hANDING ON KNOWLeDGe: TeAChING YOGA TO The DeAF by Norma Colon Jennifer Kagan
B.K.S. Iyengar has said, “The sun shines everywhere, it does not shine only here and there. In the same way, yoga is for everyone.” By everyone, he does not mean only those who hear, speak, and see, who have two arms and two legs, who are strong and vibrantly healthy. Guruji said everyone. Full stop.
She started two evening classes for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing at a downtown Manhattan studio. The classes were successful. She also taught yoga in ASL at LaGuardia Community College for one semester. That successful class has moved to the New York Institute, where it has crowded the assigned studio. Vicki recalls how much she enjoyed teaching the class with Jennifer. According to Vicki, there’s not a great difference between teaching the Deaf and the hearing, because “when we teach yoga, we utilize our whole being to express the information. Language is an important tool, but just as the Deaf students never took their eyes off me, I had to
But everyone does not have access to yoga. The Deaf and hard-of-hearing community is one of the most underserved populations. According to the DeafYoga Foundation, there are 28 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the United States; only a few yoga classes and 20 instructors serve them.
That inequity is starting to be addressed by DeafYoga and, in the Iyengar Yoga community, by Jennifer Kagan. heighten my tools of expression—pace, rhythm, facial expressions, clarity and simplicity of demonstration—while being sure they could always see me.” Vicki says, “I loved working with Jen as a team, the give and take, seeing what worked and what didn’t. I was blessed to work with an ASL interpreter who knew our subject [Iyengar Yoga]. I would love to teach a class like this again, but I think the ideal situation is to have someone like Jen—a serious practitioner of yoga, a teacher, fluent in ASL and a member of the Deaf community—teach. I recommend that anyone who takes on a class for the Deaf study some ASL; it’s fun and allows us an experience of another way of being in the world.”
That inequity is starting to be addressed by DeafYoga (www.deafyoga.org) and, in the Iyengar Yoga community, by Jennifer Kagan, a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher and graduate of the Teacher Training program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York. This spring, Jennifer teaches “Yoga in American Sign Language,” an eight-week course in yoga fundamentals accessible to Deaf students. The series follows the groundbreaking 2007 class for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing taught by Vicki Vollmer (Intermediate Junior I). Jennifer, who had presented the idea to Senior Teacher Mary Dunn, interpreted in American Sign Language (ASL) as Vicki taught.
TEACHING IYENGAR YOGA TO THE DEAF Jennifer teaches Iyengar Yoga to her Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in ASL—using her hands, face, and body. A resident of Brooklyn, she was certified at the Introductory level in 2008 and is also a certified ASL interpreter with 15 years of experience. She also teaches classes for hearing students. “Continuing to teach in English is essential to the development of my teaching,” she says, “and to my ability to transfer that knowledge into a second language [ASL].” “ASL is an incredibly efficient and dimensional language,” says Lynette Taylor, Jennifer’s ASL mentor, “a visual, gestural language with linguistic features such as depicting verbs and classifiers. Some of our verbs mimic the action, and our use of classifiers is a way to indicate movement and who is doing the movement.”
Vicki leapt at the chance to teach a class she found innovative and challenging, saying, “The idea of communicating the power and depth of yoga without the tool of verbal language was fascinating.” She signed up for ASL classes and began to study Deaf culture. The class was well received, but Vicki moved to Italy after the second semester. I offered to teach the class with Jennifer. The class was canceled, but Jennifer was not deterred.
Yoga Samachar Spring / Summer 2010
In preparing to teach Deaf and hard-of-hearing students, Jennifer created a mentorship with Taylor, an advanced, longtime ASL interpreter and instructor. She consults Taylor on language use and communication specific to yoga—largely uncharted territory. They work together in asana practice as well as conversation, defining, clarifying, and refining ways to communicate yoga better through ASL.
4
