Farah Bader signs “I love you” for the camera. (Photo courtesy of Farah Bader)
WashU first-year Farah Bader was selected to receive the Cochlear Graeme Clark Scholarship for recipients of the Cochlear Nucleus Implant who demonstrate high academic achievement, along with Saint Louis University (SLU) first-year Grace Fleming. Both will be awarded $2,000 annually for up to four years.
The cochlear implant, manufactured by the Cochlear company, is a medical device that directly stimulates the auditory nerve for people with profound sensorineural hearing loss. Most people with cochlear implants would not be able to hear without the device.
Cochlear’s Director of Customer Engagement and Support Jill Mathis said Cochlear’s two academic scholarship programs had around 1,000 total applications this cycle.
“It’s important for us to support our recipients in positive ways, and these students just have so much potential,” Mathis said. “It’s an honor for us to continue to support their endeavors into the future.”
Bader is an aspiring audiologist and the co-founder of Deaf-i, a non-profit organization she started in high school with her brother Jad Bader, who is a junior at WashU. Deaf-i aims to raise awareness for cochlear recipients, whose experience people tend to be less familiar with.
“There’s a lot of awareness about the Deaf community, but cochlear implant recipients get the vibe that they’re both not deaf enough and not hearing enough, because not all of us sign, yet we can hear,” Bader said. “But also we’re still struggling to hear the hearing community, so we’re kind of in this isolated void.”
When she got to WashU, Bader and her brother started a student organization with the same name as her nonprofit. WashU Deaf-i seeks to carry out the educational mission of Deaf-i, in addition to building community for students with hearing disabilities on campus.
At SLU, Fleming is pursuing a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in Occupational Therapy and spends her free time volunteering with Best Buddies and Beyond Disabilities.
Fleming and Bader both spoke about the misconceptions people have about what kind of support cochlear implant recipients need in an academic setting.
Bader said that people assume cochlear implant recipients don’t need accommodations because they can hear, disregarding the increased mental energy it takes for people with cochlear implants to make sense of incoming sounds because their assisted hearing is imperfect.
“When you’re talking to us, it may look like we understand you, but we’re doing a lot of work,” Bader said. “We’re lip reading, and it’s taking brain power to hear you guys, and there’s some things like listening fatigue that come with that.”
Bader said that because people with cochlear implants hear less than their hearing counterparts, they often fall behind on vocabulary and reading comprehension becomes more difficult.
The impact of imperfect hearing on students is not negligible. It can take cochlear implant recipients longer to process what exam questions are asking because recipients may not be as familiar with the subject vocabulary as students with typical hearing.
Bader and Fleming said that a lot of their understanding of course material comes from taking in information visually through reading, as opposed to listening. Closed captioning on videos shown in class is an incredibly powerful tool for both of them.
“The way I experience it when someone puts the captions on, it’s like my brain can take a rest,” Fleming said.
Bader said she hopes to see the kinds of accommodations cochlear implant recipients need become a norm in education, because closed captioning is something students with typical hearing can also benefit from.
“Something like closed captioning should be a standard,” said Bader. “It shouldn’t have to be something the cochlear implant community asks for, regardless if you are a cochlear implant recipient, deaf, or have hearing loss.”
Bader and Fleming both spoke highly of their experiences with the disability resources offices at their respective schools. Despite seeing room for improvement in disability awareness on their campuses, they’ve experienced no issues having their accommodations met so far.
Fleming said she hasn’t always had the most supportive educational environment, and said that one of her teachers in elementary school singled her out in front of her classmates for going to speech therapy.
“It was very embarrassing, just because I didn’t want anyone to know that I was struggling,” she said.
Fleming said the experience made her hesitant to talk about her hearing loss, but ultimately motivated her to push herself academically and end up where she is today.
“The mindset that I had after that experience was if people are going to see me this way, then I have to work harder to prove them wrong,” Fleming said.
Bader voiced excitement for the opportunities the scholarship has opened up for her, and said she hopes she can use it to bring more visibility to the cochlear recipient community.
“Now that I have this scholarship, I can use it to talk more about my experience, and hopefully use my experience to help younger cochlear recipients,” she said.
Tags: cochlear implant, deaf community, first year, Saint Louis University, scholarship
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