Improve Community Life Using Sign Languages Courses
Imagine your are staying with friends and after a delicious dinner with fine wine, everyone goes to bed. You wake up, It's pitch black, nature calls! The trouble is you don't know where the light switch is. Your stumbling into chest of drawers, bookshelves and dressers in an attempt to get to the door. Naturally deaf people aren't necessarily blind too, it demonstrates how frustrating being deaf is.
Lipreading is the main way deaf people receive information, however this can be slow and tedious for both parties. If more people in the community took a sign language course then communication would be quicker.
In 1817 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet set up the first American Sign language school at Hartford, Connecticut. His work was drawn from several sources, the American Indians who used inter tribal signing to communicate and French sign language which had been standardized since the eighteenth century. Before Gallaudet established his school there were pockets of regionalized sign languages. As each community adapted their own signs. In many ways deaf awareness issues had a higher place in society then than they do now.
Deaf Awareness Week is at the end of September. One event organized by Roxanne Baker is called annual Deaf Culture Festival at the Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing said "it gives you an idea of how we see the world through our eyes". The issues raised at the festival included: Deaf culture and the methods of teaching used for Deaf children education normally through lip reading rather than sign language. The effect of lip reading in teaching is being linked with the oppression of Deaf culture because it means that the community as whole are not learning the number one language of the deaf community, which is American Sign Language.
If you would like to watch the video beneath, Sarah hi lights the basics of the Sign Language Course.
