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This Issue 04/16/2009

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Every Monday and Wednesday in a small classroom in Williams Hall, a group of 13 students settles into a semi-circle waiting for class to start. The students chat about the weekend or their homework, holding idle conversation while waiting for their professor to walk in.

But as soon as Professor Joy Maisel enters, the classroom turns silent. And for the next hour and a half, not a word is spoken, as the students obey the “no voice” policy and immerse themselves in learning American Sign Language.

Maisel, who is completely deaf, is one of six ASL professors at Penn. In fact, five out of the six professors are deaf — only Jami Fisher, the ASL coordinator, can hear. Fisher is what’s known as a “CODA,” or child of deaf adults. Both her parents and one of her brothers are deaf, so growing up she learned English and ASL simultaneously.

The ASL program began at Penn in 1996, when six students approached the Penn Language Center asking for courses to be offered. Since six students is the minimum requirement for the creation of a new language class, ASL I was offered for the first time. Student interest grew and today about 125 students enroll in ASL classes each semester. The program has seven offerings, including five language courses, one of them focusing on medical sign language, and two seminars, Topics in Deaf Culture and Linguistics of ASL, both taught entirely in sign.

Professor Meghan Rainone — who was born deaf and has a deaf sister despite no family history of deafness — teaches both ASL III and Medical Sign Language. She says that throughout her schooling, she had an interpreter in all of her classrooms and was known as “the deaf girl.”

“My experience in learning ASL is not comparable to students that take ASL at Penn only because ASL is my native language,” she says. “I use it every day to communicate with others and survive in the hearing world. For them, it is just another language, one in which they may not necessarily continue after completing ASL IV.”