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by Marat Moore and Dee Naquin Shafer
Former ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff and his wife Lee stepped into the spotlight at the ASHA awards ceremony to deliver one of the most powerful messages of the 2007 Convention—an eloquent story of the transformative power of communication services, both speech-language pathology and audiology. For ASHA members, it was a reminder that the discipline of communication sciences and disorders has a synergy that surpasses a profession-specific approach.
The Woodruffs received the "Annie"—the 2007 Annie Glenn Award, presented by Mrs. Glenn, who conquered a severe stutter, and her husband, former astronaut and senator John Glenn.
Although most of the 2,600 ASHA members in the audience expected to hear solely about Bob's near-miraculous recovery from the traumatic brain injury incurred in Iraq, the Woodruffs instead began their riveting joint presentation by describing their journey in responding to their daughter Nora's hearing loss.
A few months after the 2000 birth of their twin girls, Clair and Nora, the couple noticed that Nora was responding differently to sound from her sister Clair. "We knew there was a problem when she didn't react when we snapped our fingers behind her head," Bob said.
The Woodruffs, who lived in London at that time, learned that Nora had moderate to severe hearing loss.
"We decided that we needed a new definition of 'normal'—whatever would make Nora her own person," Lee said. She praised audiologists, who "were by our side every step of the way," and speech-language pathologists who helped Nora develop speech. Now Nora is "mainstreamed, reading a lot, and jabbering all the time," she said. In another surprise revelation, Lee said that her mother, now 75, was trained as an SLP.
Bob and Lee's experience with their daughter's hearing loss helped them when Bob was severely injured in Iraq in 2006—and had his own arduous journey regaining his ability to communicate. He was in a coma for 36 days.
"They told me he had extreme aphasia," Lee said. "I knew speech was the most important part of his healing because, for Bob, his life has always been about words. But the speech-language pathologists were my mentors, my gods, my shamans."
"I couldn't speak at all. I lost words and names—even our kids' names," Bob told the audience. "That's when I realized that I needed to go through what Nora did, and have the courage that she had in learning to hear and speak. She was my inspiration."
"I had treatment six days a week," he said. "It is a miracle that I can speak today. I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you—and keep up your wonderful work."
Hot Topics and Intensive Learning
Boston is famous for its educational institutions, and for a week in mid-November, the ASHA Convention became an ad hoc university—with more than 1,400 seminars, short courses, lectures, technical sessions, roundtables, full-day conferences, poster sessions, meetings, and special events, and a colorful exhibit hall jammed with materials, the latest technology, job listings, endless giveaways, and—of course—free food.
Some sessions (on such topics as word-finding, cluttering, telegraphic speech, Asperger's syndrome, autism and TBI, fluency, evidence-based reading instruction, teaching clients with cognitive impairments, and more) filled up, even in 300-seat rooms.
Nearly 300 school-based members attended the Schools Forum, discussing auditory processing disorders, collaboration, missed sessions, literacy, workload/caseload, service delivery models, and a host of other topics at more than 36 tables.
Emerging ASHA leaders gathered at the Convention to celebrate the Association's inaugural Leadership Development Program. The 20 participants participated in various leadership mentoring activities, attended ASHA committee meetings, and reported to fellow classmates and Executive Board members on their leadership development projects.
On Saturday, the Ray Kent Symposium honored the work and contributions of one of ASHA's beloved mentors. Several of Ray Kent's former students—many of whom are now well-respected in the field—honored him by presenting a short course and four seminars in his area of expertise, complex speech sound disorders. Presenters at the Kent symposium included Edythe Strand, Joe Duffy, John Rosenbeck, Kathryn Yorkston, Kris Tjaden, Jan van Santen, Megan Hodge, Katherine Hustad, Robert Hillman, Eugene Buder, Dimitar Deliyski, Bruce Gerratt, and Jack Jiang.
ASHA's Multicultural Issues Board held a Town Hall Meeting in which more than two dozen members shared ideas and concerns regarding multicultural issues in the discipline. Topics included available resources, assessment of bilingual populations, tension with early educators, relationships between monolingual and bilingual professionals, advocacy, and concerns about the PRAXIS exam. Members were encouraged to use ASHA's Connecting to Colleagues discussion forums at www.asha.org/forums/.
