Northwestern students said they are hoping to bring an “alternative learning experience” to campus by establishing university-led courses in American Sign Language.
As a fulfillment for foreign language requirements, 161 American colleges and universities will accept American Sign Language. NU is not one of them, said Tania Karas, academic committee chairwoman for NU’s American Sign Language Club.
Karas and others have been working to create an ASL class within the School of Communication since last October, she said.
“At this point, an entire ‘program’ is too much for the school to handle,” the Medill sophomore said. “It would require hiring multiple teachers and multiple levels of ASL to be offered – like Spanish or French or other languages.”
If the School of Communication had additional funding, it would consider the creation of such a program, but at the moment, those extra resources are not available, said Prof. Charles Larson, department chairman of communication sciences and disorders.
“We don’t have any faculty in our department with expertise in the area of sign language right now,” he said. “If we had additional funding and the faculty thought it was a good thing to do then we would try to seek somebody to offer a course like that.”
Garen Checkley, a Communication junior who has been working with Karas, said the administration has been supportive, despite being unable to create a class at this time.
“Right now, they don’t have a ton of money to throw around, so we’re figuring out how to get around that in our plans,” he said.
The ASL Club has partnered with Consultants Advising Student Enterprises, the student-run consulting group that offers free consulting advice to other groups on campus, in order to determine both student interest for ASL classes on campus and research similar programs at other universities comparable to NU, Checkley said.
The research done by the consulting group has shown there is plenty of student interest, said Brad Whitman, a member of CASE conducting the surveys for the ASL Club.
“Both from people who want to take it for professional or major-related reasons there’s interest and also from those who want to take it as a new and alternative learning experience,” the SESP junior said. “It can be practical if you’re going into a career where you’ll need to have at least a basic understanding of ASL, but also it can just be fun.”
Until then, the ASL Club continues to hold weekly meetings, and they have created a student-run seminar course as well, Karas said.
The student-led classes, which began this year, are offered once a quarter and have had students on a wait list each quarter, Karas said. She is currently co-teaching the Spring Quarter session and said the hour-and-a-half class is structured much like the ASL Club’s meetings.
Meetings attract between 10 and 15 regular members each week. The setup includes an introduction with announcements about upcoming ASL events, a lesson portion where participants use vocabulary and grammar connected to a particular theme and a game or activity where members can put their ASL into practice, said Karen Bullen, co-president of the ASL Club.
“It’s important for students to be able to learn the language,” the Weinberg sophomore said. “Many other major universities require their communications students to learn ASL. Our School of Communication is one of the best in the nation, so we think this should be part of our program as well.”
