Podcasts about communication sciences

Expert Panel: Amy Hobek, PhD, CCC-SLP, Fé González Murray, EdD, CCC-SLP, Vishnu KK Nair, Archie Soelaeman, Betty Yu and Reem KhamisTake ACTION HERE: Changes to 2020 certification standards feedback. Survey. (n.d.). https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2020_Cert_ChangesThis episode will be available for 0.1 ASHA CEU on July 2Correction Note from Dr. Betty: “During the recording I referred to the executive order targeting associations with assets of $500 million or more. I thought ASHA met that criteria but actually ASHA's net assets are around $174 million.”In this episode, Michelle and Erin host an all start line up of colleagues from across the globe to discuss ASHA's Proposed Changes to the “2020 Certification Standards” and the long-term ramifications that these changes could have for our profession. This conversation is timely in that there are only a matter of days, roughly 3 weeks or less, for audiologists and speech-language pathologists (including students) to write in and advocate to ASHA on whether the proposed changes to the 2020 Certification Standards should be accepted… changes that remove key words and language that were hard fought to obtain. Be informed that this conversation does address political rationale behind the changes and offer a plethora of resources for individuals to grow their knowledge regarding the long-term ramifications of these proposed changes… but it ends with resources on how to make your voice heard! So, come join the ladies of “First Bite” and ADVOCATE!About the Panel: Amy Hobek, PhD, CCC-SLP is an Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Cincinnati. Her teaching and scholarship focus on equity and inclusion, with an emphasis on valuing and legitimizing cultural and linguistic variations in these areas within individuals, families, and communities. She is also a licensed speech language pathologist providing clinic supervision of graduate students in a culturally and linguistically diverse preschool setting on UC's campus. She is a co-chair of the Cultural Humility Task Force of the National Black Association of Speech Language and Hearing. She is a topic co-chair of Equity, Inclusion, and Cultural-Linguistic Diversity for the ASHA 2025 Convention. Professor Reem Khamis (also known as Reem Khamis-Dakwar) is Professor Emerita at Adelphi University and Chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Long Island University (LIU) Brooklyn. Her expertise centers on language development, processing, and clinical services within the sociolinguistic context of diglossia and diverse populations. Dr. Khamis is co-founder of the Journal of the Critical Study of Communication and Disability (JCSCD) and a co-founding member of the Speech, Language, and Hearing Scientists Equity Action Collective. She currently serves as Language Section Editor for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR). She received the Excellence in Diversity Award in 2020 from the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CAPCSD). Fé González Murray, EdD, CCC-SLP is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northern Arizona University. Prior to joining the NAU faculty, she worked for 25 years as an English/Spanish bilingual speech-language pathologist in various settings, most notably in public schools serving Indigenous American, migrant, and immigrant populations. In addition to teaching and supervising clinical rotations, she facilitates workshops nationally and internationally on topics related to responsive practice with culturally and linguistically diverse individuals and their families, including multilingualism and collaboration with interpreters. Vishnu KK Nair is a lecturer in the School of...

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders MS SLP Program - Dallas. We at Prestoncrest are honored to host such bright leaders of our community again for their ceremony! May God bless these graduates, previous students and all those that continue to serve and advocate for our most vulnerable in society.Subscribe to PRESTONCREST - with Gordon Dabbs on Soundwise

On the phone-in: Our guest is Steve Aiken, an associate professor of audiology at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Dalhousie University. He answers listeners' questions about hearing loss. And off the top of the show, we speak with Thomas Arnason McNeil from the Ecology Action Centre. He comments on the topic of climate change and how it figured into the federal election. We also hear your feedback on income inequality.

Join us for a riveting conversation on Pagecast as Sewela Langeni sits down with Iris Mwanza to explore her gripping debut novel, The Lion's Den. This legal thriller set in Zambia's turbulent political landscape tackles themes of justice, gender equality, and systemic oppression. More about the book: Rookie lawyer Grace Zulu does not give up easily. She escaped an arranged marriage to put herself through university. Now she's got her first case. Her client is young Willbess ‘Bessy' Mulenga, who has been arrested for offences ‘against nature'. Bessy works in a men-only bar, loves to dance, to wear dresses and live freely. But in 1990s Zambia, following your own identity can get you beaten, jailed or even worse. Grace is determined to get Bessy out of custody. Then her terrified, bruised client goes missing without a trace. She knows something bad has happened and that someone is trying to cover it up. Along with the most unlikely group of allies, Grace must take on powerful enemies at the highest levels – even risk her own safety – to get to the truth. The whole truth. A debut novel that soars with passion and humanity, The Lions' Den is a moving story of prejudice, corruption, injustice, courage and solidarity. It shows us that no cause is ever a lost one. More about Iris and Sewela: Iris Mwanza is a Zambian-American writer. Now Deputy Director of Women in Leadership in the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she has worked as a corporate lawyer in both Zambia and the US. Mwanza holds law degrees from Cornell University and the University of Zambia, and an MA and PhD in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In addition to her work at the Foundation, Mwanza serves on the Supervisory Board of Care International and on the Board of Directors of World Wildlife Fund US. Sewela Langeni is an author and the owner of Book Circle Capital, an independent bookshop focusing on African Literature based at 27 Boxes in Melville, Johannesburg. She is passionate about literacy, especially in children. She is a Marketing Manager at one of South Africa's leading insurance companies. Her academic background spans from Journalism, Communication Sciences and Marketing. She holds a Master's degree in Strategic Marketing and Consulting from the University of Birmingham, UK. Sewela is an avid reader and reviewer of local books for adults and kids. In her role at Book Circle Capital, she also facilitates conversations on books with authors. #NewPodcastAlert #AfricanLiterature #LegalThriller #GenderEquality #ZambianAuthors #PodcastSeries #BookCircleCapital #BookPodcast #Fiction

In the episode, I talk with Julius Fridriksson, Professor of Communication Sciences and Vice President for Research at the University of South Carolina, about what's going on with the NIH since the recent change of administration.

If you've wanted to start a private practice while navigating another job or learn more about serving bilingual clients, don't miss out on this episode! Joining me today is Esmeralda Sánchez, a bilingual and bicultural native Spanish-speaking Speech-Language Pathologist located in Chicago. She is the founder of Bilingual and Brilliant Speech Therapy LLC.Esmeralda joined the Start Your Private Practice program in 2023 and began building her own caseload, starting with four private-pay clients. As her business grew, she transitioned into the Grow Your Private Practice Program to scale her practice further.In this episode, Esmeralda shares why she decided to start her own private practice and talks about her experiences in becoming a mother and struggling to find bilingual services for her own son.Esmeralda Sanchez has twelve years of experience in early intervention, public schools, and private practice. She earned dual Bachelor's degrees in Speech-Language Pathology and Spanish from Saint Xavier University in Chicago followed by a Master's degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Indiana University's where she focused on bilingual therapy. Her practice, Bilingual and Brilliant Speech Therapy LLC, combines growth mindset principles, social-emotional wellness, and family-centered practices. Esmeralda specializes in treating receptive and expressive language disorders, late talking, stuttering, articulation disorders, speech clarity, and post-stroke rehabilitation.In Today's Episode, We Discuss:Esmeralda's personal experiences with speech therapy and how she got into the fieldGetting started with private clients while maintaining her job in the schools How private practice has increased her control of income, clients, and scheduleEsmeralda's natural and easy marketing strategies that anyone can doEsmeralda turned her own struggles and experiences into a driving force for her to serve her community through private practice. I hope she inspires you to take the next step toward the life you deserve as a hard-working clinician!If you want our help to start or grow your private practice (just like we helped Esmeralda!), please visit www.independentclinician.com/resources.Whether you want to start a private practice or grow your existing private practice, I can help you get the freedom, flexibility, fulfillment, and financial abundance that you deserve. Visit www.independentclinician.com to learn more.Resources Mentioned: Learn more about starting or growing your private practice: www.independentclinician.com/resourcesEsmeralda's website: www.bilingualandbrilliantspeechtherapy.comFollow Esmeralda on Instagram: www.instagram.com/bilingualandbrilliantspeechCheck out Esmeralda's Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@bilingualandbrilliantspeechWhere We Can Connect: Follow the Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/private-practice-success-stories/id1374716199Follow Me on Instagram:

How can you take your career growth into your own hands? In this episode of Neurocareers: Doing the Impossible!, we're diving into a story of initiative, inspiration, and empowerment led by the students of the Neuroscience Alliance at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Faced with a desire to expand their educational and career opportunities, these incredible students didn't wait for the right resources to come their way—they created them! The Neuroscience Alliance was founded with a mission to promote awareness, research, and volunteer opportunities in neuroscience while building professional connections between students and faculty. In this episode, we're joined by the remarkable minds behind the Neuroscience Alliance at UCF. They'll share their journey, the challenges they faced, and the benefits they've experienced by creating such a vibrant and supportive organization. More importantly, they'll provide practical advice and inspiration for students worldwide who want to take charge of their own education and career development. Ready to discover how you can create opportunities, build networks, and make a real difference in your field? Tune in to hear the story of the Neuroscience Alliance and learn how you can bring similar initiatives to life at your university. Let's explore how students are redefining neuroscience education—one bold step at a time! About the Podcast Guests: The Neuroscience Alliance (NSA) at the University of Central Florida The NSA is a student organization committed to advancing awareness, research, and volunteer opportunities in neuroscience. It serves as a bridge between students and faculty, offering insights into current research and future career opportunities. The alliance takes a multidisciplinary approach to neuroscience, linking it with fields like medicine, psychology, biotechnology, psychiatry, and more. NSA organizes various activities, including the Central Florida Brain Bee—a competition that challenges high school students' knowledge of neuroscience, aiming to foster interest and encourage future careers in this dynamic field. Join the Neuroscience Alliance: Email: neuroscienceallianceucf@gmail.com  Participate in the Central Florida Brain Bee: Contact Sudeepta Matha: sudeepta.matha@ucf.edu  These platforms provide fantastic opportunities for both collegiate and high school students to delve deeper into neuroscience, offering both educational and practical experiences in the field. For more information about the Neuroscience Alliance, visit https://med.ucf.edu/mdna/neuroscience-alliance-at-ucf/    Sudeepta Matha Undergraduate Student & Neuroscience Advocate Sudeepta Matha is a 4th-year undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida, majoring in Psychology on the Neuroscience Track with a minor in Cognitive Sciences. Passionate about neuropsychology, Sudeepta focuses on researching the interplay between neurodevelopment, autism, and behaviors like suicidal ideation and non-suicidal self-injury. As Executive Manager of the Central Florida Brain Bee, Sudeepta has advanced through roles as a volunteer, PR Manager, and Event Manager, demonstrating dedication to neuroscience education and outreach. Sudeepta plans to pursue a Ph.D. in neuropsychology, aiming to uncover new insights into neurodevelopmental disorders and suicidality.    Andrei Nesterenko Emerging Neuroscientist & Biomedical Explorer Andrei Nesterenko is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Central Florida, majoring in Biomedical Neuroscience with minors in Political Science and Rhetoric and Writing. His research spans multiple areas of neuroscience, with two current projects focusing on noninvasive intracranial pressure monitoring and the intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. As a former Public Relations Manager and the current Research Manager for the 2024 Central Florida Brain Bee, Andrei has dedicated his efforts to increasing access to basic neuroscience education in the Greater Orlando area and beyond. Following graduation and future post-baccalaureate research opportunities, Andrei plans to pursue a joint MD-PhD degree in either biomedical or behavioral neuroscience.   Charisse Melendez Future Audiologist & Community Educator Charisse Meléndez is a third-year student at the University of Central Florida majoring in Communication Sciences and Disorders with a minor in Spanish. Her future career goals are to pursue a doctorate in audiology, specializing in pediatrics and musicians, and lead an organization with a humanitarian focus. Her research interests include minimizing cochlear implant candidacy discrepancies between English and Spanish-speaking individuals, evaluating the relationship between hearing and memory, and the interrelationships between hearing and other diagnoses (for differential diagnosis). She is currently the PR manager for the Central Florida Brain Bee, a neuroscience competition under the NSA. Some of her personal interests include playing musical instruments at her church (bass, guitar, and piano), candle making, and working out.   Mae Torra Biomedical Science Student & Environmental Advocate Mae Torra is a 2nd-year undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida, majoring in Biomedical Sciences on the Neuroscience Track with minors in Environmental Studies and Genomics & Bioinformatics. Over the summer of 2024, they conducted research in Brown University's Computational Neuroscience cohort through their Leadership Alliance SR-EIP. In the Neuroscience Alliance at UCF, they have served as a STEM Day Director, Event Director, and Secretary, with contributions ranging from designing educational activities for community outreach to hosting research workshops. They plan to pursue a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience, and are currently exploring interdisciplinary connections between neuroscience and ecology through a literature review on pollinator behavior.   Prof. Kiminobu Sugaya Distinguished Professor & Researcher in Neuroscience Prof. Kiminobu Sugaya is a leading neuroscience researcher at UCF. He is a mentor within the Neuroscience Alliance, guiding students and research in neurodegenerative diseases and stem cell therapy. For more about his work or to get in touch, visit his faculty page at UCF Department of Neuroscience: https://med.ucf.edu/biomed/person/dr-kiminobu-sugaya/   About the Podcast Host: The Neurocareers podcast is brought to you by The Institute of Neuroapproaches (https://www.neuroapproaches.org/) and its founder, Milena Korostenskaja, Ph.D. (Dr. K), a career coach for people in neuroscience and neurotechnologies. As a professional coach with a background in neurotech and Brain-Computer Interfaces, Dr. K understands the unique challenges and opportunities job applicants face in this field and can provide personalized coaching and support to help you succeed. Here's what you'll get with one-on-one coaching sessions from Dr. K: Identification and pursuit of career goals Guidance on job search strategies, resume, and cover letter development Neurotech / neuroscience job interview preparation and practice Networking strategies to connect with professionals in the field of neuroscience and neurotechnologies Ongoing support and guidance to help you stay on track and achieve your goals You can always schedule a free neurocareer consultation/coaching session with Dr. K at https://neuroapproaches.as.me/free-neurocareer-consultation Subscribe to our Nerocareers Newsletter to stay on top of all our cool neurocareers news at updates https://www.neuroapproaches.org/neurocareers-news

Professors Calin Hintea and Maria Aristigueta speak with Troy Mix, Associate Director of the University of Delaware's Institute for Public Administration (IPA), about challenges facing democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States, the importance and evolution of relationships among countries in this region and the U.S., and potential roles for engaged universities and public administration programs to strengthen these relationships while bolstering democracy. Professor Hintea is the Dean of the College of Political, Administrative, and Communication Sciences at Babes Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (https://www.ubbcluj.ro/en/facultati/stiinte_politice_administrative_si_ale_comunicarii). He teaches strategy and management courses and has extensive experience working with public and private organizations on strategy development topics. He is the chair of the Accreditation Committee of the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation, senior editor of the Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, and former president of The Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (https://www.nispa.org/). Maria Aristigueta, Emerita, was the Founding Dean of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration and Charles P. Messick Chair of Public Administration at the University of Delaware. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania and at the University of Salerno, Italy. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and a past-president of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), and a past-member of the Executive Council of Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA). To learn more about the interplay of universities, communities, and democracy, review articles from a 2024 special issue of the Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences (https://doi.org/10.24193/tras.SI2024). This episode was recorded on February 26, 2025, for First State Insights, a podcast presented by the Institute for Public Administration (IPA). For more First State Insights episodes, visit https://soundcloud.com/first-state-insights or search for "First State Insights" wherever you listen to podcasts. IPA is a research and public service center within the University of Delaware's Biden School of Public Policy & Administration. For more on IPA, visit https://www.bidenschool.udel.edu/ipa. Opening and closing music: "I Dunno" by Grapes, used under Creative Commons 3.0 License.

