002. Today Dr Magongwa is a lecturer and the head of deaf education at the university.

The centre now offers honours and masters level training and constantly raises the bar for quality education and learning focused on the deaf child’s needs. It doubles as a platform for the deaf community to define their needs themselves and to push for better services and standards.

Dr Magongwa says: “Coming to Wits to assist Claudine in the training of teachers of the deaf was a bigger contribution than focusing on a single school for the deaf – and I love it.” It was also an adjustment from teaching deaf school children to training hearing educators.

It wasn’t easy in the early days. Professor Storbeck remembers: “I had to find the soft funding for Lucas’ position initially because there wasn’t a budget for a salary at the time – no one had done something like a Centre for Deaf Studies in South Africa.”

But her can-do attitude paid off and today the centre prides itself on successfully merging academic and research rigour with outreach, support and advocacy initiatives. The centre’s “Hi Hopes” programme focuses on babies who are born deaf and on supporting their parents. “EyeBuzz” is an initiative for high school children and young adults, teaching them to use film and photography to create content and platforms to deepen engagement with the deaf community. The centre also has its own cafe, Chatterhands, on the education campus, run for and by deaf people. And there’s a burgeoning deaf arts gallery.

At its heart the Centre for Deaf Studies is about fostering equal opportunities for the deaf community and responding quickly to needs that arise.

One of the biggest needs lately has been to ensure that the deaf community has information about COVID-19. Professor Storbeck says the pandemic has brought challenges (such as trying to lip read and pick up clues in facial expressions behind a mask) but also opportunities. “The deaf community around the world was demanding not to be left out, so virtually every public information broadcast now includes a sign language interpreter. That’s been amazing to build awareness,” she says. Normalising sign language interpretation in COVID-19 public service announcements is a move in the right direction. Next is the goal to extend services at other key facilities such as police stations, healthcare facilities and rape crisis centres. The centre has been working on this through its Safe Spaces programme.

It’s about inclusion, rather than being sidelined or pitied. Dr Magongwa adds: “The deaf community wants to be supported and respected. Early identification and intervention are key. Deaf children should not be hidden and only introduced to education when they are of school-going age.”

At the Centre for Deaf Studies, based on the Education Campus, the enabling environment starts with office design. It’s light and airy for maximum visibility. Glass is used so that a deaf person can pick up visual clues. There are many gathering spots, and corridors are wide enough to ensure that two people can sign to each other uninterrupted even if a third person has to pass.

The deaf arts gallery at the centre is the pride and joy of Nenio Mbazima. He joined the centre in 2018 as a video producer. For the 20th anniversary of the centre that year, artists were invited to submit work and some of this now makes up the gallery’s collection.

Mbazima says, through signing: “The gallery means deaf people can come here and enjoy art in a comfortable space. A hearing world is not a comfortable space if you’re deaf. But the centre is a deaf world – we have more deaf staff than hearing staff.”

The artworks include photographs, mixed media and sculpture from as far afield as Congo, Canada and Iran.

There are artworks that embody deaf culture as well as deaf activism. There are pieces that show the struggle and exclusion of the deaf community and the fight that continues still for a hearing world to listen, to really open its ears. Mbazima says not so long ago, some teachers punished children for using sign language; he shows art depicting hands being slapped for signing.

“Now sign language is encouraged in schools but there are still teachers in these schools who don’t know sign language,” he says of the work that still needs to be done.

The centre is working on creating a virtual tour for online access to the gallery; it’s especially useful under lockdown restrictions.

For Professor Storbeck each new project that takes off and touches more lives is a win and testament to the resilience and talent within the deaf community.

She herself isn’t deaf. Growing up she didn’t know anyone who was deaf. But she says working in deaf education and with the deaf community was something she knows she “was born to do”.

“I remember telling my parents when I was eight years old that it was what I planned to do. I believe it’s the reason I’m on this earth,” she says.

Jumping in at the deep end all those years ago helped her keep her expectations in check. It also made her an open-hearted learner – from the first classroom she turned up in, armed only with a crash course in signing. She remembers looking at a sea of faces and feeling quite helpless. Luckily the school children took her under their wings. They taught her to sign and in doing so showed her that their world was also her world – they just needed better bridges. She has been building them ever since.