Yesterday, I introduced my PhD Supervisory Team. Today I wanted to introduce another wonderful source of support. This is my advisory board:
Top L to R: BSL Interpreter Kal Newby, Me, Karin Schamroth, Evelyne Mercure. Middle L to R: Julie Hare, Martine Monksfield, Tina Wakefield, Julie Hughes. Bottom L to R: Lisa Smith, Sabina Iqbal and BSL Interpreter Kathy Yeoman-Owens.
My advisory board are a rich mix of hearing and deaf professionals. We have:
- Researcher of neuroscience in deafness, Dr Evelyne Mercure.
- CEO, Julie Hughes of The Elizabeth Foundation, a charity that supports families with deaf children.
- Two deaf parents of deaf children (Lisa Smith, a deaf instructor in a deaf school and Sabina Iqbal, the manager of a sensory services team).
- Two consultant Speech and Language Therapists (Karin Schamroth, the creator of SmiLE Thearapy works in pre-school deafness in the community and Julie Hare, consultant and lead SLT for the Auditory Implant Team at ULCH).
- Three Qualified Teachers of the Deaf (Tina Wakefield, a consultant in education for the National Deaf Children’s Society; Martine Monksfield, a peripatetic ToD and soon to be the president of the British Association of Teachers of the Deaf; and Yasmena Warris, a QToD with specialist training in early years deafness).
So far, we have met twice; once in July 2020 and again more recently in January 2021. What do they advise on?
In July, we were focusing on phase one: my systematic review. The board helped to shape the extraction form for my systematic review – what information did I need to pull from each paper? They wanted me to look at the ethnicity and social economic status of the families involved. They were interested in the presence of additional needs in the papers and also wanted to know how the deaf children were being exposed to sign language (how much exposure and through what medium). All of these were added as variables to extract.
Members of the board were also engaged in my parent involvement plan and provided me with various ways to recruit hearing parents of deaf children for my PPI (patient and public involvement) group.
The meeting this month was a little different, as well having those listed above, I also had some hearing parents of deaf children join. I’ll be writing a separate post about that!