Want to share your feedback? Send us a message!Researchers from the Delaware Stuttering Project at the University of Delaware—Dr. Ho Ming Chow, Associate Professor and principal investigator, Sayan Nanda, Ph.D. student, and Dr. Nicole Guarino, research scientist—join host Sara MacIntyre, M.A., CCC-SLP, to discuss their recent article, "Atypical gut microbiota composition in a mouse model of developmental stuttering," published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio). Building upon previous genetic and mouse model research by Dr. Dennis Drayna and colleagues at the NIH [previous podcast episode with Dr. Drayna linked below for background], their study explores the potential link between developmental stuttering and the gut-brain connection by examining gut microbiota differences in GNPTAB mouse models.In this episode, Dr. Chow, Sayan Nanda, and Dr. Guarino provide essential background context before walking through the study's development, methodology, and key findings. They discuss the potential role of the microbiome in other neurodevelopmental conditions, the challenges of translating mouse model research to human studies, and the exciting directions for future research this study has prompted.Article discussed:Nanda, S., Lamot, B., Guarino, N. et al. Atypical gut microbiota composition in a mouse model of developmental stuttering. Sci Rep 14, 23457 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-74766-xPrevious Stuttering Foundation Podcast episode referenced, 'Genetics and Stuttering with Dr. Dennis Drayna.'Delaware Stuttering Project WebpageDr. Ho Ming Chow, Associate Professor at the University of Delaware and a principal investigator for the Delaware Stuttering Project, received his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. After working as an engineer for a few years, he became interested in studying human cognition and went to Germany for his doctoral study. He obtained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences with an emphasis on Cognitive Psychology at the University of Osnabrück. He completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health. Before joining the University of Delaware in 2019, he was a research faculty at the University of Michigan and Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware.Sayan Nanda received his Master of Science in Data Informatics from the University of Southern California and his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology. Sayan is currently a Ph.D. student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders department at the University of Delaware. Sayan is primarily interested in stuttering research and the application of statistics and machine learning techniques in the same. His focus is on neuroimaging.Dr. Nicole Guarino is an adjunct faculty at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, the University of Delaware. She received her PhD in Neuroscience from Thomas Jefferson University and her B.A. in Neuroscience from Franklin and Marshall College. She has been working in Dr. Chow's lab since 2022 and is interested in the neurobiological bases of stuttering.

Ever wondered what it takes to bring a TED talk to life? In this episode, Michael Herold has a conversation with Dr. Alina Nikolaou, a passionate TED event curator, who shares her insights about the exciting world of organizing TED and TEDx events.  They discuss the process of selecting speakers, the power of storytelling, and how to balance entertainment with information. Dr. Nikolaou offers valuable tips on public speaking, preparation rituals, and the experience of participating in TEDx. You'll also pick up tips on how to pitch a TEDx talk and ways to stay engaged with the TED community. Listen and Learn:  The difference between TED and TEDx, and how these talks are bringing global ideas to local stages across the world  What it is really like to attend or organize a TEDx event—on stage, behind the scenes, and beyond How are TEDx speakers chosen, coached, and prepared to deliver talks that leave a lasting impact? How TEDx organizers curate the perfect lineup and ensure each talk flows  Even the weirdest ideas have a place at TEDx—how organizers craft the perfect lineup of talks What happens behind the curtain before a TEDx talk?  How can speakers avoid awkwardness when transitioning from rehearsal to the stage? What's the secret to delivering a talk naturally—without memorizing every word like a script? How to enliven a slide deck to captivate any audience Tips for landing a TEDx talk Resources:  TEDAI Vienna TED.com TEDx.com Alina on LinkedIn TEDAI on LinkedIn Alina's Website Jill's TEDx talk Michael's TEDx talk Ted Talks The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking  About Dr. Alina Nikolaou Dr. Alina Nikolaou is Director and Curator of TEDAI Vienna, the first TED event in Europe dedicated to groundbreaking ideas on Artificial Intelligence. Born to Greek and Austrian parents, Alina grew up during the financial crisis in Athens, Greece. After school, she moved to Vienna, Austria to graduate with degrees in Communication Science and Political Science. After a short and rather disenchanting journey into the world of advertising, Alina returned to academia for her doctoral research where she explored how Virtual Reality can affect how we think and behave toward complex sociopolitical issues. Her co-authored study about the influence of deepfakes on media trust and credibility won the award for Best Student Paper at the annual conference of the International Communication Science Association in 2023. Alina has held several courses at the University of Vienna, ranging from empirical research methods in the Social Sciences to Media History. In October 2023 she presented her research at AWE EU, the leading industry conference on mixed reality. Constantly fascinated with the hypes, hopes and fears that surround new technologies, Alina has been a Curator at TEDxVienna since 2019. There she specialises on interdisciplinary ideas about tech, philosophy and power, and brings them to life in the form of TEDx Talks. To deal with how miraculous and ridiculous the world is she constantly experiments with different artforms: A regular on Vienna's storytelling stages, Alina is known for her criticisms on capitalism, her borderline anarchist stance and her absurdist humor. Her most recent appearance was at the Rote Bar at Volkstheater, Vienna. Alina is also the creator of the (so far unsuccessful) dadaist Bring Back Boredom movement and the far more successful event format “Poetry Society Vienna”. Alina holds a Bakk.phil, MSc and Dr.phil. in Communication Science as well as a BA in Political Science from the University of Vienna, Austria.  Related Episodes 313. ACT-Informed Exposure for Anxiety with Brian Pilecki and Brian Thompson 188. Unwinding Anxiety with Judson Brewer 239. Edit Your Story, Change Your Life with Lori Gottlieb 294. Yes And: Improv in Psychology with Kelly Leonard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest: Dyan Dickerson MA, CCC-SLPEarn 0.1 ASHA CEU for this episode with Speech Therapy PD: https://www.speechtherapypd.com/course?name=Floortime-for-the-SLPIn this episode of First Bite, Michelle and Erin welcomes Diane Dickerson, a certified expert in DIR Floortime and feeding, to explore the intricacies of the Floortime model. Listeners get an inside look into the principles of DIR (Developmental, Individual Differences, Relationship-based) Floortime and understand its impact on communication and feeding therapy. Diane shares her professional journey, the importance of affect, and how to approach therapy with critical thinking. Tune in to hear case studies and learn practical tips for applying Floortime in both feeding and communication settings.About the Guest: Dyan Dickerson is an ASHA (USA) and RCLST (UK) certified speech-language pathologist who graduated with both her B.S. and M.A. degrees in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Central Florida. While in school, Dyan became passionate about The Floortime Approach while working privately with a family, where she used the approach with their son for nearly four years (Hi, J!). After graduation, Dyan moved to Washington, D.C., to work at The Floortime Center for six years, where she later became the lead speech-language pathologist. Dyan provided services in the private practice setting, school-based therapy, home services, and throughout the community. She saw clients in individual sessions and group therapy as well as provided intensive services for families around the world as part of a collaborative team. Dyan is Floortime trained and holds certification in the S.O.S. Approach to Feeding and Integrated Listening Therapy (iLs) and training with Gestalt Language Processing. While working at The Floortime Center, Dyan traveled to Budapest to present on Foodtime, a feeding program she co-developed, as well as Miami to present on both Foodtime and speech-language therapy using the Greenspan Floortime Approach. Dyan is a collaborative volunteer for The Greenspan Approach online course - an ASHA-approved C.E. program - she holds licensure in Florida and the UK. Dyan believes in a developmental, whole-child approach to therapy and uses The Floortime Approach to support children and their families. Dyan is soon moving back to Tampa, Florida, and will support clients and families in person and virtually.Mentioned in this episode:Nourishing Connection: Trauma-Informed Feeding Therapy a course from Erin ForwardThis comprehensive course supports you in providing authentic, trauma-informed feeding therapy for neurodivergent and medically complex clients. Through 18 hours of ASHA CEU credits, you'll engage with a weekly live lecture (that can be rewatched as a recorded version) plus dedicated office hours for additional questions if you're unable to join live. You'll gain access to a supportive group for ongoing discussion and receive a 50+ page ebook filled with valuable resources, including a goal bank. Explore the key principles of mealtime literacy—connection, comfort, and curiosity—designed to help children engage with food in a way that respects their individuality. Scroll down for a detailed topic breakdown and start building your confidence in a flexible, child-centered approach to feeding therapy. Learn more/sign up: https://www.erinforwardslp.com/courses

If you want to get into private practice with purpose and confidence, this episode is for you! My guest today is Eliana Provenzano-Lewis. Eliana is a bilingual speech-language pathologist with a pediatric private practice in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She started Monarch Speech and Language Therapy in 2023 after feeling determined to explore different work environments.Using what she learned in the Grow Your Private Practice program, Eliana is expanding her services to include parent coaching, educational workshops, and plans for hiring other therapists to grow her reach.In this episode, Eliana shares the challenges and triumphs of private practice, as well as how she's creating a flexible career that aligns with her values and family life.Eliana is a nationally certified and state licensed Bilingual Speech-Language Pathologist in the state of Oklahoma. She received a double bachelor's degree in Communication and Sciences Disorders and Spanish. She then completed her Master's degree of Science, in Communication Sciences & Disorders. Eliana earned all her degrees at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Eliana's area of special interests include working with Early Intervention and Bilingualism (Spanish/English). Additionally, Eliana is very passionate about using a whole-child, and family-centered approach by teaching, advocating, and assisting caregivers with getting their child all the support they need across multiple environments (home, school, community) as soon as possible. During her free time, Eliana enjoys spending time with family and friends, enjoying time outdoors, exercising, listening to audiobooks, cooking, being a plant and dog mom, and trying new restaurants in the Tulsa area with her Husband, Dereck. In Today's Episode, We Discuss:Eliana's background in SLP and what it was like graduating during the pandemicHow she embraced her niche of bilingual therapyEliana's advice for balancing school contracts and private clientsHow a client-first approach takes the pressure off of marketing yourselfThe inspiration behind Eliana's practice and what it means to her and othersI hope Eliana's story inspires you to take the first steps toward building a practice that will give you the kind of life you've always wanted! If you'd like to learn more about our programs and how we support SLPs and OTs in starting and growing their practice, just like Eliana did on her journey, please visit www.independentclinician.com/resources.Whether you want to start a private practice or grow your existing private practice, I can help you get the freedom, flexibility, fulfillment, and financial abundance that you deserve. Visit my website www.independentclinician.com to learn more.Resources Mentioned: Learn more about our Private Practice Programs: www.independentclinician.com/resourcesCheck out Eliana's practice: www.monarch-tulsa.comFollow Monarch Speech on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monarchtulsa/Where We Can Connect: Follow the Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/private-practice-success-stories/id1374716199Follow Me on Instagram:

Recorded 09 December 2024. Emina Ćerimović, Associate Director Disability Rights Division, Human Rights Watch A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Dr Mershen Pillay Associate Professor Massey University & UKZN South Africa A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Dr Brendan Ciaran Browne, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Claire O'Reilly Research Fellow Trinity College Dublin & Co-founder of SADIE A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Dr Caroline Jagoe, Associate Professor, Trinity College Dublin, Co-Founder of SADIE A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Pratima Gurung, General Secretary of Indigenous Persons with Disabilities Global Network A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Anne-Laure Duval, Deputy County Director WFP Cambodia Opening Remarks by Karen Williams, Irish Aid, Department of Foreign Affairs A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences. Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/" A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Kavita Brahmbhatt, Senior Disability Advisor WFP A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Bulelani Mfaco, Spokesperson for the Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI) A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Recorded 09 December 2024. Mohamed Jama, Chairperson National Disability Agency, Somalia A symposium on food insecurities organised by the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences.  Funded in part by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/triss/people/SADIE/index.php and https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Heather Howell Cleckler is a 4th generation rancher from Immokalee, FL.  She graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders and Education. She also earned a masters in Speech-language Pathology. When she's not busy managing her family's ranch and outfitting business, she's busy being involved in the community, helping with the annual Immokalee Cattle Drive, and spending time with her family. Heather has always been the biggest supporter of HHS and we are so glad we get to start the year off strong with her!

