I have recently come back from the madness that is the 2013 ASHA (American Speech-Hearing Association) Convention which was held in Chicago this year. Those of you who have attended previous ASHA meetings may not be so surprised by the following account, but for the uninitiated like me there was so much to take in, and some interesting snippets to share. The most remarkable aspect is the size of the meeting, which is massive! 12000 delegates, an average of 40 parallel sessions, and a convention centre the size of a small town. Going through the programme of talks and activities was in itself a big job, made easier by a conference app – the first I’ve come across in my conferencing experience – which your life depended on throughout the conference. If you’d done your homework and gone through the programme to tick sessions of interest, the app then pulled together a personalised programme for you which had a diary of what you were attending each day, with each chosen presentation showing easy links to the abstract, venue (with a map) and everything else you needed to get to it (or at least try to) on time. If, on the other hand, you had chosen two consecutive talks taking place at opposite ends of the huge building then you only had yourself to blame.
The exhibition hall had over 150 exhibitors and, in keeping with the theme of apps, between them they had apps for everything. Literally. Whether it’s assessment, diagnosis, or treatment, there was an app for it. Phonological disorders? They’ve got it covered; Literacy? Just ask. Aphasia therapy? You’ve come to the right place. I have honestly never come across such a vast market of SLT-related apps and I can only hope that some are really as useful as the companies selling them claim they are. And given that the exhibition hall is also meant to provide a bit of respite from the barrage of talks which were taking place from 8am till 8pm each day for 4 days, quite a few of the stalls offered the opportunity to try many of the Wii-style apps with funky music on, dancing, and a right big party all in the name of demonstrating physical exercises for most types of mobility treatment.
Behind the party though, and in stark contrast with the ‘sell sell sell’ drive of the exhibitors, the talks had very stringent rules, including a disclosure statement that all presenters had to make to declare whether they got any financial or non-financial benefit from any products they were about to mention in their talk (this not only included therapy products, but also publications, grants and anything else that the presenter was promoting). This is probably the organisers’ way of separating the science, which they know needs to remain clean and honest, from the ‘fringe’ aspect of the meeting, which provides them with the much needed funding for a conference of this size. And why shouldn’t they, when SLP in the US receives hardly any funding at all; they need to pull out all the stops to keep the profession alive, even if it means an opening ceremony delivered by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream).
And that does seem to keep the science alive. The range of clinical and research presentations on offer included some excellent stuff, and there were two main highlights for me: The first was a special session on navigating the Twitter terrain for SLPs by Bronwyn Hemsley, Caroline Bowen, and Patricia McCabe, which dealt with social media and its potential benefit (as well as pitfalls) for SLT trainees and professionals (our own social media guru, Helen Stringer, would be proud…); the second was a series of talks and special sessions on working with children from diverse cultures, headed mostly by Sharynne Mcleod. These included anything from new knowledge on assessments in various languages to tips on empowering monolingual SLPs to work with multilingual children. The sheer number of sessions on this topic, including a session I was invited to present at on linguistic and cultural considerations for working with children of Arab, Persian, and Turkish descent, shows that this topic is high on the agenda for SLPs everywhere right now and should hopefully lead to more efforts in addressing the gap in multilingual and multicultural assessments.
The awards for this year included a fellowship to Ben Munson, who was our visiting research fellow in 2011 and to Stephanie Stokes, a former member of staff in SLS at Newcastle, for their services to the profession.
Ghada Khattab