My friend Anna Murphy recently sent me St. Catherine University's library resources on APA style -- and they have ASL versions! Actual ASL with nice translations, not "we signed the English word for word" versions. I think these are a nice high school or early-college intro for ASL users, maybe good for a first-year college seminar course. (I'll ask Corrine Occhino about using them for ours, since this is a lovely set of matched bilingual resources.)

Joan Naturale also pointed me to an ASL companion to an introductory qualitative research methods textbook (Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology (REEP): Integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods). "ASL Companion," in this case, means there are well-done chapter summaries in ASL with the blessing of the original author (Dr. Donna Mertens). This is a nice textbook, in its 4th edition from Sage, not some hastily cobbled together thing for the sake of having something signed. Good scholarship in good ASL is, sadly, scarce stuff.

This stuff is important; not only does it make these materials more accessible to those who are native users of ASL, it gives us a glimpse towards what scholarship in ASL might look like. And yes, there have been Deaf (and hearing!) researchers working on "academic ASL" for a while (and what that means is still up for debate). I'm new to the conversation and feeling my way into a world that people far smarter and wiser (and familiar with ASL and Deaf culture!) have created before me, with the hopes of contributing to it as well.

My question is: what would it look like to do this in engineering, computing, and in engineering/computing education? I've seen scholarship in ASL, but only for clearly ASL/Deafness related fields... signed linguistics, Deaf education, Deaf history and rights, and so on. I've seen stuff about ASL in other fields, but it was written in English. What does it look like to do engineering and computing work in ASL and/or in a culturally Deaf manner? What would culturally Deaf engineering look like?

And I'm pretty sure that look is a key operative word here, but it's also going to sound like something -- Deafness doesn't mean the absence of auditory information! -- and it's also going to be a host of other things, because Deafness isn't just about visuals; consider the DeafBlind community, consider all the tactile/kinesthetic richness of the world, consider -- but I digress.

But what will Deaf Engineering (and Computing) be like? I don't know. I'm aware that I'm continuing to write these blog posts in English, and I'm okay with that right now, so long as my actual published/presented outcomes on this front come out bilingually. In part I'm writing in English because this is my scribble pad and I'm a native English writer, and it's what my thoughts come out most fluidly in (if I thought best in Spanish, I'd be writing in Spanish). But these kinds of resources are not just examples and resources for my future students; they're building blocks for me of what might be, what things might look like. And I can also tell from watching them that they took tremendous amounts of work to create, so...

..examples. I leave them here as exercises for the reader.