Catherine Parkin serves as Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, She co-authored the book, Medical aspects of disability for the rehabilitation professionals in 2017 by the Springer Publishing Company. Mary Regina Reilly has served as the Clinical Director of Speech Language Pathology at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langue Health for the last ten years.  Her Master's Degree is from Columbia University and she did her fellowship at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.  Clinical concentration has focused on pediatric dysphagia with medically complex infants with additional efforts in developing specialty programs for adults with acquired neurogenic disorders. She was instrumental in assisting in the development of the Masters of Science Program in Communication Sciences at Yeshiva University and has served as an adjunct professor at both Mercy College and NYU Steinhardt. Dr. Angela Stolfi is the Director of Physical Therapy, Director of Therapy Services at Rusk Ambulatory Satellite Locations, Site Coordinator of PT Clinical Education, and Director of PT Residency and Fellowship Programs at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langone Health.  Dr. Stolfi holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation at NYU School of Medicine and regularly lectures in the physical therapy programs at both NYU and the University of Scranton. The focus of much of her current and recent research relates to mentoring and education of student physical therapists.  She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Education in Physical Therapy (JCEPT). Maria Cristina Tafurt is the Site Director at the Rusk Institute NYU Langone Medical Center, Hospital for Joint Diseases.  She has been a licensed occupational therapist for over 30 years receiving her Bachelor's degree from the University of Rosario in Bogata Colombia, and her Advance Master's degree from NYU University.  Her clinical experience has varied with an emphasis on brain injury rehabilitation, pain management, hand therapy, and orthopedics. She holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine as a Clinical Instructor and has authored or co-authored sixteen articles, abstracts and international presentations in her field.  The discussion covered the following topics: influence of artificial intelligence, and research endeavors pertaining to occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech-language pathology.

