Lucy says: “This Deaf Awareness Week, I would love to remind everyone that there are so many different kinds of D/deaf people. Some will wear hearing aids or cochlear implants and others won’t. Some will sign and others won’t. Some will be involved in the Deaf Community and others won’t be.
Bookstart Shine for deaf children: ‘I want to show how much joy families can have reading and signing together’
Lucy Rogers created illustrations for Bookstart Shine, BookTrust’s reading support pack for children who are deaf. During Deaf Awareness Week, Lucy reflects on the experience – and what she’d like hearing people to know about supporting deaf children to read for enjoyment.
Image: Lucy Rogers
“I want to say that every kind of deaf person is still deaf, their experiences are still valid, no matter how different their experience may be.
“The reason why I use D/deaf with the two ‘d’s, is that the capital ‘D’ is for Deaf people who are more involved in the Deaf Community. For example, they may use British Sign Language (BSL) as their main language, and all their friends may be also Deaf. The lower ‘d’ represents deaf people who may be more oral and more involved in the hearing world. For me, I’m mixed. I love both worlds.
“I strive to illustrate more positive disability representation in the books I work on. I love bringing my own personal experience into my illustrations, which means you’ll find a variety of characters from different backgrounds or wearing hearing aids or cochlear implants.
“Whenever I meet a deaf child, it brings me so much joy to see their face light up when they see a character in a book who is also deaf. It’s the children I draw for that inspire me.”
Illustrating for Bookstart Shine
Bookstart Shine is BookTrust’s programme for children aged 0–2 years old who are deaf. Gifted to families via BookTrust’s Early Years partners, Bookstart Shine book packs include a high-quality picture book and a reading guide filled with tips, ideas and support for sharing stories together.
Amy Simpson, Brand Design and Brand Marketing Lead for BookTrust, says: “We wanted to modernise the illustrations for Bookstart Shine, so the resources felt more current and relevant to families.
“We wanted to illustrate scenes of different types of families sharing stories and signing together, and to ensure the BSL signs within the illustrations were correct, so we were guided by the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS). Lucy Rogers was recommended to us by the NDCS – we really like her work and her style. We felt her illustrations fit the age group, and they were young, fresh and modern.”
Image: Lucy Rogers
Lucy says: “It meant a lot that BookTrust asked me to illustrate for its BookTrust Shine packs. It was a chance for me to use my own personal experience growing up as a deaf child with sign language and spoken English.
“This project from BookTrust contributes to raising more deaf awareness and bringing out more deaf positive representation through illustrations.
“It’s also important for deaf people to be given a chance to educate hearing people on our language and culture. For example, if you would like to learn BSL, I would say please try and find a Deaf tutor, because they will be able to give you the best education on BSL’s history, its culture, and its community, as well as the constant barriers we face every day that no hearing person can really fully understand and appreciate.
What to consider when illustrating families using BSL
Image: Lucy Rogers
“BSL is a visual language, so when I worked on the illustrations for Bookstart Shine, I considered how parents can help read and sign with their children at the same time, by propping the book up where the child can see both the book and their grown-up signing.
“This way, the child can look at both things and connect the dots between the signing and what’s on the page. Illustrating for BookTrust was a real opportunity to show the joy of reading and signing that parents can have with their children.
Storytelling through sign language
“I particularly love the plane and rainbow illustrations I created for Bookstart Shine. The plane illustration shows a father with his child signing ‘plane’ in line with their book. I wanted to make this one more creative and bring in some of the imagination that comes with sharing a story, so I drew planes flying around their heads as they sign ‘plane’.
“The same goes for the rainbow illustration – it shows how visual sign language is, and how it can be so imaginative and brilliant for storytelling.
“For this project, I was not just getting feedback from BookTrust, but also the NDCS to check over the deaf representation and the sign language. It was valuable to double check all the sign language I was illustrating, which can be difficult to draw, because it’s a visual language with a lot of movement, and I appreciated BookTrust getting the NDCS involved in this project.
Representation of deaf characters in children’s books
Image: Lucy Rogers
“Growing up, I didn’t find any books with deaf characters like me. I remember that it used to make me sad. It made me feel even more isolated and lonely thinking there was nobody else like me. It was only when I left my mainstream school and met other deaf people like me that I started to stop feeling like this.
“Now, this has improved so much. I’ve seen a lot more deaf books out there which is fantastic, there’s a lot more books for deaf children to read than there used to be 20 years ago. This is important so all kids can find someone like them in the books they read.
“However, I do see there is still room to improve, as according to Inclusive Books for Children’s recent report, there were only 38 children books with a disabled main character in the UK over the past ten years – and 71.1% of those books are written by non-disabled authors or illustrators.
“This is unfortunately not good enough, and I would like to see more publishers give more voice to the disabled community as there are so many stories that we can tell the world through our own lived in experience.
“It’s okay to write stories with different experiences from your own, because writing is all about imagination (with a lot of the correct research and without biased opinions). But it’s also important to leave some room in the publishing world for disabled people who want to tell their own stories.
Getting deaf children reading for enjoyment
“To break down barriers for deaf children to enjoy reading for pleasure, I would love to see more fun stories with deaf characters, rather than sad stories, because that makes deafness look bad when actually, it’s a superpower in its own way.
“I would love to see more fun, action, fantasy or adventure stories and comics that have a deaf protagonist with just a little mention of their deafness to raise awareness but their deafness is not the main story – there’s more to their stories.
Lucy’s hope for children receiving Bookstart Shine packs
Image: Lucy Rogers
“It makes me very proud and happy to know there will be deaf children who will receive Bookstart Shine packs with my illustrations inside, and for them to see sign language in them or a variety of different deaf children.
“All deaf people are unique, and I wanted everyone to learn about that. Through the Bookstart Shine illustrations, you can find all different kinds of deaf children, because it’s okay to be D/deaf in the way you choose to be.
“For the deaf children receiving the Bookstart Shine packs, I hope they find out it was a deaf illustrator that made the pictures they’re looking at, so they’ll realise that they can achieve their own dreams too when they grow up.
“And hopefully through the illustrations, deaf children using Bookstart Shine with their parents can find the joy of books through sign language, too.”