Opening Session
On Thursday evening, the opening session included a salute to the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association's (NSSLHA) 35th anniversary. Nicole Borrelli and Mark Campbell, AuD students and NSSLHA members at Northeastern University, discussed the association's milestones and introduced "Toxic Audio," a high-octane a cappella group that demonstrated amazing vocal range by mimicking rock-band instruments, including bass, electric guitar, trombone, and drums.
Convention co-chairs Patricia Prelock (speech-language pathology) and Robert Burkard (audiology) joked about their personal differences but said, in the end, they worked very well together—like the professions in service of the broader discipline of CSD.
In her presidential address, Noma Anderson noted that Boston holds a special place in her heart since she earned a master's degree at Emerson College. In keeping with the Boston convention theme, "Honoring the Past, Forging the Future," Anderson reflected on the past year, and discussed ASHA's evolution from its formation in 1925 to the Association's move to a new national headquarters this month.
"This has been a great year of transition—one of the most exciting years for ASHA," she said. Anderson described ASHA's milestones in 2007 such as its leadership in the development of the new position statement by the Joint Committee on Infant Hearing (for an excerpt of her address, see page 15).
Keynote speaker Erin Gruwell told the story captured in the recent feature film, "The Freedom Writers," and her book of the same name. In 1994 Gruwell was an idealistic first-year English teacher in Long Beach, Calif., with 150 students deemed "unteachable." When she passed out her syllabus, one student asked, "Why do we have to read about dead white guys in tights?"
This same student helped transform the class after he was the target of a racial slur. When a caricature of him circulated in the classroom, Gruwell compared it to a Nazi exaggeration of Jews during the Holocaust, and was shocked when the students didn't know about that dark chapter of history. Yet when she asked how many students had been shot at, all raised their hands.
She introduced the class to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo. Each student began to keep his or her own anonymous diary, recording stories of their lives and their reaction to Gruwell's teaching methods.
Gruwell took a second part-time job so that she could provide the students with books and field trips not in the school budget. Gruwell has since set up the Freedom Writers Foundation. All her students have graduated from high school and are attending college.
The Convention included other events organized by the American Speech-Language Hearing Foundation; the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association; and special interest divisions (see sidebars for coverage of some of these events).
Audiology Highlights
More than 500 audiologists attended the Convention's "Audiology at ASHA." Daily keynote presentations were well-received and well-attended on topics such as emerging technologies; Doug Keefe and Mike Gorga reported on wideband reflectance measures of middle-ear functioning; and Bob Margolis presented on automated hearing tests. Ken Wolf, Don Morgan, and L. Clarke Cox led a discussion on the implications of these technologies for clinical practice. Laura Wilber covered the history of audiology.
Keynote presenter Melody Harrison discussed early intervention, and Sharon Cameron spoke about auditory streaming deficits in children with auditory processing disorders. Charlie Liberman and Sharon Kujawa presented on protection against acoustic injury for "tough and tender ears" related to injury susceptibility. Conrad Wall described emergent technologies aimed at creating a functionally useful vestibular prosthesi to help those with dizziness or balance problems. Neil Todd covered vestibular evoked (myogenic) potentials, and David Bergstrom discussed the molecular genetics of the vestibular NADPH oxidase.
The new position statement of the Joint Commission on Infant Hearing was unveiled at a special session on Thursday. The audiology reception that followed featured entertainment from Levi Reiter (Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.). Billing himself as the "Rapping Rabbi King," Reiter performed a rap, "The AuD Blues."
ASHA's audiology division surveyed attendees related to their convention experience, and results will be reported in a future issue.
See You Next Year!
Next year ASHA moves to the Midwest for the 2008 Convention, which will be held in Chicago on Nov. 20-22, 2008.
Marat Moore, managing editor of The ASHA Leader, can be reached at mmoore@asha.org. Dee Shafer, an
assistant managing editor, can be reached at dshafer@asha.org. Jessica Bowen, Joanne Jessen, and Maureen
Thompson also contributed to this article.
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