[ Contents | Search | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Nan Ratner
Date: 23 Oct 2006
Time: 12:31:44 -0500
Remote Name: 129.2.25.203
I apologize for the lack of response to some of these questions - I believe my colleagues may be away these past few days. To get more experience, some existing strategies would be to read major texts more broadly, which is hard, but augment them with some "therapy in action" materials such as SFA provides in their DVDs - I cannot recommend them highly enough. Go to conferences and search out those sessions that deal with stuttering treatment. Again, SFA does specialized workshops each summer in a number of places - put yourself on their mailing list. Go to ASHA, go to your state meetings. Join the ASHA special interest division on fluency (DIV4), read their newsletters and go to their annual meeting, which always has a basic clinical training track of some sort. Join a listserv like Stut-L, to get a better picture of what people who stutter find important, their concerns, etc. And keep scouting the StutteringHomePage, which has so much valuable info on it that I have yet to read it all. Over the years, I have complained sometimes to my husband, a physician, about the lack of training we sometimes receive in grad school for lower incidence disorders. He points out that general internal medicine training and internship has the same problem - there is some responsibility the graduating practitioner has to continue reading, going to workshops, etc. to improve skills CONSTANTLY over time. Even well-prepared students will eventually become out of date. SO KEEP READING, if nothing else. Because lack of training opportunities is real, however, ASHA DIV 4 has discussed trying to create an archive of materials and videos to help when programs cannot offer enough experience. In the years to come, hopefully that will help as well. But answers are out there now, if you take the effort. Thanks for a great conference, Judy!