  Dr. Janet Patterson: Welcome to this Aphasia Access Aphasia Conversations Podcast, a series of conversations about the LPAA model and aphasia programs that follow this model. My name is Janet Patterson, and I am a research speech-language pathologist at the VA Northern California Healthcare System in Martinez, California. Today, I am delighted to be speaking with Dr. Elizabeth Madden, an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders and an affiliate of the Institute for Successful Longevity. Liz also leads the FSU Aphasia Research Laboratory. Liz's research, teaching and clinical interests focus on rehabilitation of aphasia, and specifically on understanding the relationship between spoken and written language abilities in individuals with aphasia and developing behavioral treatments to address reading and writing disorders post stroke. Her work also addresses the impact of aphasia on the friendships and social well-being of people with aphasia and their care partners. These Show Notes accompany the conversation with Liz but are not a verbatim transcript.   In today's episode you will hear about: the power of friendship and what people with aphasia and care partners think about how aphasia can affect the ability to create and sustain friendships, the definition of literacy and its behavioral components, and behavioral treatments for reading comprehension deficit in aphasia.   In 2024, Liz was named a Distinguished Scholar USA by the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia UK. The Tavistock Trust aims to help improve the quality of life for those with aphasia, their families and care partners by addressing research capacity related to quality-of-life issues in aphasia. Congratulations on receiving this honor, Liz. Aphasia Access collaborates with the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia in selecting the awardees and is pleased to have the opportunity to discuss their work and the career influence of the Tavistock Award.   Welcome Liz, to Aphasia Access Conversations.   Dr. Liz Madden: Thank you, Janet. I'm really happy to be here today. I also say thank you to Aphasia Access and to the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia. I'm very grateful for this award and excited to have this conversation.   Janet: I'm excited to be talking to you, my friend and research partner in several endeavors that we've been working on over the last few years.   Liz, as we've said, you were named a Tavistock Trust Distinguished Scholar USA for this year, and you join a talented and dedicated group of individuals. How has receiving the Tavistock Award influenced your clinical and research efforts in aphasia,   Liz: I first wanted to extend that thank you to the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia, and specifically Henrietta, the Duchess of Bedford and the honorable Nicole Campbell, and just a very gracious, sincere thank you for all the time and effort and support they give to aphasia researchers. I would say, I'm just delighted and very humbled to be recognized this year. I would say further that this award motivates my work that is focused on trying to really make an impact on the lives and quality of life and successful living for people who have aphasia and continuing my work. My beginning work was really more impairment focused, which some of that we will talk about, and I really value that. But having this award, and the more I stay in the field, it is extending that and making sure that everything I'm doing always is directly related to helping the lives of people with aphasia.   Janet: That leads right into the question I'd like to begin with Liz, which is about your recent work investigating the role of friendship for persons with aphasia. I believe in the power of friendship and community during joyful times and also during the sad times in one's life. In Aphasia. Access podcast episode number 119, Finding the person in front of aphasia, I talked with your friend and colleague, Dr Lauren Bislick, with whom I believe you collaborate to investigate friendship and aphasia. How did you become interested in this aspect of aphasia, and what can you tell us about your work in this area and your collaboration with Lauren?   Liz: Lauren and I did our Ph.D.'s together. We both were mentored by Diane Kendall at the University of Washington, so Lauren and I are Ph.D. sisters. Also, we were both at Project Bridge, led by Dr. Jackie Hinkley in 2018. That's really where my interest in friendship began. That conference brought together researchers, speech-language pathologists, people with aphasia, and their friends and family. I was the researcher at a table, and we ended up being Team Friendship. Lauren was also at this meeting, but she was at Team Yoga; Lauren does a lot of work with friendship, but also with yoga. My other colleague who does a lot of friendship work with me is Dr. Michelle Therrien here at FSU. She primarily works with children who use AAC, but her main research is friendship. She and I had already had some conversations about the importance of friendship, particularly for people who have communication disorders. The idea was we leave the conference and to take action and carry out some of the goals that were generated from that discussion. So that's when I reached back out to Lauren, because she was at that conference. Then I also reached out to my friend, Michelle Therrien, and other individuals who became part of our Team Friendship, Dr. Sarah Wallace, who's also one of our good friends and collaborators, and Rachel Gough Albritton who is one of Jackie Hinkley's former doc students and here at FSU as well. and the office of research. That is the background of some conversations before Project Bridge, but really for me, coming back and actually starting studies addressing different aspects of friendship, which I know we'll talk more about, was really brought about by the Project Bridge conference.   Janet: That is quite a story, and I can see you sitting around the table and developing Team Friendship - good for you.   We all know, Liz, that one of the unfortunate consequences of aphasia can be the loss of or the diminishing of friendships, or the disruption of the communication skills important to developing and sustaining friendship and community. What have you learned from people with aphasia about their successes and challenges in sustaining and creating new friendships.   Liz: Yes, good question. Well, at that conference that I mentioned, there were five or six people with aphasia, and initially our table was labeled something like, What happens in the long run? and we started having conversations. It was very clear after our initial conversation that the group centered on relationships and friendship, so we shifted to being friendship only. I will say, just at that table, it became very clear to me, that's what rose to the top when the group was thinking about the bigger picture of living life.   In a research project we've done there was a small sample of 15 people with aphasia, and we talked to them over time. I think the timing of a conversation is really something important to keep in mind when we're talking to people with aphasia about any topic, of course, but particularly friendship. From other studies we've noticed that responses are really different. If we're talking during the early days, maybe the acute days, versus the chronic days, we'd get really different responses. Just a quick summary, again, this was 15 people and a unique set. Most people in our study were a part of aphasia groups, and, of course, really motivated to do research. But I will say, when we looked at their responses, when asked to think back to the early days, all different aspects of friendship, how supported they felt, or how they were able to communicate, and we compared it to their responses in the now. Overall, the pattern was less satisfaction, feeling less supported or less able to engage in those earlier days, but more of a recovery pattern over time, but again, not for everybody. There were still a few people in our group that were reporting not having many friends. Our paper had a different light, a positive light about friendships. Some of the other papers out there have a more negative tone. It's a very important area we need to address. I was happy to see this group reporting, now that they had been living with aphasia for several years, their pattern of more negative responses early, and a recovering pattern now. They reported making friends with other people who have aphasia, and finding at this point, who are those good friends.   There's other great work being done by other colleagues, Brent Archer, Jamie Azios and Katie Strong, who are studying the same topic. They had a great paper that describes who stuck around, they were examining the next steps of what it takes to support the positive recovery that we know does happen for some people.   Janet: I like the positive perspective you are taking. Given that one has had a stroke, and given that the this is the situation in life, what is the positive? What can you do? Who are your friends? Look at positive ideas rather than publishing research on all the negative aspects. Kudos to you for doing that.   Liz: Thanks, all of it's important, right? We have to know that. I think we had a special group. I think we had a particularly positive outcome, and it was good to know that friendships don't disappear for everyone. But I think there's something that those people had done and that their friends had done, that we're still trying to learn more about.   Janet: Thank you for that work. Liz. It makes me think about the aphasia journey in that it involves not just the person with aphasia, but also their care partners and all the people around them. In your investigations of friendship, what do the care partners of persons with aphasia tell you about their successes and challenges in sustaining and developing friendships? These friendships could be individual friendships or partner friendships or group friendships through social, religious or professional activities or even community groups.   Liz: Thank you for this question. I think it's sometimes a forgotten group that we overlook, the care partners, and the critical role they play in the recovery of people with aphasia. I always try to have us remember we want the care partners to do well on their own as people, and so we've done a couple projects. We've just finished data collection on a much larger study of 80 aphasia care partners, and I'm just getting into those data. We did a Qualtrics survey and also did experience sampling, where we used a phone app, and four times a day for two weeks, participants got these little pings, and they had to tell us, Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? How are you feeling? When was the last time you interacted with a friend? Was it a text? I don't have the amazing outcomes for you yet. This project was a much bigger follow-up to a project a few years ago with 35 care partners. We, of course, wanted to interview them but then COVID was happening, so we settled for a really nice Qualtrics survey.   I will say that these individuals were surprised when we were reaching out to them. They kept trying to schedule their loved one with aphasia, and we said, “No, we want to talk to you about your friendships.” And they were surprised, asking, “You want to talk about me.' I will say they were very excited that we wanted to know about them. Back to the timeline I shared earlier in that very small study, the profile was opposite. We asked them about their friendships before they were caregivers, the early stages of caregiving, and then now, and their comments kind of make sense. Across the group they reported in the early stages, they felt like they had really great friends, support and satisfaction. People were rallying around them, coming to the hospital to support them. Many of them had been caregiving for a very long time when we did a comparison, and their reported friendship satisfaction and support was actually lower now. The questions were not the same and the groups were different, but as I told you a few minutes ago, the people with aphasia were more negative in the acute stage, and our small group were more positive now with how they're feeling about their friendships, and the care partners were the opposite. They were feeling more supported in the beginning, and now as time has gone on, some of them report the friends aren't there as much. Some of them felt like they were a burden, or they didn't know how to engage, being very selfless. They have dropped their own social interests to take care of their loved one. We did see in that project, that the longer, the more months a person had been caregiving, was correlated with poor self-perceived friendships and also how they perceived their loved one's health. That was just their perception. If they perceived their loved one to have more health concerns, not just a feature but overall health, they also tended to rate themselves as not as satisfied with their friendship. Bringing in that piece of information and the caregiving burden into our new projects, we did actually get scales on resilience and caregiving burden depression. In this new project we replicated some of our same questions, and we're now trying to look more at overall well-being, seeing how resilience and purpose in life and caregiving burden might play a role.   Janet: That reminds me of the commercials, when you are taking off in an airplane or when you are thinking about being a care partner, you do have to take care of yourself as the care partner before you can give the best care to the person with aphasia. Anything that we can do to focus on the person the with aphasia, and also focus on the care partner, I think, is good in terms of developing and sustaining friendships,   Liz: Yes. Care partners definitely have a lot more to say, and we haven't actually been able to do face to face interviews yet, but we did have a lot of really rich, open ended responses and surveys that we're still looking through. A piece I'm really interested in, is we have that one-time perception when they did our one-time survey, now we have their responses, we can track how people respond over a two-week period, were they always at home with their loved ones and not responding to friends? I think there's just a lot and again, trying to understand from this group what are the positives. Who are the people that have these positive responses? Then, of course, the next big steps are trying to provide more research resources and interventions for both care partners and people with aphasia. Our group has not yet reached out to friends, so that's a big part to come. I think other researchers have examined friends and a key part intervening with these friends too.   Janet: People with aphasia and care partners have different friendship styles and needs, and when aphasia disrupts communication, it can also affect the way a person approaches friendship. As speech-language pathologists, I believe that we can play a role in guiding a person with aphasia and a care partner to develop communication skills that can support friendship efforts. Liz, what are some ideas or actions that you might think of for speech-language pathologists in a busy clinical practice? What kind of actions can they take to support friendship activities, for a person with aphasia, recognizing, of course, that we are all different in our friendship activities. Also recognizing that you're at the very beginning of some of this work, I'm hoping that you have some ideas you might be able to share with us.   Liz: Yes, actually our very first friendship project addressed this topic. It was led by Michelle Therrien, and we surveyed about 40 speech-language pathologists trying to find out their view of the role that they think they should play. They find friendship to be very important. They find it to be in their scope of practice. But not surprising, were not aware of resources. They felt overwhelmed with how much speech-language pathologists have to cover, right? But it was really good to know that the group we reached out to found it to be a very important part of their practice that they want to address. I think you hit on something really important, that we teach and adopt having a person-centered care model, and we know that it's part of what we ask about. The simplest thing is asking. We don't need tools. We just need to make sure it's part of what we ask, making sure we're talking about relationships, talking about friendships.   There are some really great tools that do exist. There's the Stroke Social Network Scale by Sarah Northcott and Katerina Hillary from the UK. Katie Strong, Brent Archer, Jamie Azios and Natalie Douglas are a wonderful group who have been studying friendship. They've used the Social Convoy Model in some of their papers. It has a great visual that they have used, and therapists can also use. Basically, it is mapping out the social network of who's most important, which could be used one time, or as a pre-post measure. There are different ways, formal or informal, of trying to monitor someone's social network or how they feel supported. I don't think there's a target number of friendships and I don't think more means better, but it could be just making sure we're checking in and that we know that's an important part of therapy. We want them to be able to communicate and interact with friends. Speech-language pathologists are creative in to how to make that happen.   Janet: I agree with that view Liz, and I hope that speech-language pathologists will feel comfortable being creative and asking people about their friendships or what they might need to help maintain or sustain their friendships.   I would like to turn now to the topics of reading and literacy, which I know you have been investigating. While these terms are related, they are not synonymous. Would you please explain the difference between them and how you are investigating both in your research?   Liz: Yes. Thanks. That is a good question. To be honest, the first answer is not very scientific. When I was writing papers it was getting cumbersome to always write reading and spelling/ writing. The term came to be when I wanted to make sure that I was making it clear that I wasn't just focused on reading, but also concerned with the spelling and writing components. With my colleagues, Jessica Obermeier and Aaron Bush, we started using the term literacy for some of our work. People will have different ideas of what literacy might entail. I have been describing treatment as “literacy focused”, working on reading and spelling and writing.   My initial work was very much focused on reading, and over the past several years I became more interested in trying to also add on the spelling component. If we're working on spelling and writing it gives us a chance to inherently work on the reading. If we're only focused on reading, it doesn't bring in the writing. There's a time for them to be separate, I fully agree. There are also times where they can be targeted at the same time.   Janet: That makes perfect sense. When I think about how we discussed in the past, reading for pleasure, or reading to gain knowledge, or reading for information, or reading for safety, so many different aspects of reading, literacy also factors into how you use reading in those situations.   Liz: Yes, and so in a lot of day-to-day communication, you need both, right? It's for text messaging, right? We need to read it and respond in a written way, also emails. There are lots of instances where for the for the interaction to go well, we need to be able to read and respond in writing, such as filling out forms, email, texting, social media. For a lot of interactions we need both for there to be a successful written language exchange.   Janet: Liz, as part of our work with the Academy of Neurologic Communication Disorders and Sciences, Aphasia Writing Group, you and I were part of the team who critically reviewed treatment approaches for reading comprehension deficits in persons with aphasia. You've also investigated, as you mentioned earlier, specific aspects of reading deficits in persons with aphasia. What are some of the insights that you have gained from this work? And by the way, it was such a pleasure doing that critical review of treatment for reading deficits, and there was a lot of interesting information that came to light in that paper.   Liz: Yes, thank you. I was going to comment that I remember we thought we were going to have all these papers to go through and really and that review, we were very much focused on papers where the main outcome was reading comprehension. When we stuck to what our aim was, there really weren't that many papers that that met the aim of that project. So that really brought to light that it really is an area of our field that doesn't have enough attention.   Some of my recent projects, as I mentioned with Aaron Bush and Jessica Obermeier, we've talked to people with aphasia and gotten their perspective of before and early days. I really like doing this research over time. Things change, but we learned just how important reading and writing are to people with aphasia, and that they really want to work on it. I think we've seen when we looked in the literature, there wasn't much there. When we've talked to people with aphasia and speech-language pathologists, they want to work on reading, and they're not sure how. That further motivates me that this is an area to work on.   In some of my beginning work, I was Diane Kendall's research speech language pathologist for a few years before I did my Ph.D., and I exclusively delivered her phono motor treatment. In that research trial, the main outcome was word retrieval, but the therapy that she designed inherently worked a lot on reading and writing. We retrained every phoneme - how to say it, what your mouth is doing, and also the graphemes that go with the phonemes. As her research speech pathologist, that's really when I got very interested in reading. I'd be in these sessions, and we'd finally bring out the graphemes that go with the phonemes. I recall telling people that this is going to get better – and it did not. That connection between the phonemes and the graphemes, for a lot of people, wasn't there. In that clinical experience as her research speech pathologist is when I realized that the treatment improved reading for some people, but not for everyone. So that's my background of really getting focused on reading.   In the last few years, I've been working on adapting that original version of treatment that was for word retrieval. I've added some components to make it more focused on reading. I've been working with Olga Burkina, who's at the Kessler Stroke Foundation, and has an NIH grant where she is pairing exercise with this reading focused phono motor treatment. It's fun to be a part of that group exploring the idea of doing aerobic exercise to improve the brain blood flow, and to see if that's going to help improve reading treatment. Again, the idea being going forward is what the treatment might change.   There are some other projects also. I'm working with Will Graves at Rutgers. He is using computational modeling to have us stop guessing which treatment. We're trying to get a really good baseline assessment, trying to find out about semantic impairment, phonological impairment, and then we're using this reading focused phono motor treatment. We also have a reading focus semantic feature analysis. I really enjoy getting to work with different researchers who have these wonderful, big questions, and that I'm getting to support it as the speech-language pathologist on these projects focused on reading and writing and phono motor treatment. So those are some exciting projects I'm involved in right now.   Janet: That's exciting, because you started out by saying there were only a few papers that we found that really address reading treatment, and you're right.  It's daunting, then how do you select the reading treatment? How do you help this person with aphasia who wants to improve their reading comprehension? I think it's exciting that you've got all these different avenues and are working with a variety of people to investigate treatment.   Liz: Yeah. And the one thing I'll add to that is part of that, that review we did, for some people those treatments are helping reading comprehension. But for some people, I've been trying to work on the next step. I have a very small dataset where I've added a semantic comprehension stage to my adapted photo motor treatment. I'm in the very early stages of this and I'm sure it's fine to say, but I've been having these really exciting conversations with Kelly Knollman-Porter and Sarah Wallace. They're also Tavistock Trust recipients, and they study reading from a different perspective, using text to speech, compensatory and very focused book reading. They're very comprehension focused, so we're at the very early, fun stages of where we are in our thinking. I think there might be a middle step we are missing, but we are talking about taking these impairment focused treatments, which I think have a role, and have a participation, functional part of it. That's another emerging, new collaboration, where we are coming to reading from different perspectives, and we're trying to see where we can get with that goal, back to this comprehension question, improving functional reading, maybe from impairment and compensatory approaches.   Janet: I think that's the right approach to take, and I think it's exciting, because we have to remember that everybody reads differently. Some people like reading, some people don't enjoy reading. They read what they have to, but they don't particularly enjoy it. So, if we all come to it from different perspectives, we all have different strengths that we bring, and different deficits as well, and different needs or designs, just as is so many things with aphasia. Start with the person with aphasia, asking What do you want to read? What problems are you having? Then use that as a guide to selecting an impairment-based treatment or text to speech treatment, or whatever. I think that's exactly the right approach.   Liz: The one thing the treatment we were talking about, phono motor treatment, in general, is a phonology treatment. The good thing is that my focus is asking, is it improving reading? I'm also extending it to writing. We do know at its core, it's a language treatment, so it is nice that it can be tweaked to serve the person's main interests. I think that's important, that we are trying to work on what people want to work on, but we want to make sure we're improving, if we can, not just one language modality, and we know that these abilities are supported by similar brain structures and underling cognitive processes. That's something else we've been trying to work on, being person centered and at the same time trying to maximize generalization - lots of pieces. I am finding now what's most motivating and exciting is trying to make sure that we're doing things that people with aphasia find important, and how also to keep the whole science moving forward in this way that's going to have functional, important outcomes. That people with aphasia are going to be able to do what they want to do to the best that they can.   Janet: Absolutely! But then there's the scientific challenge of how do you collect the data? How to best observe specific outcome data on performance measures, but also collect the person-centered data. How do you collect data that really can speak to whether you're having a success and whether this might be generalizable or transferable to another person?   Liz: I think it's important that we need both. I always say, and some of my collaborators may not like it, but if in the person reported outcome, a person with aphasia is telling us that they feel better and that they are communicating better in life, and those measures should not be optional, those measures to me, a critically important part of seeing this treatment successful. There are different ways to do that and different ways to capture their perspective. For example, if trained reading words moved this much and if the patient reported outcome change is greater, then I find that to be a success. If the reverse happens, I find treatment not successful. If my probes showed gain but the person with aphasia does not see it or feel it, then I don't find treatment to be a success. So, I think it's really important that persons with aphasia tell us different things, and we need to have many assessments in both of those categories. I think, when possible.   Janet: You're absolutely right. When you think about many of the treatments that we're doing, they are not necessarily easy, and they take time, and you have to stay the course. I think you know, I've been interested for a number of years in motivation and engagement, and what keeps people motivated and doing what they're doing. If you've got a treatment that you can see over time, small changes in your specific reading outcomes, but not so much of a change in the person centered outcomes, or person reported outcomes, how do you know the person is still really engaged and motivated and willing to slog through your treatment in order to get to the place that you hope they will? I think you're correct when you're assessing the importance of the person reported outcome.   Liz: Yeah, that's good. And then that's a whole other like measure in itself, right? The key of motivation we've talked about in some of the trials. The one person who didn't do very well, and just in our conversation, sometimes it for different reasons. That wasn't motivating for that person. There's that's a whole very important piece that a lot of us have a lot of room to improve in how we capture that and support that.   Janet: Which is a challenge when we're trying to devise treatments for, say, reading or anything that can be applicable to a wide range of persons with aphasia. Kudos to you for meeting that challenge as best you can.   Liz: We're working on it. But I do really think that it's changing. Sometimes I feel like there are impairment-based people and life participation people, and I don't think it needs to be that way. It's fine if we only study one area. We can't all study everything, but I think as a whole they complement each other very well. And so I'm just excited to see that it seems like things are moving in a really exciting way, where people who study aphasia in various different ways now seem to have the main outcome, asking is this going to help people with aphasia feel better, communicate better, and look forward to something different in life? I think we're all seeing that that's what we're supposed to be doing, and how we do it is going to look really different, and that's great. I think we're moving in the right direction.   Janet: Very well said. I think, and you obviously do as well, that literacy and reading skills are crucially important to individuals with aphasia in so many ways, such as life skills reading or pleasure reading. Acknowledging that we all have different skill levels and preferences, what are some ideas that you might have identified that speech-language pathologists can use to support the literacy and reading desires and activities for a person with aphasia?   Liz: Great question. I think my answer is very similar to the question about what can SLPs do to help support friendship? I think being person centered. You said earlier, right, we all have different interests. Somebody might say it's not one of my goals and I really don't want to spend a lot of time on this. But just having those conversations and person-centered measures and using supported conversation we can easily gather important information. There are some really good patient-reported outcome measures that ask about reading, so maybe use some of those existing tools. The Comprehensive Aphasia Disability Questionnaire has a nice scale that talks about different aspects of reading as well as other aspects of language. But at the minimum, I think finding a way, even just to draw your own scale and then trying to find out in their life, what are different activities where they want to or need to engage, right? Texting, email, restaurant. I mean, we think about it, we're reading all the time throughout life. So, I think finding the reading need is a general interest and then getting really specific is one way to do it. Another thing could be, as I mentioned before, our brain relies on similar structures and language networks when we are engaging in spoken language and written language. So oftentimes improving our reading and writing improves our spoken abilities and vice versa. So even if it's not the main goal in treatment, for example if the main outcome might be word retrieval, I really believe multimodal learning is important. If, after you've gone through what you want to do say writing it, having them repeat it, maybe copy it, even though that's not the main goal, and it's not slowing the therapy, if it's working for you and your client, then I really think, at the minimum, using written language to support spoken language has a good role. I also think the opposite can be true using spoken language to support written language. So I do think that it's important that we know we are addressing all of language, and that that language skills really do usually move up and down together in aphasia.   Janet: Well said, again. Liz, thank you so very much for joining me today in this fascinating look into friendship, literacy, reading and aphasia. And again, hearty congratulations to you on being named Tavistock, Distinguished Scholar. On behalf of Aphasia Access, I wish you well in your research and clinical efforts, and thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. At this point, I'd also like to thank our listeners for supporting Aphasia Access Conversations by listening to our podcast, including this fascinating discussion with Liz Madden.   Liz: Thanks so much, Janet, I feel like you could just chat with you all day. Thank you again for giving me a chance to highlight some of my work. Also I want to thank everyone with aphasia who has participated in my projects, all my students and collaborators, Aphasia Access and the Tavistock Trust for Aphasia. Thanks again.   Janet: For references and resources mentioned in today's podcast, please see our Show Notes. They are available on our website, www.aphasiaaccess.org. There you can also become a member of our organization, browse our growing library of materials, and find out about the Aphasia Access Academy. If you have an idea for a future podcast episode, email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org. For Aphasia Access Conversations, I'm Janet Patterson, thanking you again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access. References Antonucci, T. C., & Akiyama, H. (1987). Social networks in adult life and a preliminary examination of the convoy model. Journal of Gerontology, 42(5), 519–527. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronj/42.5.519 Archer, B.A., Azios, J.H., Douglas, N.F., Strong, K.A., Worrall, L.D. & Simmons-Mackie, N.F. (2024). “I Could Not Talk . . . She Did Everything . . . She's Now My Sister”: People with Aphasia's Perspectives on Friends Who Stuck Around. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 33, 349–368. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_AJSLP-23-00205 Azios, J.H., Strong, K.A., Archer, B, Douglas, N.F., Simmons-Mackie, N. & Worrall, L. (2021). Friendship matters: A research agenda for aphasia. Aphasiology, 36(3),317-336. https://10.1080/02687038.2021.1873908   Madden, E.B., Bislick, L., Wallace, S.E., Therrien, M.C.S. & Goff-Albritton, R. (2023). Aphasia and friendship: Stroke survivors' self-reported changes over time. Journal of Communication Disorders, 103, 106330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2023.106330 Madden, E., Conway, T., Henry, M., Spencer, K., Yorkston, K., & Kendall, D. (2018). The relationship between non-orthographic language abilities and reading performance in chronic aphasia: An exploration of the primary systems hypothesis. Journal of Speech Language Hearing Research, 61, 3038-3054. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-18-0058 Madden, E. B., Torrence, J., & Kendall, D. (2020). Cross-modal generalization of anomia treatment to reading in aphasia. Aphasiology, 35, 875-899. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2020.1734529   Purdy, M., Coppens, P., Madden, E. B., Freed, D., Mozeiko, J., Patterson, J., & Wallace, S. (2018). Reading comprehension treatment in aphasia: A systematic review. Aphasiology, 33(6), 629–651. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2018.1482405 Strong, K.A., Douglas, N.F., Johnson, R., Silverman, M., Azios, J.H. & Archer, B. (2023). Stakeholder-engaged research: What our friendship in aphasia team learned about processes and pitfalls. Topics in Language Disorders, 43(1), 43-56. https://10.1097/TLD.0000000000000302   Therrien, M., Madden, E. B., Bislick, L., & Wallace, S. (2021). Aphasia and Friendship: The Role and Perspectives of Speech-Language Pathologists. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 30(5), 2228-2240.   Resources   Stroke Social Network Scale reference and materials: https://cityaccess.org/tests/ssns/      Aphasia Access Conversations Episode #119 - Finding the person in front of aphasia: A conversation with Lauren Bislick

Catherine Parkin serves as Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, She co-authored the book, Medical aspects of disability for the rehabilitation professionals in 2017 by the Springer Publishing Company. Mary Regina Reilly has served as the Clinical Director of Speech Language Pathology at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langue Health for the last ten years.  Her Master's Degree is from Columbia University and she did her fellowship at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.  Clinical concentration has focused on pediatric dysphagia with medically complex infants with additional efforts in developing specialty programs for adults with acquired neurogenic disorders. She was instrumental in assisting in the development of the Masters of Science Program in Communication Sciences at Yeshiva University and has served as an adjunct professor at both Mercy College and NYU Steinhardt. Dr. Angela Stolfi is the Director of Physical Therapy, Director of Therapy Services at Rusk Ambulatory Satellite Locations, Site Coordinator of PT Clinical Education, and Director of PT Residency and Fellowship Programs at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langone Health.  Dr. Stolfi holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation at NYU School of Medicine and regularly lectures in the physical therapy programs at both NYU and the University of Scranton. The focus of much of her current and recent research relates to mentoring and education of student physical therapists.  She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Education in Physical Therapy (JCEPT). Maria Cristina Tafurt is the Site Director at the Rusk Institute NYU Langone Medical Center, Hospital for Joint Diseases.  She has been a licensed occupational therapist for over 30 years receiving her Bachelor's degree from the University of Rosario in Bogata Colombia, and her Advance Master's degree from NYU University.  Her clinical experience has varied with an emphasis on brain injury rehabilitation, pain management, hand therapy, and orthopedics. She holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine as a Clinical Instructor and has authored or co-authored sixteen articles, abstracts and international presentations in her field. The discussion covered the following topics: involvement of informal caregivers in treatment, staying on top of new developments, use of assistive technology, provision of care via telehealth, and impact of Long Covid on patient care.

