A new petition asking for ETSU to officially consider American Sign Language (ASL) as a modern world language is quickly spreading across campus.
The petition, created by ETSU student Eliza Billings, states that American Sign Language first became recognized as its own language in the 1960s. In 2017, the Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation to officially recognize ASL as a modern language. In the five years since, though, ETSU has made virtually no effort to consider it as such.
Students say that the College of Arts and Sciences at ETSU disallowing ASL to fulfill the language requirement not only hurts the ASL department at ETSU but also the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community itself.
Eliza Billings started the petition during International Deaf Awareness Week, which took place during Sept. 19-25. Since then, it has now reached nearly 600 signatures.
“I understand that ETSU recognizes it, but I think we could fully recognize it by seeing it as a world language,” said Billings. “I am just going to keep collecting signatures, and then I feel the more I have, the better it will be for meetings and talking to people.”
Third-year ASL student Olivia Sharp recently proposed a resolution bill requesting for ASL to be considered as a world language, with the main justification being that it supports students and staff at ETSU.
“Truly, ETSU has a big emphasis on community engagement and our local community, so we thought this was important because there is a huge deaf population in the area that use ASL as their primary language,” said Sharp.
Furthermore, Sharp mentioned that knowing even just the basics of ASL is incredibly impactful in the workforce and in everyday life.
Sharp intends to propose this bill to the student senate at ETSU, with the hopes that it will proceed to the faculty senate for consideration.
More information and the petition itself can be found at https://www.change.org/p/asl-should-be-a-recognized-language-at-etsu.
