When he was 10, Benro Ogunyipe, president of National Black Deaf Advocates, found himself unable to communicate in the same way and to the same people once accessible to him. Now 34, Ogunyipe uses American Sign Language as his primary means of communication. Although he estimates that ASL is the third most widely used language in the United States, he says he has found that “signers” are often few and far between.
“I’m a deaf person,” Ogunyipe says. “I go places and order food and have to stand in line for things and tell people that I’m deaf, and they try to figure it out. That hassle makes me wish more people learned sign language.”
So Ogunyipe decided to teach it. He led a Norris Mini Course last year, watching his students progress from knowing nothing about ASL to being able to hold short conversations using hand gestures by the end of the quarter.
Opportunities like Ogunyipe’s Mini Course are not prevalent at Northwestern, but the American Sign Language Club, comprised of students with an interest in sign language and deaf culture, is working to change that.
Each week, students in the club learn to sign words and phrases pertaining to the given week’s theme. Some weeks focus on practical topics, like the weather, while some feature seasonal events, including Halloween and Northwestern’s Annual Sex Week.
The opportunity to learn how to sign words like “pumpkin,” however, isn’t the main reason why current Co-President Robert Gomez, a Weinberg junior, first joined the ASL Club.
“I took Spanish throughout high school, and I didn’t find out until senior year that ASL was actually offered at my high school,” Gomez says. “I figured if my high school had ASL, Northwestern would have had classes, but I got here and it didn’t. I thought that was upsetting.”
Gomez attended the ASG Fall Activities Fair his freshman year and found out the club members were both fighting for sign language classes and teaching the language themselves.
Since then, the club has brought an undergraduate linguistics seminar on ASL to Northwestern, but members of the ASL Club want sign language to eventually become a two-year sequence that fulfills Weinberg’s foreign language requirement.
“It was a big fight just to get them to have the seminar,” says Weinberg senior Emily Kaht, another co-president of the club. “So obviously getting them to recognize it as a foreign language is even going to be more challenging.”
"I figured if my high school had ASL, Northwestern would have had classes, but I got here and it didn't. I thought that was upsetting."
Mary Finn, associate dean for undergraduate academic affairs, worked with the club’s founders in their efforts to bring ASL instruction to Northwestern.
“The students who talked to me were very passionate,” Finn says. “They made a presentation to the Council on Language Instruction, which is a group of representatives from all the language faculty, and did a very good job according to them. That was what got this going.”
While Finn says that the two-quarter pilot course had sufficient enrollment to merit a small seminar, the course hasn’t gained high enough demand since then. As a result, Finn says, Northwestern cannot offer two years of ASL instruction. Plus, creating an ASL sequence could be expensive.
The same students who advocated for ASL classes recommended Jennifer Hart to the dean’s office as a candidate for an instructor. Hart—who was born deaf and originally communicated using Signed Exact English, a visual representation of English and not an established language—was first exposed to ASL at Northern Illinois University. Most students who took her Northwestern classes came in with nearly no knowledge of ASL and had to pick it up quickly as Hart taught solely using sign language. This helped her demonstrate ASL’s status as the first language of the deaf in the United States.
“There is often an inaccurate assumption that because ASL is not written or auditory, it is not a language,” she writes in an email. “ASL is a completely different and unique language in its own right. I am thrilled with the addition of ASL classes to the list of foreign languages courses offered by Northwestern. It is wonderful to see a growing enthusiasm and interest in learning ASL.”
Although Northwestern doesn’t offer ASL as an option to fulfill Weinberg’s foreign language requirement, Kaht says she hopes alternatives like the seminar, Norris Mini Courses and the ASL Club will help facilitate students’ understanding of the deaf experience.
“Some people think it’s just all spelling with your fingers or that it’s a direct translation from English to sign language, but it isn’t,” Kaht says. “It’s not getting the recognition it deserves, and I feel that there are a lot of misconceptions about it, so people would enjoy it more if they knew more about it and had as many opportunities to learn about it inside the classroom as they do outside.”