University of Bristol Centre for Deaf Studies opened in 1978 and was Europe's first academic institution to concentrate solely on research and education that aims to benefit the Deaf community. The majority of teaching staff on the programme are Deaf and all tutors sign. Students at the Centre for Deaf Studies in Bristol will study within a bilingual environment, with an emphasis on acquiring fluency in British Sign Language (BSL).
The first research work began at CDS in 1978 with a study of how people learn and use BSL and was then broadened by further work in the Deaf community. Since then we have expanded our work in five main areas:
We have grown our teaching programme from a part-time certificate for teachers in 1981 to a full three year undergraduate programme, a Masters in Deaf Studies and Doctoral programme.CDS continues to grow and seek out new research and new challenges.
