Episode 233: Vicki Haddix & Janine Peca (Part 1): Increasing AAC Skills Through Mentorship

Vicki Haddix is an AAC Specialist and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Memphis who teaches their course on AAC for the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. Janine Peca is an autistic adult who recently went through Memphis’s CSD program and is now an SLP. Vicki shares about making pre-service education more interesting and engaging, and the need for increasing mentorship for recent graduates. Janine shares some of her experiences as an autistic adult, including some of the ways neurodiversity was and was not supported during her undergraduate and graduate experience.

Key ideas this week:

🔑 Even with with the best pre-service prep for students, we will need mentors after graduate school for new SLPs to lean on, especially for initial AAC device selection and implementation.

🔑 One part of a being a good mentor is leading others to where the good resources are (e.g., podcasts, webinars, articles). One way we can do that is giving them a “curated” list of resources to review before you meet together. Once they have gone through those resources, you can discuss them in-person. This can reduce the time spent going over basic information and increase the value of your discussion together.

🔑 New SLPs may also feel lost on how to evaluate and treat non-symbolic communicators who may only have emergent intentionality.  They may write goals and use materials for more advanced communicators that are not appropriate yet. We can direct them to focus instead on establishing foundational communication skills, including initiation and understanding symbolic representation.

🔑 When someone asks Vicki to explain AAC to them, she will point them to praacticalaac.com, AAC in the Cloud (aacconference.com), and the Talking with Tech podcast (talkingwithtech.org - thanks Vicki ☺️). This gives people something to read, something to watch, and something to listen to, depending upon how they learn best.