ASL courses offered at Pacific

• ASL 101 Introduction to American Sign Language
• ASL 102 Introduction to American Sign Language
• ASL 201 Intermediate American Sign Language
• ASL 301 Deaf Culture
• ASL 302 Deaf Community Involvement

Research

Starting with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 I have researched how the war is impacting the Deaf community in Ukraine and influencing Ukrainian Sign Language.

Currently I am researching how members of the Deaf community use absent referents and directionality in choral recitation of mirrored songs in ASL. Do Deaf people sign songs the same as they would a conversation, or do they sign songs more as a performance?

Some of the other unique and yet unexplored features of sign languages I want to study include the following areas of focus:

• Why sign languages lack widely-used written forms
• The six-dimensional nature of sign languages
• Variance in ASL
• Obscenities and euphemisms and their relation to taboo topics across languages
• Left-handedness and signing number ranges and double letters in ASL
• Applying Dr. Stephen Krashen's hypotheses on Comprehensible Input to teach languages more effectively than traditional instruction 

Education

Master's degree in Education at Portland State University, 2008

Bachelor's degree in English Literature at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, 2001

Teaching & Learning

In addition to teaching at Pacific University since 2016, I have taught American Sign Language at Edison High School, Vernonia High School, and Portland State University. I have also taught English in Japan and Poland. I have taught English, Japanese, and ASL and am a student of Norwegian, Ukrainian, and ancient Egyptian.