Every Monday and Wednesday in a small classroom in Williams Hall, a group of 13 students settles into a semi-circle waiting for class to start. The students chat about the weekend or their homework, holding idle conversation while waiting for their professor to walk in.
But as soon as Professor Joy Maisel enters, the classroom turns silent. And for the next hour and a half, not a word is spoken, as the students obey the “no voice” policy and immerse themselves in learning American Sign Language.
Maisel, who is completely deaf, is one of six ASL professors at Penn. In fact, five out of the six professors are deaf — only Jami Fisher, the ASL coordinator, can hear. Fisher is what’s known as a “CODA,” or child of deaf adults. Both her parents and one of her brothers are deaf, so growing up she learned English and ASL simultaneously.
The ASL program began at Penn in 1996, when six students approached the Penn Language Center asking for courses to be offered. Since six students is the minimum requirement for the creation of a new language class, ASL I was offered for the first time. Student interest grew and today about 125 students enroll in ASL classes each semester. The program has seven offerings, including five language courses, one of them focusing on medical sign language, and two seminars, Topics in Deaf Culture and Linguistics of ASL, both taught entirely in sign.
Professor Meghan Rainone — who was born deaf and has a deaf sister despite no family history of deafness — teaches both ASL III and Medical Sign Language. She says that throughout her schooling, she had an interpreter in all of her classrooms and was known as “the deaf girl.”
“My experience in learning ASL is not comparable to students that take ASL at Penn only because ASL is my native language,” she says. “I use it every day to communicate with others and survive in the hearing world. For them, it is just another language, one in which they may not necessarily continue after completing ASL IV.”
But at least one student at Penn can relate to Rainone’s experiences. Senior Chelsea Lew began losing her hearing around age four while she was growing up in Indonesia. After about two years, her family returned to the United States for professional testing and found that she had already lost one-third of her hearing and was continuing to lose more. By the time she applied to Penn she was completely deaf. In elementary school she got a hearing-aid and underwent speech therapy, voice recognition training and correction training. She had to skip lunch for her therapy and needed notetakers for her classroom lectures.
“I would miss jokes in class,” she says, so she began learning sign language as her senior class project. “The socializing part, that was the main motivator to join ASL classes… Sign is great because I never miss anything. When I’m with people who talk, I get maybe 30 to 60 percent [of the conversation], and if there’s background noise that reduces the amount even further.” She adds that learning sign language was like learning about herself. “It’s like Jewish people taking a Hebrew class.”
And many of Lew’s classmates have gained an appreciation for ASL and deaf culture. Junior Emily Weihrich, an ASL IV student, says, “It’s important to know about the struggles of a minority group that’s different than groups you might be used to [learning about] such as gays or African Americans.”
Junior Alix Winter, who has completed ASL IV, adds, “Deafness is a difference, not a disability.” She notes that although deaf people can’t hear, they can still experience the same range of emotions, but from visual rather than auditory cues.
To demonstrate this, Winter choreographed a piece for PennDance last year that was meant to be equally enjoyable for deaf and hearing audiences. The dance was performed to a spoken word piece that was simultaneously signed by the performers on stage. “I thought it would be cool, and I had an outlet to do it,” she says.
Still, there is currently a debate within the University over whether ASL should fulfill the foreign language requirement in Wharton, although it already counts toward the same requirement for College of Arts and Sciences and Nursing students. (The School of Engineering and Applied Science does not have a foreign language requirement.) The Undergraduate Assembly is working on an initiative to add ASL to the list of accepted foreign language courses in Wharton, and many ASL students feel strongly about the issue.
“As far as Penn’s general requirements are concerned, ASL definitely deserves to count toward the language requirement,” says sophomore Meredith Turtletaub. “Too many people don’t realize that ASL is among the most-used languages in our country. Why wouldn’t businesses want employees who can communicate with countless potential deaf clients?”
From an administrative standpoint, Fisher adds that she finds it “sort of hypocritical that ASL doesn’t meet the language requirement in Wharton because Greek and Latin do,” since in certain ways they are dead languages. She notes that Wharton administrators justify the difference by saying that ASL “doesn’t help expand international or global opportunities.”
Junior Nichole D’Amico, an ASL IV student, agrees with Fisher. “Many people believe that ASL is simply gestured English. However, this is not at all the case,” she says. ASL is a linguistically complete, complex and natural language. The punctuation, sentence structure and grammar of ASL are unique to the language. It is a visual, spatial language that relies on facial expressions, hand shapes, movements, use of signing space and body orientation. “It takes a long time to become fluent in ASL,” she says.
