Question
How do we educate the community about stuttering?
Answer
There are many different ways of educating the community. With our clients and the families, we may educate through formal treatment.
The main resource I try to incorporate into my therapy sessions is videos on stuttering. There are a couple of great videos on stuttering that I use with almost all of my clients. One of the videos is “Transcending Stuttering’ by Phil Schneider. I do not have a disclosure on that because I do not have anything to do with that video. It is available through the National Stuttering Association. It allows you to follow the progression of children as they go from being young children in the therapy process to young adults and discusses what is important in therapy.
We have information handouts on our website for the public ( www.marshall.edu). You can have your own information handouts. The Stuttering Foundation has good handouts, as well as the National Stuttering Association. I encourage you to have some mechanism where parents can then take the information that you are giving them in therapy and disseminate it to others, such as the teachers, coaches or grandparents.
Webinars are important for speech language pathologists, such as the one we are doing today. In-service trainings and consultation are very important for helping the speech pathologist learn how to manage, assess, and treat children who stutter.
I often find, as someone who specializes in stuttering, consultations are very helpful because they allow me to focus on developing my skills as a clinician by working and collaborating with other clinicians who may be in the schools or other outpatient clinics.
Consultations also allow you to learn about stuttering from the real experts, which are the people who have it. The best way to become educated about stuttering is to have plenty of opportunity to assess and treat it. If you can work with someone who is a specialist along the way, that guided practice and experience is so beneficial. Learning about it in theory is nice, but doing it is something very different. I can honestly say that I have read a lot of stuttering books in my life. I have read a lot of journals in my life. I have attended a lot of presentations and have given a lot of presentations. I think the best learning experience for me is always working with people who stutter and listening to people who stutter talk about what is important to them in the therapy process.
Craig Coleman is an assistant professor at Marshall University and a Board Certified Specialist in Fluency Disorders. He is a co-founder of MC Speech Books, where he has co-authored two children's books on stuttering and is also the founder of the Virtual Stuttering Center, a provider of tele-therapy for people who stutter. Craig collaborated on the child versions of the Overall Assessment of the Child's Experience of Stuttering (OASES), which assesses the affective and cognitive components of stuttering.
