We had fun games that everyone could enjoy with themselves. To break the communication barriers, we gave papers and pen to those who don’t know ASL. This has enabled hearing and deaf to communicate by writing. This is what I usually do to communicate my friends and my coworkers who don’t know ASL. This way of communication has always been useful to me. In fact, I prefer communicating via note writing than communicating through interpreters when I am socializing with hearing people.
We “event facilitators”, typed on the computer with projector, so all people could see what we were typing. We put all the instructions of the games on the PowerPoint so that everyone could read it. I told people that to have a fair communication, I will not sign or voice. Instead I would type everything on the board and let everyone read it. This was so interesting, because we had many hearing students who did not know ASL. No one felt left behind in the game unlike what happens most of the time when deaf and hearing people are in an event together. It was great learning environment and everyone seemed enjoying being there. I was impressed how effective was to use this kind of communication.
One important thing that I learned tonight is that people just need encouragement to break the communication barriers between deaf and hearing. In fact, hearing and deafness cannot be a factor to separate our community unless we want it to be so, specially at RIT which has a huge diversity students,. We should not let having a communication barriers stop us from socializing as community. We are hoping to do more of this event in the campus. I hope a lot of deaf and hearing students in other colleges across the country could do too. This is best way to educate people about sign language and the importance of the community integration.
