A Need in Deaf Education: American Sign Language Artistic Expression

Clayton Valli
(Abridged Version for Proceedings)

Descriptions of the ASL artistic forms of storytelling, poetry, comedy, and percussion signs have focused on Deaf ASL-users who perform. ASL storytelling is the most popular and the oldest art form in the Deaf community. ASL poetry is the newest. ASL comedy is also popular, but there are very few professional comedians. ASL percussion signs originally started in the 1940s when the Gallaudet College Bison Song was signed along with brass drum. It now is growing as an art form. However, Deaf students in schools today have not been exposed to all of these art forms. No ASL arts programs exist in deaf education in the U.S. In the deaf education system, there is no ASL class for Deaf/deaf children to improve and enjoy their language. In the Deaf community, the ASL arts have existed for a long time. Deaf people use ASL as their means of daily communication. Deaf families may have a respected status among Deaf people because they display effortless facility in the language of the group. Deaf children from hearing families are introduced to the use of the language by Deaf children from Deaf families and Deaf adults, most of whom have mastery of the use of ASL. Away from the structured English environment of the classroom, deaf children learn not only ASL but also the content of the culture, including art forms, especially storytelling. At Deaf clubs, there is a variety of social activities including popular entertainment: performances, storytelling, skits, comedies, and percussion signs. Deaf performers share their artistic creativity with the general public, both Deaf and hearing. However, there is not much in the schools, especially in the primary and elementary schools. Thus, there is a need in Deaf education to develop a curriculum of ASL artistic expression for Deaf/deaf students at all levels.

Elements of Artistic Expression

Eye-based, hand-based, and spatial-based artistic forms that are related to language will be discussed below.

Handshape

• A succession of hand configurations is often found in poetry, storytelling, and percussion signing. This is called handshape rhyme. For example, the 5-handshape form may be repeatedly used in a line, at the end of each line, or all the time in a whole context.

• “Soft” hand configurations (e.g., 5-handshape, C-handshape, B-handshape and others that are likely to be relaxed and opened) and “hard” hand configurations (e.g., S-handshape, clawed 5-handshape, and others that are likely to be tense) can be chosen depending on a context.

Movement

• A succession of movement paths also is often found in poetry, storytelling, and percussion signing. The movement path describes the physical details of the path of movement in a sign such as contact (VEHICLE-PARK), straight (STRAIGHT), circling (ALWAYS), zigzagging (VARIOUS), oscillating (CHILDREN), and bouncing (IMPROVE-GRADUALLY). This is called movement path rhyme. For example, a particular circling form of different signs is repeatedly used in a line, in a paragraph, or at the end of each line.

• “Tones” of movement in signs can be prolonged, shortened, accelerated, reduced, enlarged, or tensed.

• Rate of motion is to sign fast, slowly, jokingly, convulsingly, dancingly, buffetingly, giddily, and so forth. One of these motions can be used in a line, more than one of these motions can be used in a line, or some can be chosen depending on a context.

Space/Location

• A succession of particular loci in the signing space is indicated in all the art forms. For example, at the end of each line of a poem, each different sign with the same particular locus is set to the left of the signing space. This could be called locus rhyme.

• Balanced space is designed in the signing space. The right side of the signing space could be balanced with the left side, the top with the bottom, or all of these can be balanced. It can be that only one particular locus is used all the time. This is called off-balanced space.

Non-Manual Signals

• A succession of particular non-manual signals is often found in the art forms. Non-manual signals include eyebrow shift, eye gaze, mouth movement, head nod, head shake, and body shift. This is called non-manual signal rhyme. It can happen in a line, at the end of each line, or in a paragraph.

Eye Contact

• Eye contact implies contact with the audience. Storytellers, comedians, and percussion signers use eye contact with the audience more often than poets do. Some poets sometimes use eye contact depending on the intention of a poem. Poets tend to look at hands or loci more often than do storytellers, comedians, and percussion signers.

Rhythm

• The number of movements/repetitions of a sign/non-manual signal is often three in poetry, storytelling, and percussion signing. It imposes on the context a regular recurrence of movements (sometimes one time, sometimes two times, and seldom four times) that is intended to parcel a line into equal divisions of time.

• Pauses are very important in these art forms. “Silence,” the opposite of movement, is a slight hold between signs or a long hold at the end of a context. It is part of the rhythm.

