Final year Fine Art student Zoe Milner is part of the deaf community and is currently striving to achieve her dreams of becoming a creative deaf artist.
A look into her personal experiences at Nottingham Trent University will expose the strengths and weaknesses of NTU’s accommodation of the deaf community overall.
Coming to NTU from a deaf school, Zoe found herself in a new environment, one that was primarily catered towards a community of fully-hearing students.
Upon her first day in lectures, Zoe noticed that she was the only deaf student on her course, a fact that made it harder for her during her time in university.
She told Platform: “My experience joining NTU in September 2020 was one of the hardest challenges I’ve faced in my entire life.
“It was hard enough joining a brand-new institution as a deaf student, but to do so during a global pandemic was really difficult.
“Technical difficulties during my largely online-based first year meant that I really struggled to communicate effectively with my tutors, peers, and interpreters.
“The screen would sometimes glitch or freeze, meaning that I was unable to see my interpreter and therefore couldn’t understand what was going on.”
When in-person activities returned in her second year, Zoe thrived, receiving more specialist support such as modifying her writing into current grammar structure which was a great help for her grammar skills and eventually helped her to achieve a 2:1 in three of her modules.
“I feel that after the pandemic, I was really able to improve my outlook on learning, and I was able to reach for my ambitions.
“Through the time I spend in the [art] studio, I was able to communicate more and make new friends that I wasn’t able to in first year.
“To be honest, I feel like communication with people within the studio, within the NTU community is easy, because they already accept my personality.
“They always use their phone’s note app to communicate with me daily.”
She continued: “With that said, however, I don’t think there would be anything wrong with more support from students and staff.
“More specialist services and awareness towards the deaf community would really go a long way.
“This would definitely help to ease the burden off deaf students who feel like they have to work especially hard to integrate into the wider non-deaf community at NTU.”
Zoe suggests that encouraging students to learn BSL (British Sign Language) or take part in other support services could help deaf students at university.
“As an ex-president of NTU’s BSL society during 2021-22, I can assure that this society did an amazing job at teaching students to use sign-language throughout the academic year.
“I think that this is very important for them as they can use the language to communicate better with people like me, who originally feel distanced from the wider NTU community.
“I really do hope to see BSL society continue in the future, even long after I graduate this year.
“If more people use BSL, it will really help to improve the lives of deaf students everywhere.”
There are currently 10 students at NTU who are part of the deaf community.
Contribution credits: Beth Williams