Rania Johnson, a native Minnesota, was born in South Korea and adopted to White Deaf parents at a young age. She attended public schools and have used sign language interpreters until graduated from high school. Rania earned a BA in Intercultural Communication from Metropolitan State University (St. Paul, MN), M.Ed. from University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), and MA in Sign Language Education from Gallaudet University. Rania has 20 years of experience in teaching American Sign Language (ASL) in higher education; she is an ASL faculty in the American Sign Language Studies Program at the Saint Paul College – a position she has held for the past few years now. One of Rania’s highlight experiences was volunteering for a non-profit organization working with the educators in the deaf communities in Kenya, Africa. It was a first of many steps in her understanding languages, cultures, educations, and social relationships.
Rania is passionate in teaching ASL as second language to students and encouraging them to go further in critical consciousness about social dialogues. Through her teaching, she aims to ensure the values of cultural perspectives, and encourage appropriate framing through understanding cross-languages and cultures in dialogue contexts. She enjoys continuously developing and furthering knowledge of other sign languages and cultures through looking at different aspects of dialogues, sharing and understanding worldviews, creating and building better communication across different languages. With that said, Rania continues expanding her expertise as language advocacy for ethnic minorities community within the Deaf community.
