SignWriting Report March 11, 2003

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
March 11, 2003

Dear SignWriting List Members!
For the past week I have had four visitors from Albuquerque, New
Mexico, staying with me. Teachers Lorraine Crespin, Kate Lee, Dr. Cathy
Witty and Dr. Cecilia Flood presented SignWriting as a team effort on
March 8th, 2003, to around 25 teachers of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing
students, at the CAL-ED Conference (California Educators Conference)
here in San Diego.

The presentation went beautifully! The Albuquerque team brought a
PowerPoint demonstration that incorporated video clips showing young
Deaf students typing, writing by hand, and joyfully exclaiming "I can
write!"... It was wonderfully put together...

Thank you, Lorraine, Kate, Cathy and Cecilia...for your steadfast
attention to your Deaf student's needs...What is most impressive is
that your Deaf students have taken "ownership" or responsibility for
their own literacy development...the Deaf children are clearly taking
charge...reading, writing, typing and producing SignWriting and English
booklets...illustrating them, binding them...all themselves. According
to their teachers, SignWriting is playing an important role in the
development of their self-esteem...

The four SignWriting teachers from Albuquerque are now back home,
teaching their flock. They left their own unique legacy on the San
Diego area, with a newspaper interview in the San Diego Union Tribune,
and a radio interview that has been heard by several of our friends. I
am told it was a long radio interview, and that my friends were amazed
- so I will call the radio station and ask for a tape of the entire
radio interview and will then transcribe that interview into written
form for the general public. I thought it was going to be a television
interview in ASL - we were a bit surprised when the radio people came
instead! But now the radio reporter is interested. She says she will
talk to the TV people about doing a visual TV program - I hope that
happens!

A fifth teacher from Los Angeles, Richard Bernard, at the Granada
school, presented at the end of the presentation. Richard is having
success using SignWriting on cards. He places the English word on one
side, and the Deaf student is asked to write the sign in SignWriting on
the other side...Richard told me that he believes that SignWriting
contributed to improved test scores for several of his students...

Meanwhile, in my daily life now, I am fulfilling orders, trying to
complete the Shopping Cart design on the web, printing literature, and
by the end of the week, I will be starting video editing in my
Macintosh...One of our board members, James Short, is a professional
web designer and video editor. He is also an expert on captioning, and
has developed software for multi-lingual captioning of videos that are
on CDs or DVDs...so James will help me edit the video we took of the
presentation, and try to create a CD showing the progress in
Albuquerque...so this will be fun!

I am also eager to begin to add more signs to SignBank, and to answer
some of your important questions on the SignWriting List. I am happy to
see that you all are posting messages on the SignWriting List to each
other...The more you share different ways of writing, the better it is!

So that is my up-to-date report - I look forward to writing again as
soon as I can -

Have a wonderful day, everyone!

Val ;-)


Valerie Sutton
Sutton at SignWriting.org

1. SignWritingSite
http://www.SignWriting.org
Read & Write Sign Languages

2. SignBankSite
http://www.SignBank.org
Sign Language Dictionaries

3. DanceWritingSite
http://www.DanceWriting.org
Read & Write Dance

4. MovementWritingSite
http://www.MovementWriting.org
Read & Write Movement & Gesture

5. The SoulSite
http://www.SoulSite.com
Proceeds Donated to Deaf Literacy

Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting
Center For Sutton Movement Writing
an educational nonprofit organization
Box 517, La Jolla, CA, 92038-0517, USA
tel: 858-456-0098....fax: 858-456-0020
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 4717 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20030311/467618b2/attachment.bin>