What is "Jaimie's Signing Room"?

Hello everyone! My name is Jaimie, and I am a high school student passionate about Deaf advocacy. I live in a small town in New Jersey, and to be honest, until I was 16, I had never met a D/deaf person before. Although I knew people could be deaf and sign language existed, I never really bothered to truly learn about Deaf culture and its community because, well, I didn't think it affected me.

It was not until I was 15 and was watching an episode of the show "Switched At Birth" when I first saw an individual using sign language as their primary mode of communication. It was, obviously, different. Immediately, I was fascinated that, with the thousands of spoken languages used by people all across the world, there existed a language that was in an entirely separate category of communication, not in characters and tones but in presentation. I began diving further and further into the different aspects of Deaf and sign language culture, only becoming more excited to learn about the beauty of visual language.

However, one day when reading about the Deaf community in America, I was hit with a specific research article that was related to the shortcomings of the D/deaf experience. D/deaf individuals are more likely to be unemployed, unhealthy, and even imprisoned in comparison to those who have full hearing capacity. Not only was this staggering statistic devastating to hear, but it also left me with one big question: why? On a mission to find my answer, I began to research different aspects of the D/deaf community, and how the rest of the world interacts with them. I learned that stigmas revolving around visual language as well as deaf individuals as a whole were resulting in hearing-affected children being deprived of a valid form of communication at an early age. At first, I thought this was just a mere inconvenience. However, as I began to learn more about the effects of a lack of language stimulation in infants and children, I realized the connection between these misconceptions and the earlier statistics: language deprivation in deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) children are the major cause of the problems faced later in D/HH adults.

A lack of access to a mode of communication from ages 0 to 2 can cause irreversible cognitive underdevelopment in children that prevents them from ever being able to process new information properly and become fluent in any given language, whether it be spoken or visual. This cognitive shortcoming can result in a permanent feeling of disconnect between an individual and the rest of their world. A lack of ability to integrate into society is a proper and logical explanation to why D/HH individuals without early exposure to language are more likely to act out and be unaware of standard health practices.

So, we are already four paragraphs in, and I have yet to explain how my website ties into this overarching social problem. Well, although it may seem small and almost insignificant now, Jaimie's Signing Room has a purpose: to combat language deprivation in D/HH children by advocating for the integration of ASL. With free lessons in ASL as well as resources to my research in the significance of language learning, Jaimie's Signing Room is contributing to a society where ASL is widely accepted as a valid language that can be taught to D/HH children to prevent language deprivation and improve the D/HH experience in America.

Through expanding and widening the impact of my website, I hope to destigmatize the Deaf community and visual language, helping to create a more accepting as well as efficient world.

Come follow me on my journey! Sign ya later :)

Follow my Instagram: @jaimiessigningroom

Email me: jaimiessigningroom@gmail.com