…and now we’re officially done with Gone2Hear part 2! Wow, that was an incredible journey.

Part 1, held on January 18th showed us the perspective of students/interns/workers with hearing loss who went abroad. Part 2 presented the wide spectrum of teachers’/university coordinators’ experiences.

After an welcoming opening of Johanna Forsberg, Unga Hörselskadade’s President and a few words from Lidia Best, European Federation of Hard of Hearing President we dived into the various topics. First, Ewa Domagała-Zyśk from The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin presented her observations on the doubts of her students, whether to go or not to go (abroad).

After that we listened to Lenka Tóthová and Jitka Sedlackova about how to support students at Masaryk University in Czech Republic.

There was also the possibility to feel inspired by role model for our community – Johanna Mesch from Stockholm University shared how it is to be a deaf researcher and e.g. how she learnt different languages (Portuguese among them, during her research period in Brazil!).

Ufff, so many things to reflect on. After short break and another cup of the coffee, we set off (mentally) to Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where Anna Nabiałek and Marta Rudnicka with dose of humour showed the language needs of their HH/d/Deaf students based on their case studies.

Then Beata Gulati as a representative of Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, showed visually amazing presentation on her research about the Globetrotters – Deaf and Hard of Hearing students and their travel experiences. She analysed why only two of her students went for Erasmus and gave many hints on how to change this situation!

Last but not least, there on the spotlight of Gone2Hear entered Bowen Tang, our President, with his 3 tips on how to get access when studying abroad. One of them was: ‘Ask questions!’. If you don’t ask, how else would you know what kind of accessibility you might get?

We feel that it was really amazing to see how many people were involved: in commenting, brainstorming and Q&A parts. Also, we have a hope that all participants of this webinar (around 50 this time, in total around one hundred!!!) carried something new with them for the future: that some of them might one day go abroad with more self-confidence.

Big thanks for Unga Hörselskadade for conducting this project and looking forward to have more such an inspirational, important discussions in public!

PS. For those who are interested, we have recordings of the webinar with captions - just let us know!