Parkinson's disease significantly impacts various aspects of communication, and this can make it challenging for people with the disease to communicate effectively, be understood by others, and engage in social situations. Dr. Gemma Moya-Galé joins this episode to talk about her work on voice and communication in people with Parkinson's disease. In particular, she discusses a novel app she and her team are developing, with funding from The Michael J. Fox Foundation, to help people with Parkinson's improve how well their speech is understood. The app uses evidence-based principles from speech therapy and noise-augmented automatic speech recognition to provide speech training and feedback. She also shares her recent research on linguistically and culturally responsive methods for addressing communication challenges in both English- and Spanish-speaking individuals with Parkinson's disease, and how this approach has the potential to improve clinical care. Gemma is an Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, as well as the Director of the Communication, Technology, and Language Diversity Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University.This podcast is geared toward researchers and clinicians. If you live with Parkinson's or have a friend or family member with PD, listen to The Michael J. Fox Foundation Parkinson's Podcast at michaeljfox.org/podcasts. We're excited to announce that we will be merging our two podcasts in 2025, and we invite you to subscribe to our Michael J. Fox Foundation Parkinson's Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for future episodes featuring scientists, doctors and people with Parkinson's talking about different aspects of life with the disease as well as new research toward treatment breakthroughs.

Parkinson's disease significantly impacts various aspects of communication, and this can make it challenging for people with the disease to communicate effectively, be understood by others, and engage in social situations. Dr. Gemma Moya-Galé joins this episode to talk about her work on voice and communication in people with Parkinson's disease. In particular, she discusses a novel app she and her team are developing, with funding from The Michael J. Fox Foundation, to help people with Parkinson's improve how well their speech is understood. The app uses evidence-based principles from speech therapy and noise-augmented automatic speech recognition to provide speech training and feedback. She also shares her recent research on linguistically and culturally responsive methods for addressing communication challenges in both English- and Spanish-speaking individuals with Parkinson's disease, and how this approach has the potential to improve clinical care. Gemma is an Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, as well as the Director of the Communication, Technology, and Language Diversity Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University.This podcast is geared toward researchers and clinicians. If you live with Parkinson's or have a friend or family member with PD, listen to The Michael J. Fox Foundation Parkinson's Podcast at michaeljfox.org/podcasts. We're excited to announce that we will be merging our two podcasts in 2025, and we invite you to subscribe to our Michael J. Fox Foundation Parkinson's Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for future episodes featuring scientists, doctors and people with Parkinson's talking about different aspects of life with the disease as well as new research toward treatment breakthroughs.

Catherine Parkin serves as Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, She co-authored the book, Medical aspects of disability for the rehabilitation professionals in 2017 by the Springer Publishing Company. Mary Regina Reilly has served as the Clinical Director of Speech Language Pathology at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langue Health for the last ten years.  Her Master's Degree is from Columbia University and she did her fellowship at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.  Clinical concentration has focused on pediatric dysphagia with medically complex infants with additional efforts in developing specialty programs for adults with acquired neurogenic disorders. She was instrumental in assisting in the development of the Masters of Science Program in Communication Sciences at Yeshiva University and has served as an adjunct professor at both Mercy College and NYU Steinhardt. Dr. Angela Stolfi is the Director of Physical Therapy, Director of Therapy Services at Rusk Ambulatory Satellite Locations, Site Coordinator of PT Clinical Education, and Director of PT Residency and Fellowship Programs at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langone Health.  Dr. Stolfi holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation at NYU School of Medicine and regularly lectures in the physical therapy programs at both NYU and the University of Scranton. The focus of much of her current and recent research relates to mentoring and education of student physical therapists.  She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Education in Physical Therapy (JCEPT). Maria Cristina Tafurt is the Site Director at the Rusk Institute NYU Langone Medical Center, Hospital for Joint Diseases.  She has been a licensed occupational therapist for over 30 years receiving her Bachelor's degree from the University of Rosario in Bogata Colombia, and her Advance Master's degree from NYU University.  Her clinical experience has varied with an emphasis on brain injury rehabilitation, pain management, hand therapy, and orthopedics. She holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine as a Clinical Instructor and has authored or co-authored sixteen articles, abstracts and international presentations in her field. The discussion in Part Two covered the following topics: types of patients treated, impact of health care disparities, and patient cooperation in health care interventions by providers.

Catherine Parkin serves as Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, She co-authored the book, Medical aspects of disability for the rehabilitation professionals in 2017 by the Springer Publishing Company. Mary Regina Reilly has served as the Clinical Director of Speech Language Pathology at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langue Health for the last ten years.  Her Master's Degree is from Columbia University and she did her fellowship at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.  Clinical concentration has focused on pediatric dysphagia with medically complex infants with additional efforts in developing specialty programs for adults with acquired neurogenic disorders. She was instrumental in assisting in the development of the Masters of Science Program in Communication Sciences at Yeshiva University and has served as an adjunct professor at both Mercy College and NYU Steinhardt. Dr. Angela Stolfi is the Director of Physical Therapy, Director of Therapy Services at Rusk Ambulatory Satellite Locations, Site Coordinator of PT Clinical Education, and Director of PT Residency and Fellowship Programs at Rusk Rehabilitation, NYU Langone Health.  Dr. Stolfi holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation at NYU School of Medicine and regularly lectures in the physical therapy programs at both NYU and the University of Scranton. The focus of much of her current and recent research relates to mentoring and education of student physical therapists.  She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Education in Physical Therapy (JCEPT). Maria Cristina Tafurt is the Site Director at the Rusk Institute NYU Langone Medical Center, Hospital for Joint Diseases.  She has been a licensed occupational therapist for over 30 years receiving her Bachelor's degree from the University of Rosario in Bogata Colombia, and her Advance Master's degree from NYU University.  Her clinical experience has varied with an emphasis on brain injury rehabilitation, pain management, hand therapy, and orthopedics. She holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine as a Clinical Instructor and has authored or co-authored sixteen articles, abstracts and international presentations in her field. The discussion covered the following topics in Part One: a description of each of the three professions, educational requirements to become practitioners, and recruitment and retention of clinicians. 

