Interview Highlight: Louisa Willoughby - Monash University

Published Apr 15, 2025, 11:00 PM

Sam catches up with Associate Professor Louisa Willoughby, senior lecturer in linguistics at Monash University, who is here to tell us about a series of workshops taking place later in the year for practitioners of Auslan to skill up in tactile Auslan for the deafblind community.

Louisa Willoughby is a senior lecturer in linguistics at Monash University. Her work focuses on the intersecting areas of language and identity. Language policy and service provision for speakers of minority languages, particularly in health and education settings. She's here today to talk to me about tactile Auslan and a series of workshops and modules. Monash University will be running later this year as part of a short course to upskill Auslan interpreters to better service the deafblind community. Louisa, welcome to Talking Vision. Thank you very much for your time today.

Thanks, Sam.

Now, today we're here to talk a little bit about tactile Auslan, as well as some accredited training that's coming up in the pipeline over the next little while. But before we get into the details around the training, let's jump in to the details around tactile Auslan itself. So could you give us a bit of an overview of how tactile Auslan works?

Yeah, sure. So tactile Auslan is a form of sign language used by people who are both deaf and blind, where they're putting their hands on top of the person who's signing and feeling what's being signed. But as you can imagine, that's not entirely foolproof. Sign language is like to use facial expressions a lot to tell us things, so you might furrow your brow to show that you're asking a question, or you might have a sort of happy or sad facial expression to show something of the emotional evaluation of what's going on. All of that stuff gets lost when you're just feeling a sign. And also sign languages like to use pointing a lot and direction a lot. So I might put someone in a signing space and then, you know, Bob is on my left and Jill is on my right. And if I'm signing that, I emailed Jill. I don't sign her name, I just sign in that direction. And this whole kind of working out, what's being pointed out is, of course, a daily challenge for anyone who's blind. And so things like this have to change when you're using a tactile form of Auslan, rather than what I'll just call visual Auslan, but is the sort of the normal deaf Auslan that people use.

How have practitioners of tactile Auslan gone about bridging those gaps in the past? How much sort of success has there been in terms of adding those little pieces of information in other ways and adapting the language in that way. Has there been much success in that regard?

Look, I think it's been very ad hoc. So most people who are tactile signers started life as deaf people with at least some vision and sort of learnt the visual language and then through things like retinitis pigmentosa, have lost their sight over the years and have sort of moved to this tactile way of signing. And so for both the deafblind people and the people supporting them, it's often just been very ad hoc as a learning process of what works. So there's not a there hasn't been any official training in Australia about how to use tactile Auslan with deafblind people. What's just tended to happen is people have been either employed as support workers for deaf, blind people and learnt to work with them or for whatever reasons, have been an Auslan An interpreter who's like, yeah, I'm going to give this a go. And then, you know, might build up a relationship working with and interpreting for a specific deafblind person and sort of coming up with some strategies over the years, but really, really ad hoc in terms of how people solve these problems.

And following on from that, Louisa, I think there is a really important topic around greater awareness of tactile Auslan. So I'm interested to get your perspective around the importance of raising awareness of a language like tactile Auslan and enabling people around Australia and all the world in some respects, to understand a fair bit more about it.

Yeah. And look, I think it's one of those things where awareness raising is really important to know that, yeah, it is its own skill, but also so that people realize that, oh, if I'm working with a deaf blind person and I'm not doing this stuff, or I've got an interpreter who's just an Auslan interpreter but doesn't know tactile Auslan especially well that if the deaf blind person then comes out of it a bit confused or says the wrong thing or things like that, you know, we so often judge people as just, oh, this person's a bit slow, they're a bit stupid, they're not very competent. All of these things because we assume that the communication has been flawless. But of course, if the deaf blind person is only getting half the message, they're going to have all of these problems, they're going to have misunderstandings, and they're either going to be taken seriously nor understand important information that's being communicated to them. So I think it's really important to build this recognition that, hey, you know, deaf blind people have their own ways of signing and if you do it correctly, suddenly they understand things and they can do things that otherwise are just, you know, not happening. Well.

People listening out there may be thinking now and then, um, you know, I would really like to know a bit more about Auslan and then the jump on top of that, getting into tactile Auslan, what would you say is the biggest jump from people who have perhaps learned a spoken language as a second or third language, and then that jump between the spoken language to the sign language like Auslan and then tactile Auslan. On top of that, what are the biggest things for people to be aware of as they jump in to, you know, learn the language and interpret for people out there in the deaf blind community.

