HMS ASL Department

Welcome

In response to the COVID-19 crisis and school closure for six weeks, this website was built to provide our deaf students constant access to American Sign Language. Many of our students have minimal access to language at home and they are native signers. This website will help them continue their education uninterrupted. Please forgive any materials borrowed from other sites, this is used for educational purposes only.

Authors

Founded in the fall of 2015, the ASL Department works closely with both students and teachers in curriculum development, classroom resources, and ASL assessments. Currently, the team consists of an ASL Specialist, Megan Malzkuhn, and two ASL Teachers, Mary Simmons and Jennifer O'Brien. They all have Masters in bilingual Deaf Education and holds licenses as Teacher of Deaf and English as Second Language.

Area of Interest

Compared to English and many other written languages, American Sign Language has so few published works. There are several reasons to that: availability of technology, interest in publication, and quality of authors. The concept of using digital tools to collect and upload signed works entirely in ASL is a new one and the wider audience is slowly catching up. There are not many platforms where ASL literature video can be uploaded, viewed, and shared, and it is entirely dependent on individuals' access to technology. The signing Deaf community is small, there are approximately 500,000 people in both USA and Canada, making the playing field for deaf authors a very narrow one. Often teachers of Deaf have to use their own internal resources to create ASL videos or borrow others. We want to make this as comprehensive and wide-ranging to fit each of our students' interest. Deaf students deserve the luxury of choice like any other student in the US.