By Shelby Peck | Staff Writer
The College of Arts & Sciences Council of Chairs recently denied a proposal from Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences requesting American Sign Language be entered into the college’s core curriculum.
The Curriculum Committee oversees the acceptance or denial of every course proposed for the arts and sciences curriculum, including language courses. Currently, the core curriculum provides students with several options for their language credit, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Portuguese — but not ASL.
When the motion arrived at the college’s Council of Chairs on Feb. 9, it failed — by a 12-12 vote. The proposal required a two-thirds majority vote to pass.
“It turned out that 12 department chairs were in favor of including [ASL] in our core curriculum, and 12 department chairs were against including it,” Hope Johnston, chair of the College of Arts & Sciences core curriculum advisory committee said.
The issue of accepting ASL as language credit for arts and sciences students is nothing new. In 2018, two brothers born with hearing impairments gathered over 1,000 signatures from Baylor students who supported the inclusion of ASL as language credit for students outside of Robbins College.
The most recent proposal from Robbins College to include ASL in the arts and sciences core curriculum originally underwent an ideological review by the advisory committee to ensure ASL fulfilled the requirements to be included on the course distribution list.
“Our committee of seven faculty members representing both the sciences and humanities agreed unanimously that based on the substantive merits, [ASL] should indeed count as a foreign language,” Johnston said.
Using peer-reviewed research, Johnston said the committee ultimately determined ASL fulfilled the requirement of being a foreign language because it’s conceptually different from English. Many languages taught at Baylor, such as Spanish, can be used domestically. ASL is no different.
“Baylor’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is really important,” Johnston said. “Back when the core curriculum was envisioned … one of the reasons the foreign language requirement was included was as a means of having empathy for people who are different from us.”
The proposal then went to the curriculum committee, which examined the technical details of ASL’s implementation. It passed again.
“[ASL is] a real language compared to others … you can depend on it through two channels — vision and feeling with your hands,” Lewis Lummer, senior lecturer of deaf education and American Sign Language, said through a sign language interpreter.
Lummer, who was born deaf, began teaching ASL at Baylor in 2010 and was Baylor’s first fully deaf professor. Because he can sign ASL as well as read and write in English, he is bilingual.
“My belief is in God. God gives the language,” Lummer said. “So everybody has their own, deserves some type of language. If they want it, we should give it. We’re not above God.”
He also said while Baylor’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies become increasingly more inclusive, language is overlooked. While Lummer can write and read in English, he feels unseen in his own personal language, ASL.
“I love Baylor. Baylor is a great program. At the same time, this is my language,” Lummer said. “We are the leaders, not followers, and so we change the world.”
Many Research 1 classified institutions — a prestigious designation recently achieved by Baylor — accept ASL courses as language credit for arts and sciences students, including the University of Texas, Clemson, Yale and Harvard.
Even within Baylor’s campus, ASL is deemed acceptable as a language credit for other students, such as those studying engineering and social work. Business students are able to take select leadership and journalism courses to fulfill their language requirements.
“Students are the ones who have been very interested in advocating for this. Will this come up for review again? I think based on student interest in the past, it’s quite likely,” Johnston said.
As scholarly attention and dedication to ASL advocacy grows, she said she hopes more people will learn about ASL and how to “connect and use our languages toward the reconciliation of the world.”
“There is a deaf culture. It is a community that still faces significant barriers,” Johnston said. “If we are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion as a university, this is a language that would be important for our students to learn.”
