Reflections of a Deaf Scholar 183
exposed to the influence of oral communication approaches that were dominant
at the time and that sometimes included negative judgments about sign language.
In particular, my parents’ loving and forward-thinking perspective has played a key
role in what I have been able to accomplish as a student and a scholar.
As an adolescent, when playing in the schoolyard gave way to socializing after
school and going to parties, I started to feel more limited in my participation.
Although I was fortunate to have some close friends, I was not able to function
in groups. This was also a drawback in class. When I was 15, I was thinking of be-
coming a doctor. After four years of Latin, I decided to major in mathematics and
science to prepare myself for medical school. When I look back on that time now,
I realize that another reason for this change in major was that in my science and
mathematics classes, the information was written on the blackboard; thus, these
classes were more accessible than language classes.
When I was 17, I attended some open days at universities. I tried to speechread
professors’ lectures in large auditoriums, which was difficult since I was sitting fur-
ther from the lecturers and there were no notes on the blackboard. At that time
I was also considering doing scientific research in laboratories, but working with
people was important to me. A friend brought me into contact with a general prac-
titioner to discuss aspects of her job. The doctor was very kind, but, unfortunately,
hard to understand. That was the end of my medical aspirations and the beginning
of a period when I felt lost. It would be a long time before I found an alternative to
medicine that I was as passionate about.
During my bachelor’s degree studies in Dutch and English literature and
linguistics, my survival strategies stopped working. Socializing was difficult; I did not
have access to student life and became more isolated. During an entrance test for
English, the professor told me that he had never heard someone speak the way I did.
My response, which illustrated the stage of my process toward deaf awareness, was
“Oh, well, I have a hearing loss. perhaps that is the reason.”
We had exams in January, and I realized that I would need notes from other stu-
dents. The people at student services did not know much about deafness, but they
were supportive and advised me on how to approach professors. English had been
a challenge for me since high school. The method of learning language through
conversation left me frustrated and clueless. My brother, who was in the last year of
elementary school when I started to learn English in high school, easily picked up
words from music and television. I practiced with my mom to memorize the vocabu-
lary that was in my handbooks and tried to apply the grammar rules. I developed my
own strategies of studying and continued to work hard at university.
In some courses, I had to look up nearly every word I encountered in the dic-
tionary. I read books from reading lists, first in Dutch and then in English. It was
incredibly time-consuming, but I worked through it and eventually acquired the vo-
cabulary that was used in my program. Grammar books were useful to me and pro-
vided a better understanding than the limited rules I had learned in high school.
Looking back, I realize that working to overcome these obstacles was what initiated
a process of deaf awareness, reflection, and solution seeking. Although my profes-
sors were understanding and supportive, it was difficult to relate to student life and