Citation Form and Prose

Citation form in ASL is often used by sign language researchers and teachers who make reference to the “standard” form of a sign language lexical item, in contrast to a dialectal or stylistic variant. Citation form is most frequently elicited in response to, “What is the sign form __________?” However, citation forms are often quite different from those occurring in prose. Prose is what is uttered naturally during discourse. ASL prose is the medium through which first language users communicate daily with ease. If citation forms in a sentence are made, the signs are produced in isolation, independent from their surrounding phonological environment. They are more laborious to construct in either expression or reception. Compared with prose signs in a sentence, the signs are produced spontaneously and rapidly. Prose signs in the sentence are subject to phonological conditioning in which a unit like on the characteristics of a neighboring unit. Describing features shows the importance of understanding linguistic functions under various surrounding phonological environments like citation forms and prose. In this way, these forms can be separated from ASL art forms by using analysis and critique.

Use of Language in a Classroom

ASL is used among Deaf people to communicate with ease. However, ASL is not used or allowed in classrooms. Deaf adults are isolated from schools that Deaf/deaf children attend almost daily. Education is either domesticating or liberating. It happens that in the U.S. the education of Deaf children is heavily domesticating. Domesticating Deaf children means to feed their minds with sounds and to fill their souls with sounds. Many Deaf adults from oral schools or mainstreamed schools often tell me that they wish their teachers used ASL in classrooms. None of them received formal instruction in the use of ASL in schools, even still today. Deaf/deaf children are not exposed to ASL art forms in schools at all. Administrators and educators have been trained to use various modes of communication such as oralism, simultaneous communication, and artificially developed sign systems for encoding English, in an effort to teach Deaf/deaf children to speak English, a language and modality which may be totally inaccessible to them. The use of signs to support spoken English is often referred to as “sign language,” but it is not. Sign languages are natural languages with grammars independent of spoken languages:

• They develop naturally over time among a community of users;

• They are acquired through an ordinary course of language acquisition by children exposed to them; and

• They are grammatically organized according to principles found in all human languages but show independent patterns of organization that make each sign language unique.

Artificially developed systems for sign-supported speech have none of these three characteristics.¹ They are being developed by committee, not through regular use by a community. ASL is distant in structure from English. As for now, there exist roughly 10,000 programs for the Deaf in the U.S. that need to be exposed to ASL and Deaf culture. (There are a lot more programs that have at least one or two students not included in that category.) In 1991, only three schools (The Learning Center for Deaf Children in Framingham, Mass., Indiana School for the Deaf, and California School for the Deaf at Fremont) are using a bilingual/bicultural approach to teach Deaf children who can be bilingual, using both ASL and English (one or the other at a time, not simultaneously). I have taught Deaf children ASL poetry and other art forms in several schools (Sterck School in Newark, Del.; Kendall Demonstration Elementary School, Washington, D.C.; Kentucky School for the Deaf; New York School for the Deaf at Fanwood; and The Learning Center for Deaf Children in Framingham, Mass.). Almost all Deaf students from all levels were excited to learn ASL poetry and other art forms like the ABC stories. They just loved it and appreciated it a lot. Because of the increasing use and focus on ASL in the education of Deaf/deaf children, now is the right time for the development of art forms in ASL programs. Through the use of the curriculum related to ASL art forms, they will learn the forms of storytelling, poetry, comedy, and percussion signing in school and understand their own language and culture better and enjoy that with pride. Also they will appreciate English and its art more by virtue of having a first language. Deaf/deaf children simply need to express themselves freely in their own language, ASL, both in classrooms and outside of classrooms.

About the Presenter

Clayton Valli, born Deaf, graduated from Austine School for the Deaf in Brattleboro, Vt. He received his A.A.S. in photography from NTID, his B. A. degree in social psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno, and his M.A. in linguistics from Gallaudet University. Currently an instructor in the Department of Linguistics and Interpreting at Gallaudet University, he is pursuing his Ph.D. degree in linguistics at the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. For the past 12 years, he has been lecturing on ASL structure, ASL teaching, and ASL poetry nationally and internationally. He dreams that someday ASL language arts will be taught in every school for deaf students.

1. See Johnson, R., Liddell, S., & Erting, C. (1989). Unlocking the curriculum: Principles for achieving access in deaf education. (Gallaudet Research Institute Working Paper 89-3). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University.