D’Amico is one of many Nursing students enrolled in the ASL program. Students like her find the Medical ASL course useful for their professional careers, since it allows them to communicate with deaf hospital patients. Similarly, sophomore Health and Societies major Sarah Heinze says she enrolled in the program because she hopes to eventually pursue a career in recreational therapy at a children’s hospital. “Often cancer patients lose their hearing through chemotherapy, and I thought sign language would be a great tool to have when working in a hospital,” she says.
Even other professors have enrolled in Penn’s ASL courses. Philosophy, Politics and Economics administrative coordinator Sarah Gish-Kraus has taken ASL courses since high school and is currently enrolled in ASL to complete background classes needed for an interpreter-training program. Although she notes that her experience in the classroom is not much different than a student’s, she sympathizes with those who can’t complete the ASL program due to other requirements.
“Currently if students want to go beyond the four required language semesters with ASL, they can, but there is not much that it counts toward,” she says.
For this reason, the program is working on proposing a minor in Deaf Studies. Turtletaub says, “So many students, myself included, take all five levels of the language and go on to take the ASL-based classes, Deaf Culture and Linguistics of ASL, yet we have little on our transcript to show our accomplishment. We work hard, attend dozens of out-of-class events and really come to master the language and its culture.”
The ASL program is hoping to collaborate with other departments to crosslist more courses and offer a broader range of options to meet the language requirements for a minor. Fisher adds that she hopes to see more themed ASL courses or classes taught by faculty in other departments that would contribute to the experience of a Deaf Studies minor.
For example, credits from the Siena School of Liberal Arts study abroad program in Siena, Italy, would count toward the minor. This past summer Turtletaub became the first Penn student to participate in the program, which consisted of about 20 students from across the U.S.
“Except for me, all of the students had completed at least four semesters of ASL at their home college,” she says. Many were juniors or seniors at Purdue University (where there is a large audiology/speech pathology department), the University of New Mexico (which has an ASL interpreting program) or Rochester Institute of Technology (which has an interpreting program and a sizeable deaf population). Other students were certified interpreters, between 20 and 48 years of age. Turtletaub was the youngest and had the least ASL experience.
At the Siena School — which provides the only study abroad program of its type in the world — she took Spoken Italian, Italian Sign Language and Italian Deaf Studies. She notes that Italian sign language has a very different vocabulary from ASL. Turtletaub learned that in Europe, the Oralist method — in which deaf people are taught to speak instead of sign — pervaded deaf education until the 20th century.
Turtletaub also experienced immersion in deaf culture as she learned about the growing fields of storytelling and poetry in signed literature. Such immersion is also an integral part of the ASL program at Penn, since each semester students are required to attend at least two deaf events in the greater Philadelphia community. Many of these events are sponsored by the Philadelphia School of the Deaf located in Germantown and range from documentaries at the Philadelphia Film Festival to Deaf Awareness Night at the 76ers game. Sophomore Katie Thackray, who attended this event, says, “Almost everyone in our section of the stadium was signing, and it was the first time I have been in a situation that was not academic where the main language has not been spoken.”
To further these experiences outside of the classroom, Lew and Winter started Penn-in-Hand, a group for people who enjoy signing and deaf culture. All levels of signing are welcome at their events, which in the past have included silent dinners at Allegro, Quizzo at Smoke’s and “Silent Ice,” a night of ice skating at Penn’s Landing. Since the group was only formed last semester, its almost 50 members hope to formalize a constitution so the club can continue in future years.
Penn-in-Hand member and junior Evan Benshetler, who took up sign after being inspired by his grandparents, who used it while scuba diving, adds that these outside experiences have enhanced his appreciation for ASL. Benshetler says that outside of controlled classroom environments he uses “name signs” as a main conversation starter. A name sign is a gesture that represents an individual and can be used instead of finger-spelling a name. His is the sign for an “E” — the first letter of his name — located by his head since he loves computers. “It’s really interesting because in high school when you’re learning a language you get a name right away, but that doesn’t happen in sign language class… You first need to be an active member of the deaf community” to be given a name sign, he says.
Certain ASL signs have also been incorporated into the hearing world. The tradition of huddling in football has its roots in sign language, for example. At Gallaudet University, a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Washington, D.C., football players used to gather in a huddle and sign their secret plays to each other so the opposing team wouldn’t understand. A similar history exists for umpires motioning for the number of strikes in baseball. D’Amico also notes that many parents are now teaching their children sign language so they can communicate with them before they speak.
And while there are still many gaps to bridge between the hearing and deaf worlds, sophomore Meredith Perry, an ASL IV student, says her ASL classes have taught her a lot about deaf culture. Deaf people are “as able, intelligent, witty and clever as hearing people,” but can’t be heard, she says. “Like any group of people united by a central issue, the deaf have their own language, humor, inside jokes, quirks and style. They are people like you and me; the only difference is their form of communication.”
