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A Brief Note On Deaf Community Communication

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During my time at Highline I became involved with the Deaf community which I previously had no idea existed. My original interest in learning ASL was sparked by my nephew who relied on the language as his main method of communication due to a processing issue in the Wernicke 's area of his brain. He was completely capable of understanding speech, but signing was easier for him to use for self expression, yet his family simply refused to learn the language. I thought this was nonsense and decided that I would learn in order properly communicate with my nephew, but I wasn 't prepared for how much this would change my life. Learning ASL opened my eyes to this whole world that ran parallel to the hearing world that most people didn 't even know was there. I can honestly go on for pages about how rich this community and culture is, but I 'll leave it at this: as a hearing person who is now aware of how important communication sharing is to the Deaf community, I think that it is my personal responsibility to continue to develop my skills in ASL and bring that skill in to my work; not for the sake of repairing or "fixing" hearing or even cognitive issues, but for the sake of making all information in a person 's treatment readily available without the need to an interpreter.

In the fall of 2014 I began working with a handful of Highschool students who all were struggling with different learning disabilities dyslexia being one of my main focuses . I myself was diagnosed
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