Learning American Sign Language has a multitude of benefits. “The partnership with the School for the Deaf was a way to ensure our students would receive the highest standard of instruction from a provider that uses ASL every day.” “It’s really about being able to provide a teacher that is truly qualified to teach ASL,” Brooks said.
The director of instruction and special education at the high school, Missy Brooks, details how the program was created. “The hand motion creates muscle memory, so it’s easier to remember.” “It’s cool that this qualifies as a world language class because this is really something that sticks with you,” Peterson said in the school’s article. Student Davis Peterson said learning American Sign Language is becoming reflexive for him. Signers and ASL students are invited to participate. To practice their signing in a real-world environment, students also have participated in silent dinners with members of Birmingham’s deaf community who meet monthly at local restaurants. Recently, students Denton Russell, Oliver Brooks, Sam Hecker and Brianna Morris-Finley had the opportunity to sign the National Anthem before a home basketball game.īefore the pandemic, students of Mountain Brook High School traveled to the Alabama School for the Deaf to tour the campus in addition to meeting students.
Through this course, students have gained enough confidence in their skills to take their knowledge outside of the classroom.
This year’s students have lots of determination and have grown tremendously in a semester and a half,” O’Daniel said in an article published on Mountain Brook High School’s website. “Language acquisition is different for each student. Mason Ashford is one of 15 students enrolled in the sign language course being taught at Mountain Brook High School.Īt Mountain Brook High School, an alternative students have to taking Spanish, French and Latin to satisfy their world language credit requirements is to take American Sign Language.Īccording to Mountain Brook City Schools communications specialist William Galloway, only two other metro schools, Homewood and Oak Mountain, offer this form of instruction through Alabama School for the Deaf.Ī group of 15 students at MBHS are enrolled in the sign language course and meet daily in Matt Ferguson’s classroom, where they join a Zoom call with Eugenia O’Daniel, a teacher at the Alabama School for the Deaf.ĪSL is a two-year course, and students now enrolled will complete it in May 2023.
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