Look, I think one of the things that comes up a lot with sign languages is that people, for some reason, tend to think that sign languages aren't real languages in the same way that spoken languages are. So there are lots of surveys that have been done with people who are studying sign languages at university where, you know, the majority of students will say something like, oh, yeah, you know, sign languages are really just sort of English on the hands or something like that, where, you know, of course they're totally not. They have their own grammar, they have their own word order, they have all their own different ways of doing things. And there are yeah, there are words in English that might have 2 or 3 different signs that are the same thing, depending on exactly what the meaning of the word is. And there are, of course, other words in English where you might have 2 or 3 words in English that are just the one Auslan sign. So often it's this whole getting over this mindset that, no, they are actually real languages. But then also to getting into the fact that you have to pay attention to a whole new range of articulators. So yeah, we're used to listening carefully to words and working out that, you know, P and B are different, you know, different sounds or, you know, S and Z are different sounds. But we're not used to necessarily paying attention that someone's got their finger extended, their index finger extended like they're pointing, and now they've just tucked that finger a little. And that that difference between a straight out point and a hooked point might be meaningful. And we're also not necessarily used to showing grammatical markers on our faces. So as sighted people will often have expressions of surprise or happiness or something like that. But we're not used to this idea that we might always sort of furrow our brow for a question, or always smile when we say the word happy, or when we sign the word happy. So those sorts of things are an adjustment. And then for the deafblind side of things, I think people who are both sighted and hearing often have this real sort of adjustment of just what do I need to be doing to make my signing clear? So if someone's trying to feel what I'm signing, how I need to change all of that to suddenly be a lot clearer when it's perfectly clear visually. And what do I need to include? So just like with audio description for blind people, for deaf blind people, they sort of need a sense of who's in the room, what's going on in the room? Are there people asking them with hands up, asking questions, all of that kind of stuff? And so just remembering to To include that is important and challenging for many people.

In amongst that is the need for an increased number of tactile Auslan interpreters to provide such a service like this and be able to enable people who are from the deafblind community to communicate more openly with more people and have that bridge between conversation partners when they're trying to communicate important information to one another. So let's talk a bit about that need for an increased number of interpreters.

Absolutely. And so at the moment, if you want an in-person interpreter or you normally need, of course, two interpreters because they'll swap every ten minutes or so. It's important with tactile signing. People need to swap very regularly because the pressure of sort of having someone's hands on your hands while you're signing, even if they're sort of super light and super gentle, can cause shoulder injuries if you do it for too long at a time. So to get to tactile Auslan interpreters at an event in person, we're often booking two months in advance at the moment. Whereas I can rock up and say, hey, I want a sign language interpreter online and I can normally get one tomorrow. So yeah, it's a really big skill shortage and shortage of people who can and will do this work at the moment. So very important and as you say, really important for inclusion as well because, you know, deaf blind people are doubly isolated. You know, blind people can access telephones and always have been able to and have radio and various ways of connecting with each other. And Braille deaf people have these days video phones. Deaf blind people have often had a school experience that hasn't left them with wonderful literacy. They've often become blind late in life as well. So a number of them are not really fluent Braille readers. They can't use a video phone to sign with people. They can't use a normal phone to call with people. So they're just at huge risk of being really socially isolated.

And this is where the accredited training comes in to boost the numbers of tactile Auslan interpreters around Australia. So let's get a bit of an overview of the accredited training for people out there.

Yeah. So this is something that's very, very new to Australia. And that doesn't happen in a lot of parts of the world either. So I think, you know, Norway and Sweden are two of the only places currently where people are really being routinely trained as deafblind interpreters. But what we're planning on doing is we have a four part module for the training. The first part is stuff that a lot of people will have already done, and we'll be able to get prior learning for. And that's around some of these basic introduction to deafblindness units or courses that are offered. So for example, Deafblind Victoria at the moment offer a kind of introduction to Deafblindness day. So for people who haven't already done that, we'll have some pathways for them. But many of the people coming into the course will have that basic knowledge about Deafblindness. Then they'll come to us for a two day weekend workshop of hands on training, of course, quite literally hands on, where we're working through some of these strategies and with a focus on tactile Auslan, but also looking at other ways that deafblind people sign. So for folk with Usher's syndrome. They'll often use what's sometimes called restricted visual frame signing or close signing. So what, you're really trying to hold the hands in a very tight envelope where they can still see them. And so overview of the techniques to use with all of this. Then people go out into the world for a month or two. They do some jobs working as deafblind interpreters and reflect on those. They do some readings with us and some ethics based training about some of the ethical issues in working with deafblind. And then they come back to us for a final weekend training, where we debrief around some of the stuff they've been doing, problem solve, and talk a little bit more about some of the working as a team of tactile interpreters.

Let's go into the details of how and where and when the training sessions will be delivered. If you have that information yet. I understand it's still in some ways in the pipeline, and you might not have all the details at hand as we speak, but how can people keep in touch to find out more about the sessions, if they'd like to take part and skill up in such an important area?

Yeah, excellent. So we're planning on running the weekend workshops in July and September, and they will this year just be in Melbourne. But we're talking about options to roll out better nationally in the future. So in order to come to these workshops, people do need to already hold a naati qualification as either an Auslan interpreter, a provisional Auslan interpreter or a native deaf interpreter. And if people would like to be on the waiting list or it's not so much a waiting list, but be added to the list of people who are told about the formal application process. They can do that just by emailing me. Louisa. Louisa Willoughby w g b at Monash. And we'll make sure that you're sent all the information you need to register your interest when the time comes.

Perfect. I've been speaking today with Associate Professor Louisa Willoughby, senior lecturer at Monash University. Here to chat to me today all about tactile Auslan and a short course featuring a series of modules and workshops run through Monash University on offer later this year for accredited Auslan interpreters to skill up in tactile Auslan. Louisa, thank you so much for your time today. Great to catch up with you.

Thank you.

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