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From: Howie Schwartz
Date: 10/12/03
Time: 5:06:16 PM
Remote Name: 69.47.173.12
Judy and others
When you work in a smaller community you would hope that your efforts at education would have some impact on the people with whom you interact. While I haven't had feedback that the fast food places are any better at responding to customers (the staff turns over on a regular basis and there's always a group of people who are ignorant about communication disorders), I do have one experience to share.
A couple of years ago, one of the tasks that my students had to complete involved stuttering while calling any office on campus. The student was to tell the listener that he/she was interested in changing majors and would like some information. In addition, the student asked the listener if they knew where on campus they could go for help with stuttering. The initial feedback we received during that first year was that stuttering could be helped in the psychology department, the heatlth center, the communications program, the office for students with disabilities but fewer suggestions for the speech clinic. By the second and third year of completing the project, we were getting more and more suggestions for going to the speech clinic so we interpreted this to be a positive by- product of the assignment. After the third time, I changed this part of the assignment. However, like fast food restaurants and other places of employment, the office staff often change and it's probably time to reacquaint the campus with services for students with communicative difficulties.
A second comment I would like to make has to do with the perceived reactions that students and persons who stutter receive. While there is no question that listeners are rude and ignorant about stuttering, there are also occasions where listeners are reacting to something other than stuttering while the person who stutters interprets the response to be a personal attack about stuttering. In my opinion, it is often these misperceptions that maintains the negative attitudes that a person who stutters has about communicating. Unless we can verify why a listener responded, we are left with some ambiguity and the development of emotional reactions to stuttering. Boy that was a mouthful.