I’m Jason Gervase, a Deaf native of Scottsdale, Arizona, born to a Deaf mother and immersed in Deaf culture from birth. I spent five years at the Phoenix Day School for the Deaf before my family moved me into mainstream education, a transition that shaped how I think about access and language long before I became a teacher myself. That early exposure to two very different educational worlds, one built around Deaf language and community, the other not, is part of what eventually drew me to this work.

My path since then has taken me through New York, Italy, and Mexico, and I hold a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Arizona State University. Along the way I became fluent in Italian, Italian Sign Language, Spanish, and Portuguese, in addition to ASL and English. After eleven years based in Tucson, I now call Amsterdam home, where I’m learning Dutch and Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT).

Since 2010, I’ve taught American Sign Language and Deaf culture to students ranging from complete beginners to working professionals, in university classrooms, in Italy, and now fully online. I served as Principal Lecturer at the University of Arizona and taught as a professor at the Siena School of Liberal Arts, but the throughline across all of it has been the same: showing people that ASL is a full, rich language worth taking seriously, not a novelty or a shortcut.

That belief is what led me to found ASL Pinnacle in the summer of 2021. I kept meeting people who wanted to learn ASL but were priced out or boxed out by college-level coursework, credit requirements, and rigid schedules. I built ASL Pinnacle to be the alternative: real instruction, real community, without the gatekeeping.

Outside of teaching, I’m usually in the kitchen working through a new recipe, out with my dogs, or slowly making sense of Amsterdam’s canals, bike lanes, and blunt but well-meaning directness.