In this episode you will:  Learn about how the Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach was developed. Hear about the importance of actively engaging care partners in therapy through this storytelling approach. Learn the importance of celebrating stories and how to host your own version of a Waffle Night.   Katie Strong: Welcome to the Aphasia Access Aphasia Conversations Podcast. I'm Katie Strong, a  member of the Aphasia Access Podcast Working Group. I'm also a faculty member at Central Michigan University where I lead the Strong Story Lab. Aphasia Access strives to provide members with information, inspiration, and ideas that support their aphasia care through a variety of educational materials and resources. I'm today's host for an episode that will feature Harold Regier and Dr. Erin O'Bryan. We'll be talking about the Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach that Harold developed for his wife, Rosella, who had aphasia and how Dr. O'Bryan took this approach into the lab to refine it for clinicians to use in sessions. Before we dive into the conversation, let me share a few details about our guests. First a bit about Harold. Harold R. Regier, B.S. Ed., BDiv. Theol., is a retired minister with a career path in programs addressing social justice issues. In retirement, his spouse, Rosella, had a stroke resulting in aphasia. His passion shifted to becoming an aphasia care partner focused on helping to recover language and communication skills. He is the author of “A Decade of Aphasia Therapy,” subtitled “Aphasia-Friendly Reading: A Technique for Oral Communication,” published in 2021.  Our second guest is Dr. Erin O'Bryan. Erin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Wichita State University, in Wichita, Kansas. Her major research, teaching, and clinical interests focus on helping people with aphasia communicate through scripts, stories, and phrases and teaching students and care partners how to support communication. Dr. O'Bryan directs the Wichita Adult Language Lab whose current projects focus on supported storytelling and Melodic Intonation Therapy. Welcome Harold and Erin. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Erin O'Bryan: Thank you, Katie! I've been listening to Aphasia Access Podcasts for years, and so many of my heroes have been interviewed in this series. It is really an honor that you invited Harold and I to be on the podcast today! Katie Strong: I am so excited for our listeners to hear about how the Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach was developed and expanded. This work is near and dear to my heart – particularly in this unique way of developing and telling stories. I feel compelled to disclose to our listeners that I am grateful to have been involved in this work as it was refined for clinical environments. So, I am going to come right out and say, this is my bias. Harold, I'm a big fan of yours and the Aphasia Friendly Reading Approach and of you Erin for how you brought this approach into the lab and studied it so that clinicians can use this approach. So, now let's get started! Harold, can you share a bit with us about how the Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach came to be? Harold Reiger: Sure. Thank you so much, Dr. Strong, for the privilege of being here to share just a bit of our story. You know, Rosella and I would have celebrated our 65th wedding anniversary if she had stayed with us just a few weeks longer. We had a very long and very happy marriage. She used to kid me, “We've been together so long we know what the other person will say before he or she says it.” Well, actually, aphasia kind of shattered that theory. But maybe there was a little bit of that was true. Well, anyway, Rosella was a retired public-school teacher with part of her career also involving children's curriculum development. She led many workshops, was a storyteller, and was a frequent guest speaker. Communication and broad coalitions were a strong suit for her. So, aphasia, loss of language was a huge loss for her. Perhaps that sets the stage for working so hard to restore some major storytelling. But I'm sure this is the same kind of feeling that every person who is a care partner with the person with aphasia has. How did we discover a technique for storytelling through oral reading? Really, I think I just stumbled into it. The cues came from Rosella. She could say many words. She had a strong voice, but she did not put words together in a way that made it possible for a listener to understand what she meant to communicate. So, I was highly motivated, wishing there was a way to help her tell her stories. Looking back, I now can see three of what I call ‘indicators' that led me to the technique that I eventually called Aphasia-Friendly Reading. They were painting, reading, and church liturgy. So let me explain. Indicator number one, completely on her own, Rosella began to paint. Just shy of two years after her stroke, Rosella began to paint. She painted for four years. She painted 250 paintings. The choice of her subjects were all hers. Objects, scenery, flowers, roadside sightings, trips and vacations, past memories. And yes, stories, family stories, stories that she didn't have words to tell, but she could tell them with a brush. She gave every picture a title or caption, signed it, and dated it. And somehow she found those one, two, or three words to intelligibly, that is accurately, identify the picture that she had just painted. But after four years of painting those pictures, she put her paintbrush down, never to pick it up again. And yet I kept remembering that she was able to identify pictures accurately using those few words to explain what it was that she was telling with her pictures. But then indicator number two came, reading periodicals and books. She underlined periodicals with many circles, much underlining. For a long time, Rosella delved through as many as 40 or 50 books per month. She turned every page, but did she understand what she was reading? Frankly, I often wondered and doubted it. One day, Rosella was reading orally beside me, and I pressed my iPhone video button. Listen to just a few seconds of that reading. And while you listen, think of two questions. Could you understand what she was reading? What was the story that she was trying to tell? And secondly, do you think that Rosella was understanding what she was reading? So listen to that clip. Excerpt of Rosella reading from a book. You heard Rosella reading the story of she and her sister, Anna Grace, requesting radio station KNEX out of McPherson, Kansas to surprise their mother by playing it for her birthday. It was a song that the girls knew that their mother loved. And you heard her read those words, “I love those dear hearts and gentle people.” And then as she continued reading the lyrics of that song, she exclaimed, “Oh, Harold”, which was her way of saying how excited she was to recall that particular story. Now, that explanation, of course, was not in the book. Then there was a third indicator that I recognized, and that was liturgical reading. One day in church we were reading a call to worship displayed on the screen. We were reading responsibly with the leader reading the first line and the congregation reading the second line. I glanced to my side and was surprised to see Rosella reading with the congregation. Maybe it was only the first three or four words of the line, but she read these words accurately. A light went on in my mind. Might this be a hint of how to help Rosella participate in oral reading? Short sentences read with a co-reader who read every other line and written in an easy to follow format? And so I adapted various psalms into very short lines formatted for us to read responsively. I read the first line, she read the second. The result was amazing success. Let me just illustrate by us reading just a very short psalm for you. This is Psalm 150 that Rosella and I will read together. H: Praise the Lord! R: Praise God in his sanctuary. H: Praise God in his mighty firmament. R: Praise Him for his mighty deeds. H: Praise the Lord for his greatness. R: Praise him with the trumpet. H: Praise him with the lute and harp. R: Praise him with the dance. My thought then was, could we try to write other stories and read them in what I began to call Aphasia-Friendly Reading format and style? And so, I began in earnest to try to write other stories. Short sentences, familiar words, larger font. Each line considered a sentence, even if it was only one word. Label the first line H for Harold and the second indented line R for Rosella. As I started reading and continued to read every other line, this could set the tone, the rhythm, and the pattern for saying every word clearly. I thought it was time to try. And then I began to wonder, is there a setting that we could read stories to others? Could we create an audience in some way? When COVID hit, of course, I could not see Rosella in person anymore, for an entire year we were separated. And the only contact we had was FaceTime telephone calls. And those were really a disaster because we found it very difficult to communicate with each other when Roselle was not able to understand me and I wasn't able to understand her, except when we read Aphasia-Friendly stories. And so, I wrote many stories during that year. And we read those stories then as our connection during our FaceTime calls. And somehow we were able to survive COVID. But it was after COVID then that we were able to again get back together occasionally. And I would bring her back to my apartment. And there I would invite friends, usually a couple or two individuals to come over and I would serve waffles. I'm not a kitchen person, but I could make waffles. So, we'd have a simple meal, a simple supper that we could visit with each other and talk about anything that we would like. And Rosella almost always simply said, “I remember exactly”. Because as others told stories that she was familiar with, she could comment that way. Otherwise, her conversation skills were not there. So that was our first hour that we would spend together simply informally visiting with each other. And the second hour that we spent together, we would go to what I would call “my theater,” our living room with a 50-inch television. And there we could read Aphasia-Friendly stories. I would stream the story to the television set. I would have them formatted so that there would be an H for Harold, an R for Rosella, and we would read the story so that the folks who were listening and watching could see the story as well as hear the story. And if we made any mistakes, they could make the corrections in their own mind. There was a way that she was able to, again, participate. It's worth telling. But there was one waffle evening when she turned to me, and said, “China”. I knew she had a story in mind, but her look said, “you tell it. I can't do it.” And so, I did. It was a story about a cracked tea cup And so I decided certainly next Waffle Night we need to let her help tell that story of the cracked tea cup. Here is that story. Cracked Tea Cup. H: This is as story of a cracked tea cup. R: Harold and I were youth sponsors. H: Rose was one of the youth. R: Winifred was her mother. H: She invited me to her home. R: “Thank you,” she said. H: “Thank you for being Rose's sponsor.” R: We visited. H: Before leaving, she said R: “Let me pray for you.” H: It was a pray of blessing… R: …for our work in Mississippi. H: Then she added, R: “Wait!” H: “I have something for you.” R: She got a tea cup. H: Erland brought it to me from China. R: It's cracked. H: Put it in your china cupboard. R: You'll never use it. H: “But you'll remember be when you see it.” R: Sixty years are gone. H: This tea cup is still in my china cupboard. R: And I remember Winifred. H: It reminds me R: Of the grace, H: Of the affirmation, R: Of blessing, H: Of the seminary president's wife.   And so those Waffle Nights became the favorite parts of our week when we could spend time with friends and Rosella could be part of the conversation by reading stories together with me. Katie Strong: So beautiful! This is really just a fabulous way of having such a natural thing, a shared meal, a celebration to share stories. And it sounds like everybody enjoyed Waffle Nights. So, thank you for sharing, Harold. Erin, I was wondering if come into the conversation a bit more and tell us how you got involved with Harold and the Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach? Erin O'Bryan: Thank you, Katie. Even though I've heard Harold's story so many times, I still get teary every time I hear him talk about their year of not being able to see each other during COVID and the Waffle Nights that were just so wonderful. So, I met Harold in 2019 when I first became an Assistant Professor after 10 years of working as an SLP in healthcare. And Wichita State already had a weekly aphasia group, and I couldn't wait to meet the members. So, I went to aphasia group and there I met all of the care partners in the observation room and Harold showed me a video of him and Rosella reading a story together. I had been watching Rosella in the aphasia group and I'd seen that most of her utterances were short one- to two-word phrases and that much of her communication was nonverbal. But then in the video, she was reading full sentences aloud, taking turns with Harold. And what really struck me was that she was so motivated and happy to read the story. I was so impressed. Harold asked me, “Do you think that other people with aphasia could benefit from doing this?” So many thoughts were running through my mind as we were having this conversation. Earlier in 2019, I had visited Audrey Holland, who was one of my mentors when I was in grad school at University of Arizona. And we'd actually set up this meeting through an online Scrabble chat. She invited me to her home. Katie Strong: How very ‘Audrey'. Erin O'Bryan: Yes, it was lovely. And I got to visit her with all her kitty cats. So, I asked her advice because I was applying for an Assistant Professor position after 10 years of working in health care. And I remember that she was so excited about her speechpathology.com video series and the related book that she was working on with Roberta Elman that she liked to call the Social Imperative of the LPAA, which I believe is the subtitle of that book. And Katie, I think you were a part of both the video series and the book. Katie Strong: I was, yes. Erin O'Bryan:  Well, Audrey just loved that. She was so excited about that, and she told me to learn everything I could about the LPAA. And she said, “I must join Aphasia Access.” She said, “that's where all the important work is happening.” So that year I listened to loads of Aphasia Access podcasts, and I got very familiar with the Chapey and Colleagues LPAA Values chapter. So then as I'm sitting there talking to Harold, I'm thinking about the LPAA value, everyone affected by aphasia is entitled to service. So, I mean, who is affected more than a spouse? So definitely I was thinking about having the care partner being involved seemed like a wonderful thing. And I was also thinking that Harold and Rosella's approach shared so many similarities with Script Training, which I have loved and have been using in healthcare care since grad school. And there also are similarities with ORLA and Multiple Oral Rereading. And all of these are evidence-based treatment approaches. So, I felt pretty confident that Aphasia-Friendly Reading could be a very valuable intervention. So, I said to Harold, “I'd like to try using your approach with other people with aphasia and their care partners in our clinic”. And Harold was happy for us to try it. Katie Strong: I love that. I love that. And just for our listeners, we'll put some links and references in the show notes for some of the approaches like ORLA and Script Training that Erin has mentioned in addition to Harold's book and some other some other resources too. Erin O'Bryan: Yes, thank you, Katie. Those are all wonderful resources for people to be looking at. So, my grad students and I started a pilot study with a woman with aphasia and her husband. And they were actually friends of Harold and Rosella's from their aphasia group. We use the pseudonyms Cora and Dave when we describe them in our papers. It became clear that we needed to make a few adaptations to Harold's approach for use in the clinic. For one thing, I wanted the person with aphasia to have the largest role in selecting the story topic and deciding what she wanted to say. For our first session, we asked Cora and Dave to bring ideas for a story that Cora wanted to tell. And we also suggested they consider bringing some related photos. In our first session, Cora, Dave, my grad student, Addison, and I all sat around the table and together we brainstormed about the story. Cora wanted it to be about a Caribbean cruise that she and Dave had gone on. She brought photos from that trip. Dave helped with supplying names and information about places that Cora wanted to talk about. Places from their shore excursions, such as having their picture taken with a donkey in St. Thomas and visiting the Bomba Shack on the island of Tortola. We got Cora's feedback on every line that was proposed, fine-tuning the story until Cora liked every line. And we also adjusted some of the lines to make them easier for her to say. So once Cora and Dave were happy with the story, we helped them practice during our sessions, one hour per week with my grad student, Addison and I at the clinic. And we gave a printout of the story and a practice log to record notes about their home practice. In this first pilot project, Cora and Dave practiced their story for eight sessions until Cora said she was ready to plan their story sharing celebration. Then they shared their story with their friends in aphasia group. And the clinicians and the other people with aphasia in the room were just amazed. And other people in the aphasia group said, “I want to do that!” So, after two people with aphasia and their care partners did Aphasia-Friendly Reading projects, I wrote a manuscript reporting the pilot results. And Katie, I had seen online that you were an editor of Perspectives at the time. So, I emailed you my manuscript and asked if it was appropriate for Perspectives. And you emailed me back and said, “let's meet online and talk about it.” I was so delighted that you were interested in my project. You suggested that I consider exploring the value of the intervention by interviewing the participants. And I didn't know anything about qualitative research. But, Katie, you helped me write great interview questions for the care partners. And you helped me learn thematic analysis so we could find the themes in the care partner's quotes. And so, after learning from you, I have come to love the thematic analysis process. I really think it leads to deep listening. What we learned from the interviews is that the care partners felt empowered by being included in the intervention and the care partners really valued the collaborative nature of the storytelling project and especially that the intervention was so different than the previous therapy experiences that they had had because it was person-centered, it was fun, and they got to share their story with other people in their lives. So, then the three of us, Harold, Katie, and I wrote our first article about Aphasia-Friendly Reading and it's published in Aphasiology and the title is, “I wasn't just sitting there”: Empowering care partners through the Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach. And then in 2023, the three of us went to Boston and presented it at ASHA. Katie Strong: Thanks for sharing that, Erin. You know, I think the experience of the care partners saying that therapy was fun important to note. And Harold has mentioned that Rosella thought it was fun, and the other participants thought it was fun. And I guess I just want to bring home that hard work can, can still be fun or therapy can be fun. And especially when it comes from the person with aphasia and their care partners. The topics are generated by the client and care partner. They're sharing things that are really important to them that have happened in their past. I love it. Erin O'Bryan: And one of the care partners even said that they learned better when it was fun. Katie Strong: I love it. Fantastic. Erin, I was wondering if you could share some tips for clinicians who might be listening that are thinking about how they might be able to incorporate this Aphasia-Friendly Reading Approach into their practice. Erin O'Bryan: Thank you for asking, Katie. So, in the past year, you and I have been talking about how we want to make it as easy as possible for clinicians to use our storytelling approaches in regular clinical settings, outside of research. And we really want clinicians to realize that it takes almost no time to prep for a person-centered storytelling session. You just have to go into the session ready to actively listen to what the person with aphasia wants to say. I love the acronym PULSE that you and Barbara Shadden wrote about in your paper, The Power of Story and Identity Renegotiation. And then in our paper, we reviewed PULSE again. So just for our listeners, I'm going to go through it real quickly because I think these are great things for clinicians to keep in mind. The P in pulse is for partnerships, partnering with the person with aphasia. And in the case of Aphasia-Friendly Reading, the clinician partnering with the care partner also. The U in pulse is for uniqueness. So, the clinician should be prepared to help the person with aphasia tell their unique story. The L is for listening. The clinician needs to learn how to really listen. And S is for supporting the person with aphasia in telling their stories. For example, using communication ramps in Supported Conversation for Adults with Aphasia strategies to support communication. And then finally, the E impulse is for explore. So as a clinician, be ready to go off-road with your client to explore the story that they want to share. And as a clinician, know that it's okay, even it's great for you to do that. Katie Strong: I love that. I love that. Erin, I guess that leads us into sharing that we do have a paper that came out in 2024 called Person Centered Stories on the Main Stage in Intervention, which highlights examples from three different story projects, including Aphasia-Friendly Reading. So, we'll link that to the show notes as well. Erin O'Bryan: Yes, and this year at ASHA 2024, Katie, you and I are going to be also giving a talk about this work called Elevating Person-Centered Stories to the Main Stage in Aphasia Intervention. And we are looking forward to presenting this work hopefully to an audience of clinicians. Katie Strong: Yes, yes, we hope to see folks in Seattle for sure. Well, I want to bring back both Harold and Erin into this conversation. And I think one of the things that I've recognized through this collaboration that you and Harold and Rosella and later on I got to be a part of is that we really are all better together. And I was hoping each of you could take a moment to share how this work has changed your thinking or maybe some ideas about sharing with others about what you've learned from this collaboration. Harold Regier: Well, for me, one of the things that I think I really learned from this is that we care partners need the therapist and the therapist needs us care partners. And there are more ways in which we can work together than perhaps sometimes we have done it when we have just been sitting there. And so, I really, I'm so pleased to be able to feel that that we care partners are more involved or can be more involved in the whole therapy process than what so often we have been. But I think that one of the things that the therapist needs to help us understand is when is it appropriate for us to be part of the process and when it is not appropriate for us to be part of the part process. It's not a matter of us being there all the time and sometimes being in the way. So, I think that kind of very frank candid conversation with us would help us understand that. And I certainly understood better that that the role of the care partner in terms of helping the person with aphasia be able to communicate better is very different from the role of the therapist. I never tried to be the person who was the teacher, trying to let Rosella know how she should do better and how we might be able to improve our reading. We just did it and it came out the way it came out. But then when I see how Erin was working with other clients and the persons with aphasia and the family members together identified the stories that they were interested in putting together, and the therapist helped put that together into words that they then could repeat or share together and in a storyline, that that is the place where I think we can be so much more collaborative with the therapist in a process like that. So I just always was telling myself, “Don't be a therapist. Don't be a teacher. Don't try to say, well, you can do better than that. Just simply do what is natural.” And then I wish that the therapist would take the other role and really work hard to help the person with aphasia do better with their reading and their performance. We didn't do our reading for production. We did it for fun, as you were saying earlier. And then we did it because we wanted to share that fun and that experience with others. And that was so very, very satisfying for us. Those are some of the thoughts that have come to me in terms of the relationship between therapist and care partner. Katie Strong: Thanks Harold. Yeah, Erin, any thoughts? Erin O'Bryan: I've learned so much from this collaboration. From Harold, I learned what a difference it makes when a care partner puts so much time and thought into supporting their partner with aphasia's communication and her quality of life. Also I've seen how much Harold has done and I hope that me you know as a busy professor stopping and taking the time to tell him that I saw so much value in what he was doing at home with Rosella reading those videos together. I hope that this helped him realize that it was valuable to share. And I'm thrilled to say that Harold has been going around the state of Kansas giving talks about aphasia at colleges and senior living facilities. He's doing so much and I love to see that. And from collaborating with you, Katie, I've learned the importance of making the story sharing a really beautiful celebration honoring the person with aphasia and you know bringing special things like favorite food treats, beverages, flowers, and especially inviting the people that are important to the person with aphasia. We've now had five or six story sharing celebrations. It seems like everyone is more beautiful than the last. I've learned so much about that. And I've also learned that qualitative research helps me capture the meaningfulness of these projects and the meaningfulness as we're working with people with aphasia and that this research can be so fun and rewarding. Katie Strong: I love that. I love that. As I was listening to you, Erin, respond to Harold, it just sounds like together we can validate one another. The work that you're doing, you were doing with Rosella, Harold is very validating and then Erin bringing it into the lab to test it out and it's all beautiful. It's, it really is. And I guess as I reflect on this thought about what I've learned is to reiterate, Erin, something you said, that listening to family members or care partners and the ideas that they have to engage their loved ones in communication activities are so powerful and taking that time even if you are busy to listen and think and validate and see how that connects to the existing evidence-based literature. I think is really powerful. But I also think that there's this collaboration and the combination of care partners and clinicians and researchers. And of course, the person with aphasia at the center of all of that, making a powerful team to develop innovative methods of storytelling is really one of my big takeaways from all of this. Erin O'Bryan: Yes, that's wonderful. Harold Regier: I would like to give kudos to the therapists who worked with Rosella over the many, many years. Ten years of aphasia therapy, four of which were one-on-one, six of which were part of a support therapy group. Those therapists were such relational people, such encouraging people, and also knew the techniques that work in therapy. So, I wanted to say that those years were very, very meaningful, very, very helpful, and helped us with the day-to-day kind of living with hope, with the expectations that things can continue to get better. Katie Strong: Thank you, Harold. Yeah. Erin, any other thoughts as we wrap this up today? Erin O'Bryan: Well, I just wanted to say that I would never recommend that all intervention involve the care partner because I understand that it's good for the person with aphasia to get one-on-one time with the clinician. But don't forget that that care partner is often with the person with aphasia almost 24/7 and we may only see them one or two hours a week. So, it's so important that we do more to really educate the care partner about how to acknowledge the competence of the person with aphasia and really how to support their communication. So that's why I really want us to do more with in involving the care partner and in intervention. So, I'll get off my soapbox. Thank you, Katie, for letting us share about this project that I love. Katie Strong: I'm so delighted that we could have this time together today. Harold, thank you for your generosity and sharing your ideas and Rosella's stories with us and this beautiful work of Aphasia-Friendly Reading and Erin for your work in the lab and bringing it to the clinic. On behalf of Aphasia Access, thank you for listening. For references and resources mentioned in today's show, please see our show notes. They're available on our website, www.aphasiaaccess.org. There you can also become a member of our organization, browse our growing library of materials, and find out about the Aphasia Access Academy. If you have an idea for a future podcast episode, email us at info@aphasiaaccess.org. For Aphasia Access Conversations, I'm Katie Strong. Thanks again for your ongoing support of Aphasia Access. Contact information for Guests – Harold Regier hrregier@cox.net  Erin O'Bryan, PhD., CCC-SLP erin.obryan@wichita.edu  Resources Aphasia Institute's Introduction to Supported Conversation for Adults with Aphasia (SCA™) eLearning. https://www.aphasia.ca/health-care-providers/education-training/online-options/ Chapey, R., Duchan, J. F., Elman, R. J., Garcia, L. J., Kagan, A., Lyon, J. G., & Simmons-Mackie, N. (2000).Life Participation Approach to Aphasia: A statement of values for the future. The ASHA Leader, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR.05032000.4 Cherney, L. R. (2010). Oral reading for language in aphasia: Impact of aphasia severity oncross-modal outcomes in chronic nonfluent aphasia. Seminars in Speech and Language, 31, 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0029-1244952 Cherney, L. Babbitt, E., Oldani, J., & Semik, P. (2005). Efficacy of repeated choral reading for individuals with chronic nonfluent aphasia. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]  http://aphasiology.pitt.edu/1548/  Kaye, R., & Cherney, L. R. (2016). Script templates: A practical approach to script training in aphasia. Topics in Language Disorders, 36(2), 136–153. https://doi.org/10.1097/2FTLD.0000000000000086 O'Bryan, E. L., Regier, H. R., & Strong, K. A. (2023). “I wasn't just sitting there”: Empowering care partners through the Aphasia-Friendly Reading approach. Aphasiology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2023.2272956 O'Bryan, E. L., & Strong, K. A. (2024). Person-centered stories on the main stage in intervention: Case examples from the My Story Project, Aphasia! This Is Our World, and Aphasia-Friendly Reading. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups. https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2024_PERSP-23-00272 Regier, H. (2021). A Decade of Aphasia Therapy: Aphasia-Friendly Reading: A Technique for Oral Communication. Independently published Available on Amazon Strong, K. A. & Shadden, B. B. (2020). Stories at the Heart of Life Participation: Both the Telling and Listening Matter. Chapter 5. In A. L. Holland & R. J. Elman (Eds.) Neurogenic communication disorders and the Life Participation Approach: The social imperative in supporting individuals and families (pp. 105-130) Plural Publishing. Strong, K. A & Shadden, B. B. (2020). The power of story in identity renegotiation: Clinical approaches to supporting persons living with aphasia. ASHA Perspectives, SIG 2, 5, 371-383. https://pubs.asha.org/doi/pdf/10.1044/2019_PERSP-19-00145 Youmans, G., Holland, A., Munoz, M. L., & Bourgeois, M. (2005). Script training and automaticity in two individuals with aphasia. Aphasiology, 19(3/4/5), 435–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/02687030444000877

