Sign Language Incorporation in Chemistry Education (SLICE) Team

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Winner: 2022 Inclusion & Diversity Prize

For pioneering and disseminating an innovative sign language lexicon to facilitate the learning of organic chemistry by d/Deaf and hard of hearing students.

Celebrate the Sign Language Incorporation in Chemistry Education (SLICE) Team

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The Sign Language Incorporation in Chemistry Education (SLICE) team of the United States Rochester Institute of Technology are recognised for pioneering and disseminating an innovative sign language lexicon to facilitate the learning of organic chemistry by d/Deaf and hard of hearing students.

The SLICE team – made up of students and faculty members – will have significant impact on the d/Deaf and hard of hearing community. Nationally recognised ASL chemistry signs will provide d/Deaf scientists and hearing scientists an opportunity to build their connectedness as well as facilitate their communication and understanding of organic chemistry.

Pursuing a degree in a STEM-related field is a great challenge for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students and much has been reported on how to best support D/HH students in both the STEM classroom and the lab. Organic chemistry has long stood as the gatekeeper to pursuing many STEM career paths. Given its pivotal role, the team’s goal was to improve methods for conveying organic chemistry concepts for the D/HH students enrolled in these courses.

Historically, D/HH students who solely rely on an interpreter during organic chemistry lecture courses consistently performed below the average in class. A barrier attributed to this D/HH student performance is the lack of standardized methods in sign language to effectively communicate the organic chemistry terminology. As such, the team worked to address this challenge through a deliberate effort to develop a lexicon of insightful signs/classifiers that convey organic chemistry vocabulary as well as descriptive expansions to demonstrate challenging concepts such as reaction mechanisms and transition state modelling.

This work is crucial for d/Deaf scientists because you can’t learn science through fingerspelling. Without comprehensive ASL sign development, the science content has very little meaning for d/Deaf people. Having signs that convey the meaning of the words, that were previously finger spelled, adds value to the d/Deaf individual’s educational experience. It changes their world because now the content can be described in their native language and it has real meaning.

The team

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Kaitlyn Clark, ASL translator, SLICE team language creator and video signer / Undergraduate student
Cody Cummings, ASL translator, SLICE team language creator and video signer / Undergraduate student
Jonathan Dominguez, ASL translator, SLICE team language creator and video signer / Undergraduate student
Ashley Gleason, ASL translator, SLICE team language creator and video signer / Undergraduate student
Christina Goudreau Collison, SLICE content expert, PI / Organic Chemistry Professor
Michelle Mailhot, ASL translator, SLICE team language creator and video signer / Undergraduate student
Asma Sheikh, ASL translator, SLICE team language creator and video signer / Undergraduate student
Jennifer Swartzenberg, SLICE coordinator, Co-PI / Deaf Support Faculty and Senior Lecturer

Q+A

How did you feel when told you had won the Inclusion and Diversity Prize?

Kaitlyn Clark: It felt great to learn we had received this prize. It shows that there are others in the community that realize what we do is beneficial for making chemistry/science more accessible.

Asma Sheikh: I am honored to be a part of this change. d/Deaf people can do everything except hear and we are very proud to have our beautiful sign language work to educate ourselves in any science studies and communicate better with professional scientists.

Jonathan Dominguez: I was tremendously astonished to hear the Royal Society of Chemistry Prize was being given to us for our efforts to develop the sign language to support our understanding of organic chemistry. This is exceptionally good for our accessibility to communicate with people who are d/Deaf/hard of hearing, and hearing.

What were the biggest challenges in this project?

Michelle Mailhot: I thought the biggest challenge in this project was figuring out the appropriate signs that made sense for each of the Organic Chemistry vocabularies. Also, we wanted to make sure that the newly developed sign for each vocab was easy for d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing students and interpreters to use.

Jennifer Swartzenberg: The biggest challenges of this project were coming up with signs that encompassed both the organic chemistry content and the proper ASL grammar and classifiers. We worked diligently as a team to come up with our agreed upon sign(s) for different terms and then vetted our signs with a team of ASL linguists and d/Deaf content experts to ensure our work satisfied both the organic chemistry and the ASL accuracy.

Why is this work so important and exciting?

Jennifer Swartzenberg: This work is crucial for d/Deaf scientists because you can’t learn science through fingerspelling. Without comprehensive ASL sign development, the science content has very little meaning for d/Deaf people. Having signs that convey the meaning of the words, that were previously finger spelled, adds value to the d/Deaf individual’s educational experience. It changes their world because now the content can be described in their native language and it has real meaning.

Tina Goudreau Collison: The effective incorporation of organic chemistry ASL signs and expansions supports the fact that making an effort to be inclusive not only can benefit the group you are aiming to help, but through universal design can impact so many more people in the process.

Where do you see the biggest impact of your work being?

Kaitlyn Clark: Younger d/Deaf people. They can walk in a classroom and feel confident that there will be communication access before class even starts. They don’t have to team up with an interpreter and create temporary signs for the class.

Tina Goudreau Collison: I am hopeful that instructors in any field recognize that effective communication is a major key to learning both formally and informally. I have witnessed hearing students answer my question using the correct hand sign for a transition state while they verbally gave me the wrong answer. Sometimes, we have to think outside the box when communicating the material and orchestrating the learning process in a classroom. Many of us follow a long tradition of certain processes and assessments, and I hope this project catalyzes a different way to approach our pedagogies as a whole.

What inspires or motivates your team?

Asma Sheikh: We feel very proud to be the founding members of the SLICE project. We are motivated by the thought that future d/Deaf students will be successful.

Jennifer Swartzenberg: Seeing more d/Deaf people in the sciences is inspiring. Our pioneering work in this area will ensure that d/Deaf students have the access they need and deserve to learn alongside their hearing peers.

Tina Goudreau Collison: I have been teaching at RIT for 20 years, and until I started this project, I never mentored a d/Deaf student in my wet research lab. In the last four years, I have mentored five d/Deaf/hard of hearing students in my lab. This is not a coincidence and it encourages me to be alert in my teaching practices relative to inclusion. My actions changed the way my students saw me. I can't help but wonder what more there is for me to do to improve inclusivity practices in the classroom.