Intervention and Reflective Report

1. Introduction

I’m a lecturer at UAL Creative Computing Institute (CCI). I teach BSc Data Science and AI and MSc Creative Computing. Both courses combine art and computer science, with a strong focus on lecture and tutorial delivery.

My positionality is informed by my background as: a man who grew up in China, an international student (2019-2022), and an EAL (English as Additional Language) learner. It is also informed by my role at UAL as both a PhD student and an early career lecturer. As a researcher in the field of engineering and computer science, I often value interventions that are operational, finding solutions to problems, or providing concrete recommendations for future work.

This report is about my reflection on planning a living manifesto on hearing impairment accessibility.

2. Context and Motivation

In the Digital System unit during the Spring term, one of the learning outcomes is to understand how sound/audio is encoded in digital systems. To achieve this, during the lecture, I ran a listening activity in which I displayed audio waveforms produced by different signals, and had students listen to sounds produced by these signals. However, this activity has been inaccessible for one of the students in my class, who has a diminished hearing channel.

The experience of working with this student, as well as the PgCert journey, has prompted me to think about accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students and, more broadly, how to accommodate different hearing preferences in the pedagogy of audio programming.

A common learning outcome in teaching digital audio/music has involved communicating experiences about sound, audio, and music. However, traditional audio pedagogy often centres around listening as a primary mode of engagement, assuming auditory access as a baseline. This assumption reinforces marginalisation of DHH learners.

3. Rationale

The intervention will be a living manifesto on hearing impairment accessibility, a living document initiated by me, and co-edited with colleagues and students, as a call for changes in the pedagogy of audio, sound, and music. It aims to invite colleagues to take a counterfactual approach and re-evaluate how we should communicate our experiences around sound, audio, and music.

I hope this can help us move toward an inclusive learning environment that takes account of the intersection of disability, different hearing preferences, and cultural/linguistic nuances in ways of expressing sound.

The following sections elaborate on the literature and theories that will inform (has informed) this manifesto.

3.1. Students’ hearing preferences are differently situated.

Informed by the literature on hearing impairment, I learned that hearing conditions vary among individuals with DHH. For instance, in the study by Looi et al. (2008), their results suggested that a large amount of variation was observed in individuals’ ability to differentiate between different aspects of sound, including pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Their study also shows that conditions can vary within these categories (ibid). For instance, certain types of DHH conditions can diminish the ability to perceive female voices, whereas some other conditions diminish the ability to perceive male voices.

Why is it important at UAL CCI?

In music schools specifically focusing on music and audio education, Cheng and Mcgregor (2024) described a viable approach of offering personalised audio workstations to accommodate individuals’ needs, creating an inclusive learning environment for all.

However, in the context of UAL CCI, music and audio only make up a small portion of the learning outcome. The course design often focuses on more general aspects of creative computing to support students’ diverse interests. This places constraints on time, effort, and funding for the pedagogy of music and audio. In addition, not all teaching staff are domain experts in music and audio. UAL Dashboard (2025) also shows that only 1.1% of students at CCI have declared “sensory, medical or physical impairment”. It is not likely that all teaching staff have experience working with DHH students in this environment, and new lecturers (such as me) may have limited knowledge of accommodating different hearing preferences.

Figure 1. Caption

Therefore, I hope this manifesto can be helpful for colleagues who need an introduction to adapting to the mindset of acknowledging students’ differently situated hearing preferences, and using available assets at CCI to accommodate these preferences.

3.2. Ways of understanding sounds intersect with race, language, and culture.

In the review by Nichols and Stahl (2019), grounded in the literature on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), they highlight how elements of intersectionality shape students’ social and personal experiences in higher education. In the context of the pedagogy of music and audio, the intersections between race, language, culture, and disability can shape how sound is described, understood, and valued. Studies in Human Cognitive Processing (HCP) have shown that the way we communicate embodied experience (such as sound) is a cross-cultural matter (Yu, 1995).

Why is it important at UAL CCI

Looking at UAL data on students’ home ethnicity, this profile of multicultural backgrounds suggests that students’ ways of internalising sound are diverse. This cultural nuance can be a key to introducing the element of intersectionality in the pedagogy. For instance, as a Chinese EAL learner and teacher myself, describing the bodily metaphor of a sound is a common strategy I use. Yu (1995) speculated that the explanation for this references the theories of yin-yang and the five elements of Chinese medicine. In a more recent study, Reed, Strohmeier and McPherson (2023) show that the use of metaphors between teachers and students can reach some mutual understanding across backgrounds but still vary in nuanced details.

Figure 2. Caption

I also considered the research on linguistic diversity in academia. For instance, Sharma et al. (2025) took an ethnographic approach to examine how socio-culturally nuanced expressions can lose their meaning when translating from other languages to English. The paradigm of “speaking the same kind of English” in academics already amplifies a monocultural proficiency in English. Therefore, by promoting students’ own ways of describing experiences and feelings, I hope the manifesto can call for an inclusive language of communicating sound.

