I remember when Jo and I took a pandemic walk in 2021, and she brought up an idea she had toyed with over winter break. She was thinking about having some kind of ASL (American Sign Language) learning and conversation group in our Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. As we made our way along a forest trail, we talked about our inability to communicate directly with our colleague Dana. Dana is a Deaf faculty member in our department who is a native signer, and I too had lamented the fact that I could not communicate better with her. Over the next weeks we kept talking about how useful it would be to learn ASL to be able to communicate with our colleague, our clients, and a whole community of signers. Thus an idea was born.
Jo had done some background work and found a video teaching series online in which a Deaf teacher of ASL goes through various lessons for self teaching (www.lifeprint.com). This would be a great support to a conversation group in our department without putting Dana in the position of having to teach us. We brought up the idea to her of having an informal weekly ASL conversation meeting for our department. To our delight, Dana was thrilled about the concept and wanted to be involved as a leader/teacher of ASL. Once we had a rough plan pulled together, we approached our department chair, who was very supportive and had been thinking along the same lines as she worked with the faculty to map out our departmental strategic plan. She created a committee that allowed this effort to fulfill Dana’s service work.
Since then, several of the faculty have met to learn and converse in ASL. And, for my part, I have had the time of my life and have rarely laughed so much. In faculty meetings, it is rare to have eye contact with Dana because she is intently watching the interpreter on her computer screen in order not to miss anything said in the meeting. (I sometimes find myself getting distracted from the meeting myself by trying to follow the interpreter’s translation.) But in our ASL groups, without the need for an interpreter, Dana comes alive.
Dana is a wonderful teacher and communicator, acting out any and all concepts with infectious enthusiasm and energy. She has shown us that ASL is a rich and descriptive language expressed with the whole body and face in addition to the hands. Facial expressions underscore the emotion/mood underlying all communication (for example the shape of the eyebrows indicate the kind of question–lowered for yes-no questions, raised for open-ended questions). Being a more introverted person, this kind of “acting out” has been difficult for me but is teaching me to show a little vulnerability in order to better get a message across. And despite my arthritic fingers, when I cannot get it across, there is always finger spelling to say a word or phrase.
As with any language I learn, the more I learn, the more confident I feel and the more I try to mentally express my thoughts in that language. But it takes consistent practice to keep the skills. When I recently ran into a former student who is a fluent signer with her Deaf parents, I was able to sign to them that I was happy to see them and that I am learning some ASL to add to my repertoire of rudimentary languages.
Tomma Henckel with Jo Shackelford and Dana Hoover – (photos by Jo)
