Daniel Greene

Category: Education

  • Genre Recognition Venn Diagram

    I’m such a nit-picking perfectionist it’s killing me! I’m working on tweaking my slideshow presentation for a workshop I’m teaching at the Arizona RID State Conference, and I’m creating a Venn diagram because it was suggested by a few of the participants when I first taught this workshop last November. Problem is I’ve never created a Venn diagram before. I’m trying to represent how Genre Recognition is a skill that develops at the intersection of Discourse Analysis, Predictive Skills*, and Genre Theory.

    Is this diagram readable? Does anyone have any suggestions for improving it? Can you believe I’ve been working on this for an hour? Urgh! I hate being a perfectionist!

    *While Googling “predictive skills” (a term used a lot in ASL interpreter training), I could not find a single page that defined the term. Hm… interesting.

  • I taught a workshop today!



    I taught a workshop today!
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    Today, I accomplished something I’ve been thinking about doing for at least five years now: I taught a workshop to sign language interpreters. I have my colleague Joy Marks at the Desert Valleys Regional Cooperative to thank not only for taking this photo but for providing the logistical assistance, facilities, and equipment I needed to present this workshop. Her generosity on so many levels was invaluable.

    For my part, it seems that all my hard work, research, and preparation paid off. The students had fun, learned a lot, and scored my presentation highly. Yay!

  • Dennis Cokely "Culturally Rich Realities" Workshop



    Cokely Workshop 7 of 15
    Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

    This was the first time I had photographed a presenter giving a workshop in sign language. Those who know American Sign Language (ASL) can guess what Dr. Dennis Cokely was talking about. Those who don’t know ASL– well, they can have even more fun guessing. I don’t want to give away the content of his workshop to those who know ASL; rather, I encourage them to take his workshop themselves! As for those who don’t know ASL, there would be so much lost in translation if I simply said, “Dr. Cokely is signing X,” that I would be guilty of oversimplifying his message. And his workshop “Interpreting Culturally Rich Realities” is all about not oversimplifying any interpretation! I thank Dr. Cokely for his permission to photograph him as he worked.

    While I don’t want to give too much of his workshop away, I do want to use these photos to help myself and others who took his workshop recall some of this repeated points. One of the things Dr. Cokely repeatedly discussed was having multiple lexical items in one’s “mental files” to choose from when confronted with signs or words that represented “culturally rich realities,” or words that are not easily conveyed from one culture/language to another in a 1:1 ratio.

    As a photographer of a speaker presenting in ASL, I used the textual analysis and predictive skills I’ve developed as an interpreter to study Dr. Cokely’s rhetorical devices so that I would be prepared with my camera to capture him at the very moment when he would repeat one of his themes. As an instructor, he was very deft at using repetition to drive home a point.

    You may view my set of photos of Dennis Cokely on Flickr.

  • Anna Witter Merithew Receives Mary Stotler Award

    CIT President Carolyn Ball presents Anna Witter Merithew with the Mary Stotler award for her contributions to the field of ASL interpreter education at the awards banquet during the Conference of Interpreter Trainers in San Diego on October 20, 2007.

    I know this is not breaking news now, but I took this photo on my cameraphone and I just learned how to upload photos from my cameraphone directly to my blog by way of Flickr, so I’m trying it out for the first time. Just think of the possibilities for an average Joe like me to post breaking news on the Internet!

  • Video Response to "My first sign language video!"

    The following is a translation/transcript of my ASL video response to “My first sign language video!”

    Hi, Ashley. Thanks for leaving a comment on my video, “ASL Intro”! Your signing is good and you fingerspell well. If you don’t know a sign, it’s perfectly fine to fingerspell. You fingerspell clearly, and good for you! — I mean, it’s a good thing that you fingerspell instead of trying to invent signs.

    If I may make only one small criticism… (more…)