Hi everyone,

I've been following this thread with interest & wanted to jump in. I read all of the postings that come through in the daily digest but don't post often. For the last 20 years I've worked as a Teacher of Students with Blindness/Low Vision & Certified Orientation & Mobility (O&M) Specialist for the Blind. I'm also hard of hearing. I began experiencing hearing loss about 7 years ago.

While I teach a long list of skills to my students (braille, long white cane skills, assistive technology, etc.) one of the most important skills I teach them is self-advocacy! Once I began experiencing my hearing loss I knew I would need to take many of the skills that are easy to teach my students with blindness & apply them to myself as someone with hearing loss! It's interesting because I can easily name 15 resources/advocacy groups for people with blindness that I share with my students & their families along their journey in the area of vision loss, but had been having difficulty finding that many resources for people with hearing loss to support my own journey in the area of hearing loss!

A few people have mentioned HLAA meetings--definitely worth checking to see if there's one in your area! My Seattle-area monthly group typically meets online too early in the afternoon for me join regularly since I'm still teaching at that time, but I definitely take advantage of attending their virtual meetings & events when I can.

A resource that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone yet is the book that came out in 2022 called "Hear & Beyond--Living Skillfully with Hearing Loss" by Shari Eberts & Gael Hannan. A review on the cover of the book calls it "The ultimate survival guide to living well with hearing loss" & it's packed with lots of great information!

In my own search to becoming the best hard-of-hearing teacher of blind students that I could be, I finally came across a class a year ago that has been a game-changer! I live in the Seattle area, & the Vancouver Community College out of Vancouver, Canada has an online course called "Living Successfully with Hearing Loss." The class meets virtually (weekly sessions for 1.5 hours each,) & last year, I became their first international student. It's a 12-week course that covers a different topic each week. After completing the Level 1 class, I immediately signed up for Level 2. When I took Level 2, however, there were only 3 of us in the class last year, so I'm currently taking Level 2 again right now. There are 6 of us so there are more opportunities for interactions, brainstorming sessions, & being able to practice the skills that we're learning together. The courses are taught by an Audiologist, & last month she & I met to brainstorm ideas for a Level 3 course, which she's in the process of developing, so I'm thrilled that a more advanced class is in the works! The instructor invites & encourages not only people with hearing loss to register for the class, but their spouses or other family members to sign up for the class as well.

I have yet to find a class or set of classes in the States similar to these. As a teacher, I'm constantly taking Professional Development classes to support my students, so I've really loved taking different kind of PD classes (Personal Development!) to support my own well-being! I believe Lisa, the Audiologist who teaches these courses, mentioned that she will NOT be teaching spring 2024 classes so that she can focus on creating the Level 3 course materials, but I would still recommend checking out the VCC website to keep tabs on when the classes will be offered again in the future, if you're interested. The main page to the Vancouver Community College website is https://www.vcc.ca/

Here's the description of the Level 1 Class from the VCC website:
"This course promotes skill development and attitudinal change towards communicating with a hearing loss. Participants, including individuals who have hearing loss and their partners, reflect on how hearing loss impacts communication. The course allows the students the opportunity to create more effective personal communication, to identify and select communication strategies and tools, to increase self-confidence levels, and to learn to self-advocate. The students practice speechreading; they detect differences in mouth movements, discriminate and identify visual aspects of speech, and incorporate visual information with what they hear with the goal of improving personal communication."

Learning to change my attitude & focus on communication strategies with regard to my hearing loss has been so beneficial after taking these classes. I think one of the reasons I was tempted to post here was after seeing the initial title of this thread: "Dealing with a Spouse..." Every time this thread pops up in my inbox, I cringe a tiny bit because my first thought goes to attitudes, advocacy, & strategies around communication that we've talked about in class. Instead of trying to "deal with someone with hearing loss," wouldn't it be helpful if we reframed that to something along the lines of "supporting someone with hearing loss?" I think every single one of us, with hearing loss or not, would prefer to be "supported" rather than "dealt with" by our friends & family, & anyone else we need to communicate with as we go through life!