In the spring 2022 semester, a new American Sign Language (ASL) Z Block was added to Sequoyah’s curriculum. Ethan Rios ’23, Owen Thomason ’23, and Ruby Park ’23 dedicated their SIP project to bring awareness to American Sign Language. In doing so, the American Sign Language course was created.
Ruby Park, student and leader of the Z block, explained the mission of the new course. She said, “We want to focus on bringing more awareness to deaf culture and Sign Language as a language option…[we] want to bring it into schools since that is the place people are learning languages, and we think that it should be counted as a language credit.”
Park continued, “Our final project is to just use what we have learned from the course in some way or do a deep dive into something else from it…It’s really broad. You get to design your final project and Marc approves it.”
Below are projects from the students of the ASL Z Block:
Alana Greene ’24 and Ruby Park ’23
Alana and Ruby teamed up in order to create a conversation in ASL.
Park explained, “Alana and I are going to just create a script and do a short skit as if we’re having a conversation…through ASL…We want to have a conversation where we’re pretending we don’t really know each other. Just like the basics of what you would say to someone.”
Gloria Aguilar ’23 and Nico Vallejo ’23
Previously, Vallejo took an ASL elective course in middle school, which interested him to join the ASL Z block. Vallejo said, “[American Sign Language] is a great language to learn [and] to be able to talk with…people in the deaf community. ”
Aguilar says the reason she joined the Z Block was mainly due to her SIP project, which is focused on accessibility of language. “I really thought that it would be very important for me as a person whose work is around language accessibility to expand their knowledge in language. I know English and Spanish and it’s always great to learn another language.”
Aguilar and Vallejo decided to implement their new language skills and dedicate their final project to an ASL transcription of “505,” by the Arctic Monkeys.
Owen Thomason ’23 and Nathan Yoo ’23
Thomason and Yoo created a document explaining the origins of signs and sign language.
Take some time to learn American Sign Language. Learning the basics, such as hello, would be super beneficial. Well done to the ASL Sip project and ASL Z block members!
