American Sign Language (ASL) Club, a student-led group, is gathering and looking to recruit more students into a new horizon of language.
Club Sponsor Rhonda Clopton hopes to use the club as a medium to allow more communication within the community.
“I think that any time you can open yourself up to being able to communicate with other people, it’s a good thing,” Clopton said.
Senior Kellan Dore, ASL club president, sees the club as a fun way to get involved in something bigger.
“It just makes talking way more fun. I’ll be honest. There’s something about communicating in ASL that just feels novel,” Dore said. “There’s a lot of events around Richmond that I think people should know about because they’re all really fun. They’re all really nice and they help people to learn about ASL and about this community.”
The ASL club attendees are largely hoping to be able to use the skill to integrate themselves into the deaf/hard of hearing ecosystems both professionally and personally.
“A lot of students that are doing it hope to possibly become interpreters, not necessarily full time, but part time. There is a huge ASL community in Richmond that does game nights and lots of activities, and so they want to be fluent enough to be able to attend and participate in those,” Clopton said.
ASL club has reached out to associate with other official members throughout Virginia.
“We have a lot of really great contacts with companies like Mosaic Interpreting. We have contacts with the Reynolds Community College, their ASL Department. Our club actually has a lot of communication with other organizations, so hopefully we can just leverage that to help continue it,” Dore said.
The club itself is open to teaching beginners, and hopes to reel them into the silent world.
“Normally we take a couple of minutes at the beginning of each meeting to review a couple of basic things, you know, run through the alphabet, run through things like greetings and whatnot. Normally, there’s video content online by this man, Bill Vickers. He is a pioneer of American sign language, which is based on French sign language, and he has a whole video series about ASL signs. Take a topic, maybe seasons, and we would run through some drills and learn that one skill,” Dore said.
Looking into the future beyond this year’s group, the club is looking to recruit new interested students.
“We’re having our first meeting on Thursday, and hopefully enough people show up that we can kind of foster a little community. My hope is that somebody will take my place and take all of my friend’s places next year. I think basically all of the club, as far as I know, is seniors. We’ll need to figure that out. I hope we can continue,” Dore said.
Clopton seconded this point in discussion of the same first meeting.
“We’re meeting this week to talk about getting new members, especially younger members, so that we can continue going after this group of seniors graduates,” Clopton said.
The club meets in room 309 and welcomes pros and beginners alike in open arms.
