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FACING UNCERTAINTY Biology and Spanish junior and president of ASL Club Katherine Stroh teaches the club the sign for “family” at an ASL Club meeting in Dale Hall Nov. 13.
JACKSON STEWART/THE DAILY
Future of OU’s American Sign Language program unclear amid struggles to secure permanent funding
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h e f u t u r e o f O U ’s American Sign Language program is uncertain as it has been unable to secure permanent funding at the university or college level. The program was supported during its first year on campus by one-time funding, said Teresa DeBacker, interim chair of the Department of Educational Psychology. In the fall of 2017, the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology began offering American Sign Language courses, which are housed in the special education program. The dean of the college found money to support the program this year, but DeBacker said the goal of the college is to have stable funding. “I think that the barrier that we’re up against right now is that ASL, like lots of other things on campus right now, are just on hold again while (OU President James Gallogly) gets an understanding of the budget, establishes his own priorities and then releases funds accordingly,” DeBacker said. There are six sections of ASL I and one section of ASL III offered for this semester. DeBacker said ASL III will be indefinitely discontinued starting in the spring 2019 semester, but the overall program is not ending. American Sign Language is the seventh-most enrolled language at OU for this semester with 119 students, according to a document provided by Breck Turkington, associate registrar and director of academic records and enrollment services. The university offers courses for 17 languages. Katherine Stroh, president of OU’s American Sign Language Club, said she and other American Sign Language students received an email over the summer about the decision to discontinue ASL III. Many majors require students to take a minimum of three semesters of a foreign language. This has led to some students having to enroll in ASL III at different universities to complete their majors’ foreign language requirement. Stroh said she encouraged students to write testimonies about
K ATELYN HOWARD • @K ATELYNHOWARD_ how the program has impacted them and made a difference at OU, which she plans to give to Provost Kyle Harper. She has also reached out to the Oklahoma Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf and the Oklahoma Association of the Deaf for support. During a press conference in August, Gallogly said he would decide later dow n the road whether to cut some academic programs. This is part of his ongoing effort to “fix” the budget and keep student tuition flat. Other areas of campus have already experienced Gallogly’s budget cuts. Most recently, OU’s Office of Undergraduate Research and OU’s Center for Research P ro g ra m D e ve l o p m e nt a n d Enrichment were terminated, as well as 50 staff positions, most of which were in OU’s landscaping department. As a freshman in 2016, Stroh, who is now a biology and Spanish junior, discovered OU did not have an American Sign Language program or club, and she was not alone in wondering why. Other students and staff had the same question. Stroh said she became interested in learning American Sign Language in high school, so she could communicate with a deaf classmate. Once American Sign Language was offered at OU, Stroh and another student decided to start the American Sign Language Club. “Initially when I came, I was hoping for a minor that could maybe turn into a major,” Stroh said. “But since we didn’t have anything, even getting ASL I was a win for us.” The club meets twice a week and has about 20 active members. Tuesday evening meetings are geared toward beginners and students interested in learning American Sign Language. A theme such as clothing, food or expressing emotion is chosen and used to teach members signs related to the theme. The second half of the meetings are silent as members play games to practice the new signs they’ve learned. The only sounds that fill the room are the occasional light-hearted chuckles in response to someone doing a sign wrong or shoes scuffing the
classroom tile when a game gets too competitive. Each meeting ends with members learning a Deaf culture fact of the week. For Friday meetings, mem-
“I think that the barrier that we’re up against right now is that ASL, like lots of other things on campus right now, are just on hold again while (OU President James Gallogly) gets an understanding of the budget, establishes his own priorities and then releases funds accordingly.” TERESA DEBACKER, INTERIM CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
bers practice their American Sign Language conversation skills with people from the Deaf community and other students while drinking coffee or eating. Stroh said the silent environment is important to experience when learning American Sign Language. Sometimes the program’s assistant professor and two adjunct instructors, who are all deaf, come to the Friday meetings. Stroh said only a few deaf and hard-of-hearing students from OU are part of the club. Instead, its members are mostly beginners. “As you start learning ASL, you start learning about Deaf culture, and then you open yourself up to a whole population of people that you otherwise might not even think about,” Stroh said. “It’s easy to kind of marginalize that group, but having ASL and having it be a strong program makes it so that this group that has been marginalized and ostracized for so, so long gets hopefully some sort of
voice and some sort of recognition here at OU.” W h i l e t h e f u t u re o f O U ’s American Sign Language program is unclear, the program at the state’s other largest university is the opposite. Sandie Busby, American Sign Language program coordinator at Oklahoma State University, said the university’s American Sign Language program offers a minor and has been approved for an American Sign Language Bachelor of Arts degree. The program has been under the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Languages and Literatures since 2012, but Busby said the program did not initially succeed when it started in 2004 under the Department of English. Since American Sign Language i s b a s e d o n F re n c h , B u s b y said she thinks the American Sign Language program at OU would be improved if it was moved to the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics instead of the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education’s D epar tment of Educational Psychology. Dylan Herrick, chair of the D epar tment of Mo dern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, said the department would like to address the issues of understaffing several of its language programs, such as Italian, Russian and Japanese, are facing before adding another language. He said he thinks the solution for
American Sign Language funding lies at the college or provost level. Herrick said it would not make sense for every foreign language at the university to be taught in his department since languages are offered in multiple different departments at OU. Languages such as Kiowa are housed in the Department of Native American Studies and Latin is offered in the Department of Classics and Letters. Even though American Sign Language is not in his department, Herrick said American Sign Language should still be viewed as a foreign language with its own grammar since some people view it as just spelling English out with signs. According to the Department of Educational Psychology’s website, American S i g n L a n g u a g e a n d Na t i v e American languages qualify as foreign languages due to the State Regent’s Foreign Language competency policy. Many OU programs are facing similar budget problems, but students and staff are continuing to fight for the future of the American Sign Language program. “(American Sign Language) really has changed my life,” Stroh said. “It’s impacting more than just OU. It’s impacting the entirety of Norman and Oklahoma.” Katelyn Howard khoward@ou.edu
JACKSON STEWART/THE DAILY
Linguistics and Arabic sophomore Matthew Townsend does the sign for “black” while playing a game during an ASL Club meeting in Dale Hall Nov. 13. The future of OU’s ASL program is uncertain.