The Art of Signing

During the Experiential Term, I learned so much about Deaf culture and sign language. The purpose of this term, as the school defines it, is to immerse ourselves into Deaf culture and to walk in members of the Deaf community's shoes. In my own words, I believe it was so much more than that. I got to feel sad, proud, inspired, happy and even sometimes stressed out. I believe this is one experience I will take with me for the rest of my life because now I feel that there is another world out there, the Deaf community. I want to explore it to the fullest by continuing to learn ASL and diving deep into the Deaf world. We learned basic ASL such as "Hello, my name is", fingerspelling, numbers, colors, animals, transportation, 5 w's, direction, states, countries, art, school, school years, vehicles, scenery, clothing, technology, disability, weather, food. Honestly I am proud of almost everything I did this term but I am most proud of all the progress I made in ASL language and the comprehension of it.

If the video does not show the captions that I have provided for you, then I suggest you see the video on YouTube.

For an external event I attended the Children of Peace School to get inside information on the Deaf community and also see how Deaf and hearing kids cooperate in school. I attended the Children of Peace School and had the opportunity to visit two different classrooms, one was kindergarten and the other was 5th grade. When I went to the kindergarten class, I saw hearing kids and Deaf kids and also some hard of hearing kids playing together and communicating with each other. Something I found cool was, when I went to the kindergarten class I got to teach the kids new signs and also they taught me some signs. Then, I went to the 5th grade class and got to see them practice their signing and they even had a special time where they practice their speech. When it was time to practice their speech, I loved seeing how the teacher pushed them to do it well and strives for them to have successful speech.

One person that inspired me this term was my ASL teacher Thomas because of the stories he told. He told us how he had to speak, even though he was Deaf until he was 25 because he was never supported to learn sign language. I also found him inspirational because he is so nice and funny and I view deafness differently now because of him. After talking to Thomas, I don't think of deafness as a disability anymore, now I think of a person that is Deaf as normal. He also inspired me by the way he tried and tried to get us to learn ASL even when it got a little stressful he never gave up on us and continued to teach us the best he could. ASL and Thomas has changed my worldview by making me realize that everyone can communicate if you just put in effort and there is nothing wrong with being Deaf.

For the group action project, I found it difficult to work in a group because there was very little communication between group members which made it hard to accomplish anything. One thing I did like was the way we took videos and pictures from FE and put it all together to make a great and successful video. My roles for the group micromentary were interviewer and also editor. In all honesty, I do not feel like I helped much with editing because I only helped a little. But as an interviewer I feel like I got a lot of information and also asked good questions to the guests. I learned a lot but not so much from working in the group but, I learned a lot from the ASL part of the course.

I was able to live another person's life and step into their shoes by breaking the barrier between the Deaf community and the hearing world by learning their language so I can communicate with them. I connected with the culture by talking with deaf students, teachers that teach them, learning about cochlear implants and how the Deaf community feels about the implant.