This is my 20th year teaching undergraduate students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York. I’ve always had somewhere between one and ten Deaf students in my classroom, but they’ve been in a sea of hearing students. The university provides sign-language interpreters for courses, but I recognized how exhausting it was for Deaf students to keep up in my classes with the time lag that comes with interpreting. Sometimes it felt like I could almost see them thinking, “I’m just going to figure this out later. I’ll try to read the book.” They were clearly not getting the same classroom experience as the hearing students.

I attributed the Deaf students’ academic struggles to the painstaking need to fingerspell the organic chemistry terms that lacked proper signs. Their performance was noticeably lower than that of their hearing peers. And we rarely had Deaf students conducting independent research in our laboratories. I thought, “What can be done about that?” I have always gestured with my hands and body a lot when teaching, and I used to make up little terms to prompt the interpreter, calling different reactions or transition states of molecules names such as the ‘spaceship model’, the ‘bridge’, or the ‘cha-cha’. I would categorize these terms to help the students, but also to let the interpreter know that I was using a sign or doing one of my dances, so that they could just point to me.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when my colleague Jennifer Swartzenberg, a senior lecturer in chemistry who is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and a former student of mine, told me that there were no signs for many scientific terms that I began to understand the depth of the problem. Working with Jenn, who was vocal with me about things that I could change in my teaching, along with a particularly big Deaf class that was keen to work with me, really helped. A lot of them said: “What you do with your hands is really helpful. Let’s make it work even better.”

Word building

We identified several challenges that our Deaf students were experiencing during the organic chemistry course. One issue is that interpreters don’t know the science. Most of them don’t even have a scientific background, let alone knowledge of general chemistry or organic chemistry. Another issue is the absence of chemistry vocabulary in ASL, which means that long names of reactions, such as the Grignard reaction or the Diels–Alder reaction, need to be fingerspelled.

What did help — and this is where it gets controversial — was taking away the names of the reactions and categorizing every reaction into its transition state. So, instead of memorizing what felt like 300 named reactions, the students and interpreters needed to learn only 10 transition states. And every reaction is either one or a combination of those states. I don’t totally discard named reactions. They’re in the book, but I don’t test the students on them.

Communication barriers for a Deaf PhD student meant risking burnout

From there, a group of us, including several Deaf students, started creating a sign-language lexicon specific to organic chemistry. We made videos of the signs so they could be used for interpreter training, as well as teaching the next class of students. We also had the signs added to the ASLCORE website, a free sign-language vocabulary resource curated by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is based at the RIT. The Deaf students and I have argued over some signs, but it’s their language, so they have final say. I’m the person who makes suggestions for scientific content.

It’s important to note that these are not official ASL terms. They are part of a sign-language lexicon for organic chemistry. It’s a very specific context, so we took some liberties. For example, the sign I use for ‘tetrahedral’, the 3D geometry of a carbon atom’s bonds in certain molecules, is like this: my hands are held flat with my thumbs pointed out, one hand is positioned in the x plane and one in the y plane. The hands then ‘click’ together to convey the 3D shape. This is so easy to do, and everyone in my class knows what it means. Everyone accepts it, and the Deaf students don’t even laugh at it, despite the fact that in ASL the sign has a sexual connotation. But, I’m not going to use that sign in a conversation about tetrahedral groups outside my classroom.

As we incorporated the signed vocabulary and the ASLCORE videos into the course, we found that students who relied solely on an interpreter started to outperform hearing students on the course. And this was consistent in a study¹ we conducted from 2016 to 2019. Once our course culture changed to include more signing, the Deaf students not only improved in the classroom but also began to seek out research opportunities more often than they did previously.

We also started using sign language more for everyone, not just the Deaf students. I teach all my students signs for the most common answers to organic chemistry questions. When I ask the class, “Why do we get this product from this reaction?”, I ask the students to sign the answer back to me instead of saying it. It’s nice, because instead of someone shouting out the answer before the Deaf students can sign it and wait for the interpreter to voice their response, everyone signs it at the same time. It eliminates the interpreting time lag.

Broader benefits

We’ve created this organic chemistry lexicon with the Deaf community in mind, but we are starting to see its universal design advantages. What’s good for a Deaf person might also benefit someone else — similar to the way that a ramp into a restaurant that might have been built for people who use wheelchairs is also helpful for a person with a pram.

In a current study, we are tracking the progress of students who speak English as a second language and those who are neurodivergent. If there’s a visual sign that anchors the meaning of a scientific term, then it might help these students to keep up as the lectures move forwards.

This project has benefited more than just the Deaf community. I’ve heard from some of the Deaf students that they are proud that their language is helping others as well. Sign language has a beautiful way of saying a lot in very compact gestures.