3.3. Embodied listening is a multisensory approach.

Traditional pedagogy of sound assumes that hearing is a singular and primary channel for sonic engagement. However, embodied cognition, especially embodied music cognition (Godøy, 2009), argues that embodied listening is a multisensory (synaesthesia) approach that extends beyond the ear. The oscillation of sound can be perceived as visual, tactile, or vibrational cues. An example of this multisensory experience of sound is the Chladni patterns (shown in the Figure 3), which opens the use of visual and haptic to engage with sonic phenomena.

Figure 3. Chladni patterns in vibrating plates. Source: Max Planck Institute. License: CC-BY-SA.

Why is it important at UAL CCI?

CCI students often come from interdisciplinary backgrounds, with interests spanning code, music performance, visual art, choreography, and more. In my own teaching, I noticed how synaesthesia had become a repeating theme in students’ work to connect multisensory experiences. This resonates with the reflection from Murgia (2015), that synaesthesia is a “gateway” to teaching creativity in higher education because it “forming a new way of thinking and experiencing the world”. In doing so, sonic pedagogy through a sensory-inclusive lens is not just an assistive act, but also an inclusive pedagogical tool in creative computing.

4. Action

To develop this living manifesto, I will initiate a draft as the initial prompt to start the conversation, and share it with colleagues using the bulletin board at CCI High Holborn campus. Meanwhile, to bring students’ voices into it, I aim to plan a workshop for students around the theme of communicating sound experiences, and focus on guiding students to reflect on ways of communicating sound using their language/cultural elements.

5. Reflection & Evaluation

The idea of considering DHH started from the IP unit’s first workshop, in which the Social Model (UAL, 2025) motivated me to think about disabilities as barriers in the learning environment that have prevented individuals from full engagement. It was particularly the talk from Sadiq (2023) that has prompted me to think not assuming what kinds of support are needed, instead, to understand that every individual is different and go beyond “box ticking”. In addition, the discussion about intersectionality during workshops, as well as the first tutorial with Tim, have inspired me to open up to the race, culture, and language aspects of hearing, and to be mindful and consider the variety of hearing preferences.

This has also sparked my reflection on my own positionality, I realised that I needed to shift my perspective from being a “developer” (who builds tools and solutions) to a “facilitator” (who encourages reflection and fosters enquiries).

During the peer-to-peer presentation, we posted feedback to each other on a Miro board (https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVIjgKNKI=/?share_link_id=217453660255), where we discussed how to evaluate this intervention. Claire mentioned the way to measure the success of this is to consider whether it raises staff awareness of different hearing experiences. It is indeed true that the aim of this manifesto is not to offer a straightforward solution to problems, nor concrete recommendations that can be immediately implemented in one’s teaching. Instead, it seeks a reflexive way in which we are encouraged to examine our assumptions, think about “what if”, and provide directions for future work. I believe Oulasvirta and Hornbæk (2022)’s way of describing this counterfactual way of thinking could be the best way to approach the evaluation of this: to “redefine problems and sensitise [us] to the problems”.

Reference

• Cheng, L. and Mcgregor, I. (2024) ‘Pedagogical Approaches in Music and Audio Education for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students’, Organised Sound, 29(2), pp. 188–196. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771824000074. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Godøy, R.I. (2009) ‘Gestural Affordances of Musical Sound’, in Musical Gestures. Routledge.
• Looi, V., McDermott, H., McKay, C., & Hickson, L. (2008). Music perception of cochlear implant users compared with that of hearing aid users. Ear and hearing, 29(3), 421–434. https://doi.org/10.1097/AUD.0b013e31816a0d0b [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Murgia, M.D. (2015) ‘Teaching Synaesthesia as a Gateway to Creativity’, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2(2), pp. 305–313. Available at: https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v2i2.118. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Nichols, S. and Stahl, G. (2019) ‘Intersectionality in higher education research: a systematic literature review’, Higher Education Research & Development, 38(6), pp. 1255–1268. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1638348. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Oulasvirta, A. and Hornbæk, K. (2022) ‘Counterfactual Thinking: What Theories Do in Design’, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 38(1), pp. 78–92. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2021.1925436. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Reed, C.N., Strohmeier, P. and McPherson, A.P. (2023) ‘Negotiating Experience and Communicating Information Through Abstract Metaphor’, in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (CHI ’23), pp. 1–16. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580700. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx [Online]. Youtube. 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025].
• Sharma, S. et al. (2025) ‘Lost in Translation: Researchers’ Reflections on Writing in English for CHI’, in Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (CHI EA ’25). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3716231. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• UAL. (2025) ‘The Social Model of Disability at UAL’, YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/mNdnjmcrzgw [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• UAL. (2025) ‘ActiveDashboard’, ActiveDashboard. Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/ [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]
• Yu, N. (1995) ‘Metaphorical Expressions of Anger and Happiness in English and Chinese’, Metaphor and Symbol, 10, pp. 59–92. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1002_1. [Accessed: 09-Jul-2025]