184 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
to my studies. I did not feel in control, and I was terrified of poor results. I post-
poned studying for exams and thought I would fail, but I passed with high grades.
I felt too alienated from myself and from my studies to feel proud, but my grades
opened doors. Now I could negotiate with professors to replace attendance at lec-
tures with reading books and writing papers. I loved working on my own, focusing
on a topic and exploring literature. However, these alternatives also gave me a large
workload and required a lot of energy.
In some way, I feel that I lived those years of my youth and early adulthood in a
mist (in the sense that I was circumscribed in my development), and deafness was
merely a vague feeling of knowing that I was “different” without any comprehension
of what this meant.
At that point, exhausted, I felt a strong need to take time for myself and reflect on
my deafness. I achieved good grades on my January exams and received permission
to postpone the June exams for one year. During this period, I met another young
deaf woman on the train and we started to fax each other letters (e-mail had not yet
become widespread). I started to read about deafness, language acquisition, liter-
acy, sign language, and deaf education. I knew that I wanted to work on these topics
in my master’s program.
After earning a bachelor’s degree with high distinction, I started work on my
master’s thesis, for which I researched the reading development of deaf children in
a bilingual education program. I began to relate theories to deaf studies and deaf
education topics and to write papers. During an internship at a deaf school, I came
into contact with deaf children and sign language for the first time.
This world was much more fascinating to me than the university lectures. I dis-
covered that research was a way to find answers to my questions and to acquire
knowledge that was not available in Flanders at the time. My resulting thesis totaled
365 pages, and I graduated with highest distinction as the top student of my year. In
the foreword of my thesis, I wrote that reading had always been my favorite leisure
activity but that since I had discovered the pleasure of signed communication, I was
spending more free time socializing.
I started to work at a sign language interpreting program and came into contact
with more adults and young people who were deaf. I enjoyed going out and partic-
ipating in group activities. I was hungry for Flemish Sign Language, and I remain
grateful to the deaf adults who passed on their rich language and cultural heritage
to me—we always remember those times now when we meet with each other—and
I think that these encounters and processes of knowledge exchange have been very
important in my later initiatives to “give back” to the community in the form of
workshops, documentary films, and books (see Chapters 1 and 6 for a description of
my contributions to the deaf community in Flanders and Chapter 8 for information
about my work in Africa).
However, entering the deaf world also raised many questions. I did not under-
stand why I seemed to know more about Flemish Sign Language (e.g., that sign lan-
guage was a natural language equal to spoken language) than deaf people who had
been using this language all their lives. How could it be that Flemish Sign Language,
deaf culture, and deaf history were not taught at deaf schools? I also recognized the