Join me and my guest, Mickaël Dufourneaud. Mickaël is a Process Communication Model® Master Trainers Director and certifies PCM trainers and coaches around the world. He is also a facilitator, executive coach, and supervisor. Before becoming the Chief Operating Officer of Kahler Communications, Inc. in 2018, Mickael worked as a consultant at KCI and was responsible for creating, organizing, selling, facilitating, and managing the quality of the personal development and SoftSkills Assessment training. In the past 12 years, Mickaël has trained more than 10,000 people on a variety of subjects including the Process Communication Model, public speaking, communication management, and leadership skills. Mickaël has also been studying comedy since he was 11 years old, and has worked as a freelance comedian since 1997. As a drama school graduate, vocal coach, and 19 years experience as an actor, Mickaël integrates comedy and emotional expression in his training methods. Mickaël also has a Masters degree in Information and Communication Science from La Sorbonne University in Paris. Click here to connect with Mickael on LinkedIn:   / mickaeldufourneaud   Order Mickael's book: https://a.co/d/98hzG6U #communications #communication #leadership #mentalhealth #emotionalintelligence #culturalawareness #personaldevelopment #france #unitedstates

Want to share your feedback? Send us a message!Julia Kerrigan, B.A., current second year Master's student and the University of Iowa, and Shelley B. Brundage, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, BCS-SCF, Fellow-ASHA, join host, Sara MacIntyre, M.A., CCC-SLP, to discuss a recent paper published in the Journal of Communication Disorders, 'Lived Experiences of Children who Stutter in Their Own Voices.' The authors begin by sharing a bit about their professional journeys into stuttering, research areas of interest, and then dive into discussing their motivation to further explore and document the lived experiences of young people who stutter where they emphasize the real need to increase this particular area of research within our field of stuttering. They proceed to walk through their design, findings, impressions, and areas of clinical consideration and application.Lived Experiences of Children who Stutter in Their Own VoicesJulia S. Kerrigan; Shelley BrundageSeptember 2024Journal of Communication DisordersDOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2024.106468FluencyBankJulia Kerrigan, B.A. is a current second-year Master's student at the University of Iowa and a Teaching Artist with the SPACE Community and Arts program.Shelley B. Brundage, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, BCS-SCF, Fellow-ASHA, is professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the George Washington University (GWU). She is a certified SLP and a board-certified specialist in stuttering, cluttering, and fluency. She is the co-chair of the tri-annual Oxford Stuttering and Cluttering Research Conference. Her research addresses clinical questions that enhance the lives of persons who stutter, by improving procedures for assessment, treatment, and clinical education in stuttering. Recent work has merged her expertise in assessing student learning outcomes with her expertise in the development and use of virtual reality technologies; this work has led to grants, publications, and awards for innovation. She teaches graduate courses on stuttering and research methods and is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching excellence and mentoring. She is the co-author of two books, the seventh edition of A Handbook on Stuttering and Writing Scientific Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Guest: Lisa Bowers, PhD, CCC-SLPIn this episode, Michelle is joined by the charismatic Lisa Bowers, PhD CCC-SLP, Chair of the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorder's (CAPCSD) IPE/IPP committee, and Director of the Service Learning Initiative at the University of Arkansas. Lisa, a passionate advocate for the speech-language pathologist working to improve children's language and literacy abilities, spends this power hour sharing some of her favorite resources and imparting pearls of wisdom! So, whether you are a tried and true SLP and want to improve your interprofessional education and practice within the public schools for your students struggling with reading or are still in your clinical fellow and not sure where to begin when it comes to speech-sound disorders and literacy, this episode has you covered.

In the second episode, we are exploring the what is it like to study Audiology. Maria Khan is joined by Danielle DiFabio, a Combined MClSc-PhD student in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorder at Western University. Danielle discusses her PhD thesis, developing a clinical framework to enhance caregiver participation in family-centered virtual care, looking at the methodology, results so far, and future goals. She also shares how she finds the clinical portion of the program so far and what she does to balance a Masters and PhD.  

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation. Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract. Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Partners in PROMISE is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect the rights of military children in special education and disability communities to ensure they receive equal access to education.  Listen as Dr. Jenna Kremkow and Carla Wyrsch discuss how the PROMISE advocates for military children with special and exceptional needs.   This podcast is made possible by generous funding from the Tinker Spouses Club. To learn more, visit https://www.tinkerspouses.org/.   Audio mixing by Concentus Media, Inc., Temple, Texas.   Show Notes:     Resources:   Partners in PROMISE https://thepromiseact.org/   Partners in PROMISE Special Education & EFMP Binder  https://thepromiseact.org/binder/   Educator Report https://thepromiseact.org/educators-report-partners-in-promise-2022-research-findings/   Bio: Jenna Kremkow is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Elmhurst University. She completed her MS and PhD at The Pennsylvania State University with an emphasis in autism, augmentative and alternative communication, child language disorders, and stakeholder training and perspectives. Clinically, Jenna has worked as a speech-language pathologist in elementary schools, outpatient clinics, and early intervention settings. Jenna teaches courses in augmentative and alternative communication, autism, language disorders in children, and research methods. One of her research areas focuses on the experiences of military families with children with autism and the use of technology to improve communication outcomes and quality of life for children with autism and their families. Her goal is to use research to support data-driven recommendations and policy changes to improve special education services for military families.     Carla Wyrsch is the spouse of a retired United States Marine and mother of two. She has devoted her career to educating and advocating for children with disABILITIES. Her experience spans a variety of settings, including residential treatment facilities, military bases, public schools, and the Lerner School for Autism at the Cleveland Clinic. Currently, she is a School Operations Director with MIYO Health. In addition to her work with MIYO Health, Carla enjoys volunteering with Best Buddies of Greater Memphis, the Organization for Autism Research, and Partners in PROMISE as a content creator and advisory board member.    

Dr. John Anderton, Associate Director for Communication Science at the CDC's Office of Readiness and Response, tells us how the CDC has changed their approach to National Preparedness Month; Brian Lentes, Senior Director for Public Health Infrastructure at ASTHO, discusses ASTHO's upcoming Virtual Performance Management Vendor Showcase; and you can now apply for ASTHO's latest cohort of the Diverse Executives Leading in Public Health program. CDC Web Page: National Preparedness Month 2024 ASTHO Web Page: Vendor Showcase – Performance Management Systems ASTHO Web Page: Diverse Executives Leading in Public Health ASTHO Web Page: DELPH Applications  

There is a disproportionate number of individuals with communication disorders and reading disabilities involved with the justice system for both children and adults.Past research suggests that more than 40% of incarcerated people have some type of nonpsychiatric disability (Berzofsky et al., 2015; Bixby et al., 2022; Thompson, 2022)Additionally, once youth are involved in the justice system, it becomes more difficult for them to access the education and therapeutic services they need. Both literacy and language skills will impact someone's ability to comprehend employee or disciplinary handbooks, to read language in legal documents, fill out job applications, and or explain past events during job interviews, when interacting with school staff or with law enforcement. Many times things are written off as “behavior problems” when the real underlying issue could be tied to language, reading, or writing. That's why I invited Dr. Shameka Stewart to episode 180 of the De Facto Leaders podcast). Dr. Shameka Stewart is an Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the Juvenile Forensic Speech-Language Pathologist(r). Dr. Stewart is also a special education advocate trained by the Wright's Law training center. Dr. Stewart's clinical and scholarly work specializes in Juvenile Forensics, Law Enforcement Interaction with youth with CD, child language disorders, and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Her primary research focuses on the Confluence and Impact of cognitive and communication disorders on the school-to-confinement pipeline, status offenses, involvement with the criminal justice system, law enforcement interaction, and criminal recidivism in youth placed at-risk for delinquency and crime (especially Black and Brown youth from under-resourced areas). Dr. Stewart is also a clinically certified and licensed speech-language pathologist and is licensed to practice in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and multiple other states. Through her work, Dr. Stewart has created cutting edge social justice and juvenile justice specialty courses for graduate CSD students, nationally known training programs for law enforcement and legal counsel, and national and international CE workshops and training for licensed SLP clinicians, students, and families of children with special needs.This episode is part of the National Literacy Month series of podcasts, presented in partnership between the Be Podcast Network and Reading Is Fundamental (RIF).In this conversation, we discuss:✅The relationship between reading challenges and the school-to-confinement pipeline.✅Why “behavior problems” could be related to language processing, reading, or writing challenges.✅When youth become involved with the justice system, how do they get access to special education services (including language therapy)? ✅“They should know better”: Why we can't assume kids comprehend language in the school discipline handbook. ✅A case for continuing direct language therapy in high school (and why therapists need support from school leaders in making this happen).You can connect with Dr. Stewart on her website here: www.juvforensicslp.comConnect with her on Instagram @drjuvenile_forensicslpJoin her Facebook group SLPs 4 Juvenile Justice here. References for this episode's show notes:Berzofsky, M., Bronson, J., & Maruschak, L. L. (2015). Disabilities among prison and jail inmates, 2011–12. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.Bixby, L., Bevan, S., & Boen, C. (2022). The link between disability, incarceration, and social exclusion. Heath Affairs, 41,10. doi: https://.doi.org/10.1377.hlthaff.2022.00495Thompson, E. (2022). Reading through the lines; The correlation between literacy and incarceration. Retrieved from: https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2022/03/21/reading-through-the-lines-the-correlation-between-literacy-and-incarceration/In this episode, I mention the School of Clinical Leadership, my program that helps related service providers develop a strategic plan for putting executive functioning support in place in collaboration with their school teams. You can learn more about that program here. In this episode, I mention Language Therapy Advance Foundations, my program that helps SLPs create a system for language therapy. You can learn more about Language Therapy Advance Foundations here. You can get 25% off either program when you join between September 15-October 15. Just enter coupon code RIF25 on the checkout page to get this special rate. *If you're already a member of either program and you refer a friend, tell them to email me at talktome@drkarenspeech.com if they join and let me know you referred them and I'll send you a $100 referral bonus. Here's what you can do right now to support this campaign and ensure you don't miss any of these amazing interviews/commentary. Go to Apple, Spotify, or any other directory you use for podcasts and subscribe to the De Facto Leaders podcast.Once you listen to an episode or two, leave me a rating and review. This helps get my show into the hands of people who need the information.Do you have a colleague or friend who needs to learn more about the research surrounding language and literacy? Do you want to spread the word about practices and ideas you'd like to see in your school, community, or state? If so, tell them about the De Facto Leaders podcast so they can listen to all the episodes in this special campaign. Reading Is Fundamental is a nonprofit that focuses on connecting educators and families with materials and training aligned with evidence-based literacy instruction. Not only is their model aligned with the science of reading; they also offer unique book ownership solutions for professionals and families to address book equity issues. You can learn more about Reading Is Fundamental here.&n...

