As sophomore Eve Sharp was running errands with her mom in The Container Store she witnessed a deaf woman having difficulty checking out due to the employee’s inability to speak American Sign Language (ASL). Sharp was inspired by this event and told sophomore Sophia Leinwand about it. Leinwand, Sharp and sophomore Tara Hain then founded the ASL club at CESJDS.
“We saw how much she struggled with communicating to the woman who was a cashier,” Sharp said. “And it was just kind of sad that she had to live her life like that, always struggling to communicate with people.”
Club meetings consist of learning the basics. Sharp believes that learning ASL is supposed to be fun. Therefore during the club, they teach the language in fun ways because remembering the hand movements can be a lot of effort. To teach ASL, Sharp, Leinwand and Hain use a slideshow presentation and add photos of the hand gestures used in ASL.
Sharp believes that the more people practice and learn ASL, the more popular and useful it will become in the community. The Maryland Deaf Culture Digital Library (DCDL) is a local organization in Washington that supports the deaf community by providing equal access to information that deaf people could not otherwise obtain.
Brandt Van Unen, a librarian at the DCDL, believes that deaf and non-deaf people would be able to communicate much more easily in everyday situations if ASL was a better known language.
“It would then be easier for deaf people like me to order a complicated drink at a local cafe without using my phone to communicate,” Van Unen said via email. “Now, that’s a dream to achieve.”
Van Unen’s advice to Sharp and her co-founders was to make the ASL club enjoyable so students will want to engage with the deaf community outside of school. In order to practice ASL at a more advanced level, he also suggested getting involved in local deaf community events and organizations.
To teach ASL, Sharp, Leinwand and Hain use a slideshow presentation and add photos of the hand gestures used in ASL.
Sharp hopes that in the future, depending on consistency and member interactiveness, the ASL club will interact with the deaf community outside of JDS and hopes to possibly even bring in guest speakers during meetings.
To recruit new members, they hung up posters all over the building to alert students about the new club. Now that the club has been in progress for a while Hain said that they have all grown and learned together.
“Initially it was just a bunch of people that I didn’t really know, but I think the club has really grown into a family of people that come every week,” Hain said.
