ASL Nursery Rhymes

Last week I felt like I made some tremendous strides towards my goal of learning enough American Sign Language to be able to have an introductory conversation with someone. This week I decided I would have a little fun and try to learn a nursery rhyme in ASL. I thought that this would be a fun way to engage a class in learning because I could make learning a song a tactile activity. This was an enlightening experience in my lack of understanding for ASL. I planned to utilize YouTube again this week because I felt it should be as easy as searching for ASL nursery rhymes. I tried this and was surprised by the lack of videos that were available and that many of them were created by the same person. I thought this was odd, but moved on assuming that most ASL content creators spend their time on teaching videos rather than songs.

As I have mentioned in previous posts it is important to search for content created by people who are deaf or hard of hearing so I began looking into the creators of a couple of the videos. Both of the channels that have posted the majority of the content for my search were not created by people from the deaf or hard of hearing community. One channel ends the videos with a statement that they are not fluent in ASL, but are creating videos for their learning and the learning of others and acknowledge that they may make some mistakes. While the other channel appeared to be parading as experts in ASL . This was disappointing to see and I felt that I could not support their channel by watching because it is one thing to share ASL and acknowledge that ASL is not your first language, but it is another to pretend that you know exactly what you are doing. People who are just learning ASL or educators that what to share this content with their students may not have done the research behind the content and assume that they are watching a very informative channel. I admit, prior to my learning project, I would have seen this channel and felt like a rockstar watching them because it appears as though they are very knowledgeable on the subject, so of course I would trust what they are teaching.

After some more searching I came across a video called Awti Answers: What is ASL Rhyme?

In the video the creator talks about how it is hard for children that use ASL to engage in nursery rhymes because they do not rhyme in ASL. This thought never occurred to me. A part of the fun of nursery rhymes is the repetition and the rhymes. As we all know for something to rhyme it must have the same ending sounds. This cannot be the case in ASL because there are no sounds being made nor are the signs that could be used to translate the song alike or exciting. This explains the lack of nursery rhyme videos that I could find.

I set out on this ASL journey assuming that by the end I would have learned the skills to be able to converse with someone I have just met. I did not expect that there was so much beneath the surface that I would be learning such as the importance of ASL being recognized as its own language, ASL grammar, that things do not rhyme in ASL, and the general lack of knowledge that the public has surrounding ASL. However, the more I learn about ASL beyond the signs the more I am motivated to continue my journey because I am intrigued to learn more and share what I have learned with my friends, family, and all of you!