About 60 people played an hour-long game yesterday in the Harvard Union, but no one was allowed to talk.
The silent players were participating in a workshop--the first of its kind at Harvard--designed to show hearing people what it's like to be deaf.
Once the participants entered the Union's Parlor B, no talking was allowed. Students rotated around seven stations, where they had to deposit a paycheck, report a crime, make travel arrangements and convey other complex information--all by means other than speech.
The program, titled "It's A Deaf, Deaf World," was sponsored by the Committee on Deaf Awareness of Phillips Brooks House.
Beth A. Baron '92-'93, a special concentrator in American Deaf Studies and past chair of the committee, coordinated the workshop as part of her senior thesis project.
Baron became interested in Deaf Studies after taking an introductory sign language course. The concentration focuses on "looking at the deaf community as a linguistically and culturally oppressed community in the U.S., and not as a disabled group," she said.
Harvard's only deaf undergraduate, Carrie L. Miller '96 of Baltimore, Maryland, was at the event.
Miller said through an interpreter that she thought the workshop was great. She said she was surprised that so many people showed up to learn about the problems facing deaf people.
Miller, who was born hearing but became deaf at the age of 15 months from spinal meningitis, swam on the 1992 U.S Deaf Olympic Team.
She said she is happy with her decision to come to school here. "Harvard has been very supportive of me," Miller said. "They have provided me with a doorbell that flashes, a fire alarm that flashes, and an interpretive service for all my classes and swimming. I really like Harvard."
Elizabeth T. Abrams '94, chair of the committee, said she hoped that the game and the discussion that fol- About 20 to 25 students take the beginnercourses in sign language that the committee offersevery term at Phillips Brooks House, according toAbrams. Many of the people at the workshop had someknowledge of American Sign Language. For those whodidn't, it was struggle to communicate. Hannah V. Boyle '96, who did not know anysigns, said the program gave her "an insideperspective into the world of the deaf by beingforced to find alternative methods ofcommunication." Luckily for those who didn't know any signlanguage at all, there was also a station wherethey could learn some American Sign Languagebefore having to communicate in a nonspeakingworld
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