This
summer, a group of high school students stood before a wall of red and gold
rocks in Utah’s Moab Valley, striped with different formations and cracked
by faults. Orange field notebooks at the ready, they leaned in toward the rocks,
measuring the orientations of the fault planes with their compasses and drawing
diagrams. But instead of the typical chatter of an average geology field trip,
the group was silent — but they were communicating, rapidly and often,
in American Sign Language (ASL).
Michele Cooke, a professor at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, uses American Sign Language to talk to Colin Whited,
a high school student at the Indiana School for the Deaf, about a fault, while
in the Moab desert in Utah. Photo by Theresa Huckleberry.
The deaf students and their teachers had traveled to the Utah desert to get
their first taste of structural geology under the tutelage of Michele Cooke,
a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and her team of geologists,
both hearing and deaf. Cooke put together the program under the auspices of
the CAREER Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), to bring geology
to an underserved community.
Cooke, who has been hard of hearing since her early childhood, invited six high
schools for the deaf to send one or two students apiece and their teachers to
Utah for one week of field work. She also invited several hearing and deaf professional
geologists to join the field party, from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and
various universities. She ended up with 20 high school students, six teachers,
two interpreters, and about a half-dozen geologists to teach them in the Moab
desert.
Cooke says that she was drawn to geology partly because she was good at imagining
3-D structures. She acquired ASL as a second language when she was in graduate
school at Stanford University. Teaching science to deaf children as a volunteer
at a high school across the San Francisco Bay, she saw the “tremendous
range of abilities and communication challenges” for deaf children, depending
on when they acquired their language skills, either spoken or signed. The experience
led Cooke to want to teach geology “hands-on in a deaf learning environment,”
but she did not get the opportunity until she moved to Massachusetts.
Mary Ellsworth, an earth systems teacher at Model Secondary School for the Deaf,
based at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., contacted Cooke several years
ago to ask her to take part in a geology classroom activity for her high school
students. That call eventually led to a sandbox exercise, where teachers and
their students built the same kinds of trays that structural geologists use
to mimic fault systems in the lab. The program was the original focus of the
NSF grant that would eventually take Cooke and students from across the country
to Utah.
Their subject would be the Moab Fault, and Cooke recruited John Solum, a Mendenhall
research fellow at USGS in Menlo Park, Calif., who specializes in the fault
and knew the best outcrops to show the group. Teaching deaf students “was
brand new to me,” he says, and in the first couple hours after meeting
the students, it was “intimidating as well.” But “a lot more
direct communication” took place immediately than Solum thought possible,
particularly because he knew no sign language at the time (he says that he now
knows the ASL alphabet). “In the field, the easiest way we have of communicating
is with drawing,” he says, which is true of all geologists.
“Language gets in the way when you’re teaching” any kind of geology,
Cooke says, “especially the scientific jargon.” But with ASL, signers
can get past the technical language and straight to the physical concepts, she
says.
The field exercises, such as measuring the orientation planes of a fault known
as strike and dip, brought out visual-spatial abilities in the deaf students
that perfectly fit studying structural geology, Cooke says. “ASL users
tend to be very good at pattern recognition observations,” she says, and
structural geologists are the same way.
After being a teaching assistant for a structural geology class at Colorado
State University in Fort Collins, where he is a graduate student, Scotty Salamoff
wrote in an e-mail that “being in the field with high-schoolers was a different
experience” because of their openness to abstract ideas, even though they
had less exposure to chemistry and physics than college students. Although he
himself is deaf and uses ASL, Salamoff wrote that “teaching geology to
deaf or hard-of-hearing kids was a surprising experience,” as they seemed
to have “the ability to visualize easier than hearing kids do.”
David Corina of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California,
Davis, wrote in an e-mail that “deaf children who have been exposed to
sign language from an early age do show some enhancements in visuo-spatial abilities,
but it is not across the board.” Some studies show, for example, that they
can more easily rotate objects mentally and remember spatial locations better,
but not necessarily remember images better.
Although not much research has been conducted on ASL users’ spatial perceptions,
“I can imagine that an ASL speaker has a great sense of 3-D space within
an arm’s length,” says John Middlebrooks, a researcher at the Kresge
Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. An ASL
speaker physically forms words, making hand and arm gestures “within a
set space” about a meter from the eyes, he says; at that distance, stereoscopic
vision comes into play, which gives visual cues to depth.
“ASL can be used in different ways, like body language, variety of signs,
[and] facial expressions,” wrote Chanc Vogel, a soil scientist with the
U.S. Department of Agriculture in Richland Center, Wisc., who is deaf. His own
experiences as a geology professional have led him to make up signs (see sidebar)
to speak using the vocabulary his co-workers use. Vogel, who is not involved
with Cooke’s project, describes ASL as being as different from English
as English is from Spanish, and each deaf person’s acquisition of any of
those languages might happen very differently.
Signs also may vary from place to place, as spoken accents do. Cooke’s
field crew had to learn some words in each others’ dialects, as well as
make new signs (such as for “fault”: signing “f” with one
index finger while sliding flattened hands past each other), she says, alongside
learning the new geology concepts.
The students said that they were surprised that “communication was not
the issue. It was just a matter of everybody [being] willing to put effort into
it,” says Ellsworth of the Model Secondary School for the Deaf. “Different
cultural exchanges were going on at different levels.” The hearing geologists
were willing to learn signs, just as the students, who had yet to take earth
sciences, were learning about scientific work and field work.
The field experience was “so totally unique,” Ellsworth says. “Even
in a hearing program, it would be a unique opportunity to do that.” Many
of the students (and Ellsworth herself) had never seen the Southwest and were
“bowled over” by the geology there.
“I got a good picture with the sandbox [experiments], but never have I
really thought about it in terms of size and depth of the faults in real life,”
wrote Mary D’Angelo, a student from the Model Secondary School for the
Deaf who went on the trip, in an e-mail. “I would prefer to be a geologist
because I enjoy doing my work outdoors,” which was “the most significant
thing” she learned on the trip, in addition to helping to collect samples
for a real study. D’Angelo also says that she now better appreciates the
multidisciplinary nature of geology. “I didn’t really think how much
geology impacts us until I saw it for myself.”
Naomi Lubick
Links:
Blog
of the Utah Trip
Sandbox
experiment at Indiana School for the Deaf
Michele
Cooke's GSA abstract
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