We are excited to share with you our most recent initiative, Signing O Canada: A Learning Video.
The vision driving this effort lies at the heart of our mission – helping to create a more inclusive and accessible community. Whether you try your hand at learning to sign or not, this experience may bring you together with others in different ways. This can be empowering.
The video’s intent is to:
- widen the existing sphere of awareness about the deaf community in Canada, and wherever the video shows,
- introduce and encourage that awareness in others,
- further, grow that awareness to those inclined through offering a learning opportunity to sign a commonly known song (our national anthem) through Canada’s official language for the deaf – ASL (American Sign Language).
In this experience members of the NL Deaf Choir and Shallaway are your facilitators. Children have been chosen to facilitate as their communication is open, purposeful and joyful. Their welcoming spirits invite us to take risks and offer us both confidence and the means of accomplishing the challenge at hand.
We thank wholeheartedly all of our terrific partners in this project – Leigh Ann Ryan of NL Deaf Choir, Kellie Walsh of Shallaway, and Professor David Buley of Memorial University. Andrew Mercer of Andrew Mercer Consulting for video production. Deaf advocate Myles Murphy, to whom we have dedicated this video. The Newfoundland and Labrador Association of the Deaf for professional oversight and much encouragement. And huge thanks to the eight talented and fearless young signers & singers and their supportive families.
We hope you enjoy this unique experience as much as we enjoyed creating it. Perhaps it may inspire you to imagine and create your own variations of new, inclusive and accessible community.