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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 12 Oct 2004
Time: 08:45:06 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.12.221
Dear Janea, You are right that the number of undergraduate and graduate courses in fluency disorders has diminished over the past couple of decades. For example, I used to teach a full undergraduate and graduate course in stuttering here at West Virginia University. Now, the undergraduate class is half a semester. This decline was accelerated in the early 90s when ASHA no longer required 25 clock hours of practicum in fluency disorders. My guess is that the new KASA standards will not help a great deal more, although "fluency" is again mentioned. I don't have the figures at my fingertips, but there are a couple of surveys that were carried out the SID 4 (for Fluency and Fluency Disorders) that clearly documented the decline in teaching in the area of fluency disorders. For an entertaining look at this area check out Bob Quesal's paper on the "death of fluency disorders" in one of the earlier ISAD On-Line Conferences. In recent years another serious problem has emerged. Many of the fluency disorders courses at our university training programs are being taught by adjunct instructors or by professors without a particular interest in fluency disorders. As a number of the well-known experts in this area have retired, their university positions have been filled by people specializing in other areas, e.g., swallowing, ultimately adding insult to injury in for those who stutter and clutter. I don't have any data to back this up, but I suspect that this problem is more acute in the US than it is in some other developing nations. My impression is that stuttering is still considered to be a necessary disorder in which to be trained in most training programs around the world. I hope this answers your question. Best wishes, Ken