The girl who taught her school to sign, by Natalie Brookes
An original contemporary magazine interview.
Amara Wilde does not like being interviewed. She tells me this within the first minute, signing quickly while her interpreter, Joe, keeps pace beside her. ‘Journalists always want me to be brave,’ she says. ‘I’m not brave. I’m just deaf and annoyed.’
She is fifteen, and she has been deaf since birth. For most of her time at Fenwick High School she was the only pupil who used British Sign Language, which meant, she says, that she spent a great deal of time ‘watching other people’s conversations through a window’. Classmates were friendly, but they did not know how to talk to her. At lunch she would sit with a group, smile when they laughed and have no idea what the joke had been.
Eighteen months ago, she decided to change that. Not by asking the school to change, but by changing it herself.
She started a lunchtime club in an empty science lab, with a hand-drawn poster and a packet of biscuits as bait. Four people came. She taught them the alphabet, then their names, then the signs for ‘lunch’, ‘funny’ and ‘wait for me’. The next week there were nine. By the end of that term there were sixty, and the club had moved to the sports hall. Today more than 160 pupils and eleven members of staff have learned basic sign language from a fifteen-year-old who, by her own admission, ‘had no idea how to teach and just made it up’.
The effects are visible all over the school. Students sign to each other across the canteen. The head teacher now opens every assembly by signing ‘good morning’. The drama department has staged a play with a deaf main character, performed in English and BSL at the same time. When a new deaf pupil joined Year 7 last September, a group of twelve-year-olds greeted her at the gate by signing her name.
‘That was the moment,’ Amara says, and for the first time in our conversation she stops and does not sign anything for a few seconds. ‘When I started here, nobody could say hello to me. She walked in and people already knew how. That’s the whole point.’
It has not been easy. Some pupils came to the club to mock it. One teacher told her that sign language was ‘a nice hobby’. She has given up dozens of lunchtimes, spent her pocket money on printed worksheets and stayed up late filming practice videos in her bedroom. ‘People say, oh, it’s so inspiring,’ she signs, rolling her eyes. ‘But the inspiring bit is everyone else bothering to learn. I just turned up.’
Not content with one school, she is now writing to every secondary school in the county offering to help them start a club of their own. Five have said yes. She has also persuaded the local council to add signed versions of its youth event announcements to its website. When I ask what she wants next, she answers instantly. ‘A world where I don’t need a club.’
At the end of the interview, she teaches me one sign, the one for ‘again’. Then she grins and signs it to me, slowly, twice, and I realise she means that I should come back.
Amara Wilde is described as an inspiring young campaigner. How does the writer try to show this?
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