NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Dorothy Miles Cultural Centre

The Dorothy Miles Cultural Centre (DMCC) is a non-profit making charitable institution, named after Dorothy Miles, poet and pioneer, working with people of all ages. The Centre is committed to enhancing communications and understanding between deaf and hearing people,through social, cultural and educational activities.

These activities include British Sign Language (BSL) tuition, deaf awareness programmes,children's activity days, parent support groups, drama and poetry workshops and various fund-raising events. Future projects include Baby Signing, family sign classes and a Touring Schools Programme introducing BSL through drama. The aim is to bring deaf and hearing people together, and to increase sign language awareness among all parents and teachers of deaf children. Dorothy Miles' vision was of deaf and hearing people learning, developing and working together together.

There are about 9 million people in the UK who are deaf or hard of hearing. Not all of them, however,are members of the "Deaf Community" - people who use BSL as their first preferred language estimated at some 50,000 to 70,000. BSL users may describe themselves as "Deaf" rather than just "deaf", which means they see themselves as part of the Deaf Community.

British Sign Language, now officially recognised as a language in its own right,has its own grammar and syntax, completely different from the grammatical rules of English. It uses manual and non-manual components - hand shapes and movements, facial expression and shoulder movement. Linguists generally agree that BSL is a "topic-comment" language. For example, the question in English "What's your name?" becomes the sequence "Name you what?" in BSL. The topic of the sentence "Name you" comes first, followed by the comment, "what?".

External Links

Dorothy Miles Online (http://www.dorothymiles.org)

Results from FactBites:

Models of deafness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1807 words)
	The cultural model of deafness arises from, but is not limited to, deaf people themselves, especially pre-lingually deaf people whose primary language is the sign language of their nation or community; their children, families, friends and other members of their social networks.
	Gay culture and American deaf culture, both of whom experience the disadvantages of being minority cultures, bear resemblance to one-another in that most members of these two minority groups do not share their minority identity with their parents and cannot develop it at home.
	Deaf cultural values find abhorrent the dismantling of the residential schools since they were considered the best possible environment, the highest quality of life, in which to acquire and enrich sign language fluency and pass on deaf cultural values that serve as tools and solutions to challenges in a predominantly hearing world.

Deaf culture (1771 words)
	The determination as to one's membership in a particular cultural group is not determined by vote or election to the group by its constituent members, but by individual election to embrace the core values of the group.
	In the conceptual framework of culture, deaf culture shares its closest parallel with minority language groups, a scale of human experience much smaller than the majority culture in which it is embedded, but nonetheless, deaf culture possesses every single aspect of culture that defines cultural groups at all; minority or majority.
	In hearing cultures foreigners are expected to learn the language of the land of their residence in order to successfully assimilate into the culture.

More results at FactBites »

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