Hanna Mignano

Interpreting Practicum Fall 2021

10/22/21

Professional Development

1 hr.

Journey Into the Deaf World

This lecture put on by Team TVS featured Ben Jarashow, Director of ASL and Deaf Studies at

Utah Valley University. It was a great introductory lecture on deaf culture , and although I've already

taken a Deaf Culture class, I still learned a few things from this video that I did not know before. From

a technical standpoint, I really enjoyed Ben's signing style—his sentence structure and concepts were

all very vivid and three dimensional, in the truest form of ASL. For example, his use of directional

verbs and pace to put emphasis on time lapsed i.e. “CHANGE” with slow, deliberate movement and

wider use of sign space in an arc movement. I also appreciated his creative use of his non-dominant

hand while signing concepts such as “ALONE” ; he kept this sign stationary while using his non-

dominant hand to sign “SEARCHING” , directional verb. I thought this was very cool. In general, just

a lot of dimension to his signing. Apart from the receptivity/technical aspects, a few informational

tidbits I picked up on that I found to be interesting. Namely, that has been scientifically proven that

deaf people generally have much wider and more accurate peripheral vision than hearing people. Also

that college courses in American Sign Language increased in popularity by over 400 percent from 2002

to 2011. Another interesting topic that Ben delved into was eugenics and its historical prevalence

against deaf people. This included but was not limited to sterilization, genetic screening, and prenatal

testing, etc. Even now, the medical community has a view towards deaf people that they must be

“fixed.” He made a very interesting distinction between the increasing numbers of hearing babies born

in the US and having access to learning sign language, while deaf babies are often forbidden from

learning ASL due to audism, and instead are raised in a more oral approach. He makes the point that, in
a way, ASL as a language BY and FOR deaf people is being “given” to the hearing community, which

is an unfortunate phenomenon.