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On the Way project preserves Sign Language
Our Lives & Signs project - what we achieved
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Our Lives & Signs project - what we achieved
Location: North Tyneside
What was achieved by the successfully completed Our Lives & Signs (On The Way) project, and the lasting effects it has had in the community.
By investigating and recording on film the distinctive culture of people who communicate through British Sign Language, this project has created a valuable resource and helped to save and preserve an aspect of British culture that would otherwise have been lost.
Whereas spoken language has traditionally been written down, preserving its changes and developments across the years and generations, the only way to record BSL accurately is to film someone actually signing.
This was for many years impractical or prohibitively expensive, so that the cultural record for deaf people has many gaps and often relied on interpretations because the original communication was not available.
With professional help, the On The Way project filmed signing by people across the age range, including some in their 90s, who had used British Sign Language their whole lives, and whose experiences were radically different from those of young people in the 21st century.
The project enabled the deaf community to do something positive towards bridging the inevitable gap in culture between 90 and 19 year olds, and to illustrate an aspect of Deaf history. The older generation were very happy to share their BSL signing, and younger people were interested to discover how radically different their own signs are, reflecting the enormous changes that have taken place in technology and society.
The results - on DVD, CD-ROM and video, with accompanying script - were made available through museum and library archives and various projects supporting and working with culturally deaf people. The group also booked two separate slots to use the 700-seat cinema at the Playhouse in Whitley Bay for public screenings, one in the afternoon to encourage schools to come in.
The project became very wide-ranging, involving a lot of people in doing little bits of different things, and forged ongoing partnerships between services, creating a much better understanding of each other’s role in the community.
The group continued as an alliance between members of the Deaf Issues Group and people from other agencies who were involved in the LHI project. While creating the DVD, they produced a lot of material that wasn’t used and felt it would be a shame to waste it, so they planned to create more similar material.
They also hoped to continue identifying events and people that merit being recorded on film, enabling deaf people to create a cultural record through direct communication, and not have to rely on interpretations.
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