Shayna Kantor turned her passion for American Sign Language into her third-place winning IWitness Video Challenge project.

An eighth grader at Berkshire Country Day School in Massachusetts, Shayna was assigned to complete the IWitness Video Challenge in her teacher Sarah Pitcher-Hoffman’s history class. The Challenge asks students to be inspired by testimonies of genocide survivors and witnesses IWitness to create positive change in their community, and to document their process in a short video.

Shayna was drawn to one of the most unique testimonies available to view in IWitness: a testimony given completely in American Sign Language (ASL), which Shayna has been learning for the past two years. She was fascinated to learn more about what life was like for a deaf person in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

“Seeing what Rose Rosman, the Holocaust survivor I showed in my video, had to go through when she moved from school to school for her education, I thought it was unfair that she had to deal with that just because she was deaf,” Shayna said. “I realized how the deaf community is not acknowledged and included as much as they should be.”

For her community service project, Shayna went to a local kindergarten classroom and taught the kids the basics of ASL. She was excited to teach them a way to communicate with a community that they had never known before, and it was rewarding to introduce them to a new language that they may be able to use in the future.

Through her video, she wanted to teach her audience that deaf people are normal and the fact that they can’t hear is not a reason to treat them differently.

“My testimony and video can teach them that deaf people have to make more sacrifices than we realize in order to fit in with the hearing world and that we should start giving them more respect for that,” Shayna said.

Shayna came away from the IWitness Video Challenge feeling more empathetic toward all the things deaf people have to go through, and encourages other students to complete the Challenge themselves.

“I will take away from this that I should be more aware and respectful to those who are less fortunate than me and who have to go through greater challenges to make their lives work,” she said. “I would recommend the IWitness project to my classmates because it allowed me to have new experiences with people I never would have met, and I learned I could make a difference in others’ lives and so could they.”

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