Have you been thinking about starting a private practice in your small town? You're going to love this episode of Private Practice Success Stories! I sat down with Gabby Hewitt, a speech language pathologist with a private practice specializing in orofacial myology in a small town in North Dakota. She opened her practice while knowing there was a lack of speech therapy services in her hometown and wanted to fill that gap. I got to know Gabby during her time in the Start and Grow Your Private Practice programs and it has been amazing to watch the impact she has had bringing a much-needed service to her rural area. In this episode, Gabby talks about how she started her practice right out of her CF, how clients find her, why she hired an assistant, and how specializing in feeding and myo has helped clients be drawn to her.Gabby is an ASHA Certified SLP specializing in orofacial myology, oral myofunctional disorders, and pediatric feeding and swallowing. She is currently in the certification process for becoming a Certified Breastfeeding Specialist (CBS), Certified Myofunctional Therapist (CMT®), and Certified Orofacial Myologist (COM®). She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of North Dakota before obtaining her Master of Science in Speech Language Pathology from Gannon University in Ruskin, FL where she was a member of the first-ever graduate SLP program cohort. It was in Florida that she discovered and learned about orofacial myology. Following her clinical fellowship, Gabby opened her private practice, UpNorth Therapies, in her hometown of Carrington, North Dakota where she recently just completed a renovation and expansion project of a new clinic space 8 months after opening. In Today's Episode, We Discuss:How and why Gabby decided to start a private practice so early in her careerWhy work-life balance isn't just a fantasy with a private practiceThe good you can do for your community when you take control of your life and careerThe key to getting your first clients as a private practice owner in a small townThe true power of specializing as a private practice ownerHow you can structure your week when you are in charge of your hoursA look into the impact of hiring help in your private practiceHow the Start and Grow programs helped Gabby grow her business and get more stabilityThe power you have to grow at your own pace in your businessI hope you enjoyed this episode with Gabby! She is a perfect example of someone who opened her private practice early on in her career and specialized in a rural area.If you want our help to start - or grow - your private practice (just like we helped Gabby!) please visit: https://independentclinician.com/resources/.Whether you want to start a private practice or grow your existing private practice, I can help you get the freedom, flexibility, fulfillment, and financial abundance that you deserve. Visit my website www.independentclinician.com to learn more.Resources Mentioned: Follow Gabby on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/upnorththerapies/Visit Gabby's website: https://www.upnorththerapies.com/Where We Can Connect: Follow the Podcast:

Dr. Gilliam, better known as “Dr. Jay,” is a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist and Founder of Jabber Talk Speech and Consulting, PLLC. She is passionate about providing skilled speech therapy services to the early childhood and school-aged populations. She enjoys coaching parents to help their children meet their full potential across all environments. Dr. Jay's education began with a B.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Alabama A&M University. She obtained her M.S. in Communicative Sciences & Disorders from The University of Arkansas and her Doctorate of Speech-Language Pathology at Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions. Dr. Jay has been an active member of the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the National Black Association for Speech-Language Hearing. Dr. Jay has over 13 years of experience in assessment, diagnosing, planning and treating children with speech-language and feeding disorders. She has provided speech and language services in a variety of settings, including schools, private clinics, home health, and early intervention. In addition to her private practice Dr. Jay is an Adjunct Professor and currently a Visiting Professor at one of the local universities in the DFW metroplex. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, reading and spending time with her husband William and their daughters Layla and Nova. Social Media Handles: IG: the_latetalkers_speechdoctor IG: jabber_talk Facebook: Jabber Talk Speech and Consulting, PLLC Website: www.jabbertalkspeech.com   ________________________   You can listen to this episode wherever you stream podcasts and at www.3cdigitalmedianetwork.com/telepractice-today-podcast

UT Health San Antonio Speech-Language Pathology program graduate students are helping local kids at risk for developing a language disorder through a program called LAUNCH. Angela Kennedy, SLP-D, CCC-SLP, is the director of clinical education and an assistant professor for the Speech-Language Pathology program in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

This weekend's 1 in 36 guest is Dr. Bob Domingo. Dr. Domingo is an Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Long Island University – Post. Dr. Domingo has over 40 years of experience as a speech language pathologist. His career has always focused on working with and helping individuals with developmental disabilities. Dr. Domingo has recently begun incorporating improvisational theater to help young adults with autism to develop their social skills. Tune in to learn more about Bob!

I'm not a financial advisor; Superpowers for Good should not be considered investment advice. Seek counsel before making investment decisions.Watch the show on television by downloading the e360tv channel app to your Roku, AppleTV or AmazonFireTV. You can also see it on YouTube.When you purchase an item, launch a campaign or create an investment account after clicking a link here, we may earn a fee. Engage to support our work.Devin: What do you see as your superpower?Mara: Honestly, my superpower is my empathy. As the host of "Superpowers for Good," I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Mara McLoughlin, the Program Director of IRL Social Skills. During our conversation, Mara provided invaluable insights into her program, which focuses on helping autistic and neurodivergent individuals improve their social interactions. Today, I want to share some of the key ideas and strategies that Mara discussed that can benefit us all.IRL Social Skills, which stands for "In Real Life," offers a community-based, proactive approach to mental health by teaching essential social skills. Mara emphasized the importance of creating a safe space for participants to learn and practice these skills, stating, "We offer a community-based proactive approach to mental health so that our participants get the opportunity to learn these skills in a safe space with other people who are also struggling."One of the standout strategies Mara shared involves transforming the dreaded small talk into a meaningful exchange. She explained, "You think about the dreaded small talk, right? We think of this more in terms of like a tactical strategy of trading information to find common interests because friendships are based on common interests." By encouraging participants to ask questions, give compliments, and share their own interests, IRL Social Skills helps individuals build genuine connections.Another critical aspect of Mara's program is teaching the concept of "interoception," which involves understanding and interpreting the body's physical sensations. This skill is vital for both personal well-being and social interactions. As Mara put it, "The body speaks in sensation. So we want to learn how to drop into our nervous system to be able to receive the messages that our body is sending us."These strategies are not only beneficial for neurodivergent individuals but can also help anyone looking to improve their social skills and mental health. By focusing on authentic interactions and self-awareness, we can all learn to navigate the complex social world more effectively.If you're interested in learning more about IRL Social Skills or supporting their work, you can visit their crowdfunding campaign on SMBX. Mara and her team are doing incredible work, and it's inspiring to see the positive impact they're making in so many lives.tl;dr:* Introduction and Mission of IRL Social Skills: Mara Mcloughlin, founder of IRL Social Skills, explains that the program helps autistic and other socially struggling individuals (teens, young adults, and older adults) to initiate, cultivate, and sustain relationships. The program focuses on teaching social skills in a safe, community-based environment.* Success Stories and Teaching Methods: Mara shares success stories, including a teen who gained friends and an adult who improved their professional social skills. She describes teaching methods such as using small talk strategically to find common interests, giving appropriate compliments, and fostering genuine connections.* Challenges and Strategies in Social and Romantic Interactions: Mara discusses the challenges neurodivergent individuals face in social and romantic interactions. She emphasizes the importance of building basic friendship skills, understanding and interpreting body sensations, and developing strategies to manage social interactions effectively.* Business Model and Crowdfunding Campaign: IRL Social Skills operates as a for-profit business and is raising investment capital through a crowdfunding campaign on SMBX. Mara encourages people to learn more about the offering on the SMBX website.* Mara's Superpower and Empathy: Mara identifies empathy as her superpower, sharing a personal story of helping her partner recover communication skills after a stroke. She offers advice on developing empathy by reflecting on how one would feel in others' situations and the importance of somatic understanding.How to Develop Empathy As a SuperpowerMara McLoughlin's superpower is her profound empathy, which she describes as a lifelong trait. Her ability to deeply understand and feel for others drives her work at IRL Social Skills, where she helps neurodivergent individuals build meaningful connections. By fostering an inclusive environment, Mara ensures that everyone has the opportunity to be understood and supported.Mara shared a compelling story about her partner, who had a stroke and lost his ability to speak. Through her empathetic approach, Mara tirelessly documented his attempts to regain speech and navigate workplace accommodations. Her efforts led to a successful settlement with his employer, who had initially failed to provide necessary accommodations. This experience underscores how Mara's empathy translates into concrete actions that significantly impact others' lives.Tips for Developing Empathy:* Reflect on Reversed Situations: Regularly think about how you would feel if you were in someone else's shoes. Focus on not just the mental but also the physical sensations you might experience.* Engage in Active Listening: Pay close attention to others when they speak, showing genuine interest in their experiences and feelings.* Practice Compassionate Responses: Respond to others with kindness and understanding, acknowledging their emotions and validating their experiences.* Learn from Diverse Perspectives: Interact with people from different backgrounds and experiences to broaden your understanding and appreciation of various viewpoints.* Create Inclusive Environments: Foster spaces where everyone feels welcome and supported, ensuring that no one feels isolated or misunderstood.By following Mara's example and advice, you can make empathy a skill. With practice and effort, you could make it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.Remember, however, that research into success suggests that building on your own superpowers is more important than creating new ones or overcoming weaknesses. You do you!Guest ProfileMara McLoughlin (she/her):Speech-language pathologist and program director, IRL Social SkillsAbout IRL Social Skills: IRL Social Skills teaches autistic, adhd and other socially struggling adolescents and young adults the most important skills anyone can learn: How to initiate, cultivate, and sustain relationships.  Website: www.irlsocialskills.com/Company Facebook Page: fb.com/irlsocialskillsOther URL: thesmbx.com/app/auction/IRL-Social-SkillsBiographical Information: With over 14 years of professional experience working with autistic and other neurodivergent people and their families from age 6 months to 60 years and 30+ years as a student and teacher of yoga and mindfulness, Mara knows that the learning and application of these skills will build a better world.A self-diagnosed AuDHD human and certified provider of the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS®), Mara holds both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Communication Science. Mara was appointed to the Oregon Commission for Autism by former Governor Kate Brown, serves on the Strategies and Supports subcommittee, and looks forward to working with the state legislature to make significant change in services for autistic people and their families across the lifespan.Personal Facebook Profile: fb.com/maramcloughlinLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/mara-mcloughlin-irl-social-skills/Instagram Handle: instagram.com/irlsocialskills/Upcoming SuperCrowd Event CalendarIf a location is not noted, the events below are virtual.* Impact Cherub Club Meeting hosted by The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation, on August 20, 2024, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Each month, the Club meets to review new offerings for investment consideration and to conduct due diligence on previously screened deals. To join the Impact Cherub Club, become an Impact Member of the SuperCrowd.* SuperCrowdHour, August 21, 2024, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Each month, we host a value-laden webinar for aspiring impact investors or social entrepreneurs. At this month's webinar, Devin Thorpe will provide a “Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Capital from the Crowd.”* Recently, we created an AI GPT to help you learn more about The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation, and our upcoming events. Click here to try it.Community Event Calendar* Successful Funding with Karl Dakin, Tuesdays at 10:00 AM ET - Click on Events* Community Capital Live: Betty Francisco and Aliana Piñeiro of Boston Impact Initiative - Virtual Event: July 31, at 2 pm ET* Main Street Skowhegan and NC3 Entrepreneur Finance Workshop Series, September 17 - November 19, 2023.* Crowdfunding Professional Association, Summit in DC, October 22-23* Asheville Neighborhood Economics, November 12-13.If you would like to submit an event for us to share with the 8,000+ members of the SuperCrowd, click here.We use AI to help us write compelling recaps of each episode. Get full access to Superpowers for Good at www.superpowers4good.com/subscribe

Have you been thinking about starting to see private clients and are curious about offering Special Education Consultations through your practice? If so, you're going to love this episode of Private Practice Success Stories! I sat down with one of my students, Ali Moulton. Ali is a pediatric speech language pathologist with a private practice in Northern Virginia. She started her private practice after reevaluating her priorities to focus on family and fulfilling her aspirations as a clinician. In this episode, she discusses the importance of family and personal fulfillment in her decision to pursue private practice. She also discusses how she added another income stream to her private practice in the form of special education consultations and advocacy work - and how starting to specialize made her sought after for these services. Ali is a certified member of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and is licensed as a Speech-Language Pathologist by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the District of Columbia. She received her graduate degrees in Speech and Language Pathology and Learning Disabilities from Northwestern University. She received her undergraduate degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders with a concentration in Speech and Language Pathology from Northwestern University.Ali has created and implemented interdisciplinary educational programming and has assisted in the creation and implementation of special education curriculum for elementary, middle, and high school special education programs. She has developed and presented professional development on the diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia and language development. She has trained special education teachers on the evaluation process for diagnosing dyslexia and was a member of the Dyslexia Core Team that assisted in the creation of the Dyslexia Handbook for a school district in Northern Virginia.Ali recently completed the Inside Out Sensory Certificate for SLPs, which involved training in the assessment and implementation of sensory strategies in speech sessions. She is currently working toward her Qualification in Orofacial Myology (QOM).In Today's Episode, We Discuss:The one thing you have to do if you want people to send you clientsAn inside look at what it looks like to take your private practice from part-time to full-timeHow private practice can help bring you true fulfillmentThe types of decisions you get to make for yourself when you become your own bossHow you can make your private practice stand out in the crowd and increase your impact by offering special servicesThe key to adding additional income streams into your private practiceI hope you enjoyed this episode with Ali! I love how she started her private practice on the side while working in the schools and then took the leap to go full-time to focus on quality time with her family.If you would like to know more about our Programs and how we help support SLPs and OTs who want our help to start and grow their practices - just like we helped Ali, please visit www.IndependentClinician.com/Resources.Whether you want to start a private practice or grow your existing private practice, I can help you get the freedom, flexibility, fulfillment, and financial abundance that you deserve. Visit my website www.independentclinician.com to learn more.Resources Mentioned: Visit Ali's website: ​​