Senior Faith Hubbard has felt an immense connection with the expressive language of ASL since she was very young.
She has been intertwining facial expressions, hand movements, and creative storytelling since she was in the eighth grade, and she hopes to continue it in her future career.
“I want to become an interpreter,” Faith said. “Ideally, I would love to do the performing side of interpreting, I just think it’s so cool. I think working for concerts would be super fun. Otherwise, a more realistic idea would be to create a bigger access of information for people.”
With a dream of performing songs with ASL, Faith has some experience in that field.
She went on an ASL class trip to the campus of Central Michigan University, where she performed a song for a group of people during Deaf Week.
“When I was learning my song for CMU,” Faith said, “I was thinking, ‘Oh, this clicks.’ I would be in my room and wanting to be performing this all the time, I would love that for my job. I performed the song ‘Heavy’ by the Powers. It was for [an event called ASL Rocks], and [the performance] was a really good experience. I was learning all the different techniques for glossing it out, seeing what works and what doesn’t. I had to see if I should go with the English version or the glossed version, seeing what goes along with the beat. It was really interesting trying to figure that stuff out.”
However, Faith had to start somewhere when it came to storytelling and performing. She did what is called a “classifier story” last year, describing a scene or situation with your body, instead of telling it with signs.
With this experience, she was able to grow her love for signing and her abilities with the language as well.
“[The rock story] was definitely one of the hardest classifying stories that I’ve done,” Faith said. “Last year I was kind of bad at classifiers, I had a hard time figuring out [the meaning of the classifier and how to use it]. So, for the rock story, it was a huge help figuring out and understanding different ways to use your body, especially because you get so used to using your arms and your torso and that kind of space. Also, trying to use your head and figuring out the different things you can do is super important to elevate your skills.”
Faith has been able to create many new skills when it comes to her learning of storytelling. She has become an overall more expressive person, especially when it comes to facial features.
In many cases, someone’s body movement and expressions play a big role when it comes to languages and storytelling, which Faith exemplifies in her performances.
“Usually, when I’m at work I will be talking with my boss and he can tell if I want to do [what he tells me to] or if I don’t,” Faith said. “Sometimes, he can even tell when I’m lying to him just by how I look at him in different situations.”
All of this comes down to how Faith can use her facial expressions to highlight important moments in situations, which is an amazing skill to have.
Even when she may be giving someone a “weird look,” it can be translated into her skill for expressing emotions when she is signing. This amazing feature of the language is to be known as NMS.
“[NMS] is a person’s facial expressions and movement,” Faith said. “In ASL, it’s either go big or go home. You want your eyebrows to move up and down depending on what you are saying, you want to move your mouth with mouth morphemes by using different sound effects. It all helps to move the story along and add more emotion to the story.”
Having this ability to learn another language has made a huge impact on Faith’s life, she has been able to communicate with many deaf people. Whether it be while she is working or just volunteering at deaf community events.
She encourages any and everybody to pursue this beautiful and expressive language if given the opportunity, it can help many people in many different ways.
“Learning ASL is super important,” Faith said. “It can help include other people, and you never know what kind of impact that can make on a person later in their life.”
