Located in: Features
Posted on: November 26th, 2013 No Comments

CMU instructor teaches students nonverbal ASL


Photo by Malissa Smithey

Metz

“A little bit of water, do you mean…?” a student asks Brittany Metz, the instructor for the Intro to American Sign Language class. The student then signs to Metz across from her. “Yeah, that’s right.”

Metz has taken over the class for Barry Laga, head of the English department, who is away on sabbatical.

This week, she and her students have been going over tests.

“My students don’t always love me,” Metz said, describing the challenge of teaching ASL. “It’s a visual language that’s conveying the meaning of a sentence through visual description, so it’s making a picture for you to understand rather than word for word for word.”

Hilliary Schott, one of Metz’s students, benefits from the hands-on environment of the classroom.

“It’s not really a language that’s written a lot. You more just do it,” Schott said. “That way I figured I might be able to apply it, instead of having a year of a language and not really being able to speak it.”

Metz said she took an Intro to ASL class when she was in college.

“I thought it was going to be an easy class,” Metz said. “It turned out to be really fun. I just took it as an extracurricular, and after that, we found out my brother was deaf.”

The majority of Metz’s classes on campus include limited amount of talking. She usually communicates with her students through ASL.

“When he was in second grade, I was the deaf education teacher for school district 51. I had kindergarten through 5th grade,” Metz said.

When she was teaching at the elementary school, the class was almost silent, except for the scratch of pencils or the rustle of paper.

“What you’re doing in a setting like that, you are getting the material that other hearing kids have, and figuring how to teach it in ASL. Instead of teaching it word for word what they are doing in science, you are visually showing them what is happening,” Metz said.

Some days Metz shows video clips or has her students read sections from their textbook, “For Hearing People Only.”

“The classes here, I still teach them strictly in ASL, but we start with building blocks, instead of teaching every subject and that meaning in ASL,” Metz said. “They have to change all of that and think in ASL.”

Grand Junction has a small deaf community. They enjoy sharing their language with the larger hearing community.

“That is not the case everywhere; there are ASL purists,” Metz said. “They think that it is there language and only they should be using it. They don’t want to share it, and they don’t think hearing people have a right to it.”

In many places, the deaf community is large enough to mimic Metz’s classes. They only communicate in ASL and take pride in the language. The purists of the ASL language even look down upon the deaf who get implants or wear hearing aids to help them hear.

“It is their language, their culture. It is pride for them,” Metz said. “They feel like hearing people shouldn’t be using something that is theirs in order to benefit themselves. Before taking this job, I waited to see if someone else wanted it, someone who was a part of the deaf community,” Metz said.

Many families with deaf members will pick up and move just so they can be a part of a larger deaf community. Grand Junction can be difficult for them because the deaf community is so small.

jkirk@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

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