Episode 46: Shining Lights on Indigenous Speech-Language Assistants Supporting Children in Their Communities

Dr Lisa Archibald speaks with speech-language pathologist Chelsea Van Tol and speech-language pathology assistant Kara Willie about their collaborative work at a First Nations school in Alert Bay, British Columbia. They discuss how culturally responsive practice, relationship-building, and community partnership shape speech-language services for students, with Kara sharing her perspective as a member of the Kwakwaka'wakw community. Chelsea and Kara also highlight their efforts to incorporate Kwak'wala into their work, supporting both children's communication development and Indigenous language revitalization.

Dr Lisa Archibald speaks with Kierstin Lapointe, a speech-language pathologist who works in rural and remote communities in Northern Ontario, primarily in Indigenous schools, as a fly-in S-LP. In this episode, Kierstin describes her practice, the logistics of fly-in care, and working with Indigenous communities.

Dr Lisa Archibald speaks with Chelsea Van Tol, a speech-language pathologist who works in rural and remote communities, primarily in First Nation schools. In this episode, Chelsea describes her practice, the challenges and rewards, and work with communication health assistants from First Nations communities.

In this episode, Dr Archibald speaks with speech-language pathologists Dominique Lacasse and Megan Von Muhlenen. The two guests discuss the funding model for AAC in Ontario and how their teams of speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists provide services to children and their families who struggle to access them.

Dr Archibald welcomes Paula Filangeri, a speech-language pathologist from Leamington, ON. Paula introduces us to WH-questions, a practical tool for empowering parents and learners to support language. She delves into her strategies to support vocabulary and grammatical complexity from children in the classroom.

Speech-Language Pathologist Lindsay Sharpe from the Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg, MB returns for a third episode to speak with Dr Archibald on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). She speaks on the challenges of AAC assessment and explores some of the tools she has tested and uses every day practice as a school speech-language pathologist.

Dans cet épisode, Chantal s’entretient avec trois invitées ayant participé à la conception de la ressource pédagogique gratuite « Lire un jour, lire toujours! », une plateforme Web visant à soutenir l’enseignement explicite et structuré de la lecture en français. Les invitées présentent la genèse du projet, ses fondements pédagogiques et son intégration en classe, tout en mettant en lumière les nombreuses ressources offertes (fiches pédagogiques, activités, outils d’évaluation et guides d’intervention). L’épisode aborde également l’apport essentiel de l’orthophoniste dans le développement et l’utilisation de la ressource, notamment pour soutenir les élèves aux besoins variés en littératie.

In this episode, Dr Archibald welcomes Dr Sean Redmond, a professor from the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah with almost 30 years of lecturing experience. Dr Redmond shares what he learned comparing kids with developmental language disorder (DLD) to kids who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He discusses the co-occurrence of DLD and ADHD and what that looks like in terms of both language development and the progression of ADHD symptoms.

In this episode, Lindsay Sharpe, a speech-language pathologist who works in the Louis Riel School Division out of Winnipeg, MB, returns to continue her conversation on AAC use. She identifies the increase in the number of students with communication disorders in her school division and working to have sufficient intervention and programming for these students. She describes this new pressure put on school teams to ensure that they're getting the programming, the intervention and the goals set for them that they really need. She explains how support teams can adapt to AAC users' unique needs using this complex system of communication.

In this episode, Dr. Theresa Pham – a researcher and speech-language pathologist (S-LP), and Melissa Fiesser, a classroom teacher – team up as an S-LP and teacher team to discuss Talk Moves, sentence starters and gestures that students can use to join or invite others into conversations.