Life Drawing and American Sign Language

I started a sign language lesson in the Art room purely out of boredom with an old lesson plan. Every year I teach life drawing and one of the first human forms that students learn to observe and draw is their own hands. I usually only spend a day or two teaching students how to observe and draw the contours and details of our hands before moving on to something else. It’s an intense first day but once students realize that they can move from drawing those horrible turkey hands to more skillful Albrect Dürer hands, they are pretty amazed at themselves and primed to do more. This time I decided to make the moment more meaningful and work in some additional skills at the same time. 

I used the concept of sign language to teach meaning making. In the beginning of our lesson we look at how sign language in its basic form works to help those who are deaf/Deaf. Just in writing this article I was exposed to new information regarding this statement. The lower case d is used to signify people with any degree of hearing loss and the upper case D is used to identify with the community at large, according to https://theaslapp.com/faq. As I do not know anyone who is deaf personally, I needed to consult sources such as theaslapp.com and http://wfdeaf.org/who-we-are/ . It is also important to note that I used ASL American Sign Language in order to teach this lesson. Sign language is not universal and differs from country to country. 

My students went through the design process of honing a message that needed to be thought provoking and concentrate on an event in the news cycle, a community, a human right, or a personal value. I phrased it differently in my initial instructions page but it is pretty similar. Some topics that students chose to explore include environmental issues, loss or personal strength after a struggle such as cancer, body image, LGBTQ community support, and peace. My English Language Learners were studying the atomic bomb in their history class concurrently  so I included an example image of the atomic bomb matched with the words “no war” in sign language. We used a printable ASL Alphabet Chart in order to learn how to construct our messages in English and we used our own hands as our drawing models. During the lesson on observing our hands I make sure to point out our unique hand features such as hitch hikers thumb, our nail shapes, our special wrinkles. I even do a little palm reading that I picked up overseas.

Just to balance things out I also allowed students to include whimsical messages as well, because we all need a little whimsy in our lives. I was falling in love with the Child, a.k.a. Baby Yoda at the time so I used this as my example for whimsy. 

During the lesson one of my newcomer ELL students shared that she was proficient in sign language which really helped me to make a deeper connection with her. 

Since this lesson I have worked with my son and daughter on signing as an added form of communication. Check back for updates on signing with younger children.