Outreach: Summer course prepares graduate students to work with alternative communication devices
A six-day course taught in the Mary Frances Early College of Education provides future speech-language pathologists with hands-on experiences with assistive technology.
The intensive course takes place every summer for graduate students in the communication sciences and disorders program who just completed their first year, and it’s one of the only courses of its kind in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).
“[AAC] is anything outside of using your verbal speech to get your point across, whether that’s adding to verbal speech that you have, or for some people, that is their whole communication system,” said Ainsley Vergara, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education who teaches the course. “So, it can be things like gestures all the way through using iPads that have built in language systems to communicate.”