Classrooms and Clinicals

Wednesday, February 3rd represented my second appointment with K.J. Again, she was in good spirits, friendly, and engaging. Her language deficits are still apparent--she has trouble coming up with words (anomia) and many speech-motor difficulties. She has trouble with her R's, something for which I remember going through speech therapy in elementary school. Even when I was six and seven, I was profoundly embarrassed when I couldn't correctly roll my tongue and produce succinct "r" sounds. When attempting to say "prayer," K.J. vocalized a "play-uh" sound, representing a disconnect between Broca's area and the premotor and motor cortexes. She communicated well through hand signals and staccato sounds, and verbal hints help her with the anomia.
Caitlyn, our speech therapist student liaison, was wonderful enough to print us out a speech hint cheat-sheet with the possible hints that could help us give K.J. a little push in the right direction. 
Phonemic hints give the first phoneme or sound of the word, possibly the first syllable as well. Semantic clues designate the category of the vocabulary objective, and gestural hints are simple affirmations of nodding or pointing to an available clue. Sentence completions are cloze-statements where K.J. can more easily finish a thought already in progress. Binary choices are simple either-or categories. We can provide written hints and also tactile clues by touching the table or paper. This taxonomic hierarchy allows us to categorize our arsenal of speech-therapy hints and learn the ways we can best help and communicate with our client. 
K.J. is extremely quick-witted and responds well to any of the hints--but only if she can get the word quickly. I can empathize with her frustration--language is such a fundamental and overlooked part of daily life. 
This is such an interesting learning environment, because our responsibilities as students go far beyond memorization and essays and tests to interpersonal relationship building and real-world skills academia sometimes loses sight of. In this service-learning class, we have the privilege of applying what we've learned--both on our own time and from the class itself--to a situation that makes that learning truly mean something. When learning incorporates real people, especially in a clinical or humanitarian environment, it transcends our conceptions of what school is and ought to be. Anecdotes become personal and we won't soon forget them. 
For her "frame" assignment, we went through K.J.'s photos on the little screen on the back of the digital camera. We all talked about our favorites, and K.J. provided some wonderful stories about a random rooster walking down her neighborhood and a cat eyeing the intruder suspiciously. Some of her photographs were phenomenal, with a shadowy palm-tree providing sharp, spiky lines and impressive, stark contrast. We all agreed we liked a picture of a quaint and naturalistic lake with reeds and ducks, and K.J. became very excited. She said something about how it wasn't very pretty in real life. We weren't sure what she meant until she took Diego and I outside the UCF speech disorders clinic across the parking lot after class. She pointed to a glorified puddle, and we quickly realized that the retention pond happened to be the subject matter of her impressive photograph. We laughed how our professor would love that because it satisfied the assignment perfectly. 
On the walk back from the pond, I asked her about her recovery since her stroke. For the past six or seven years, she's been in speech and physical therapy. She said it's helped a lot, that she was barely able to communicate in the weeks after the horrible event. She's been bored, but she recognizes the necessity. She said she loved the creativity that this photography class allows, and loves going to this appointment of therapy. 
The service-learning environment goes far beyond instilling the student with memorable learning strategies and real-world experience. We're also helping the community, in this case our clients at the UCF speech disorders clinic. For an individual hoping to go into the medical field, I love the clinical aspect and learning about cues, strategies, and reading up on CVAs. In a traditional classroom, I wouldn't have much of an impetus to go so far out of my way to read articles and clinical strategies because I know I wouldn't need to implement those skills to get a decent grade in the class. I'm no longer just trying to impress my professor, K.J.'s comfort and happiness is a new and wonderful responsibility. 
When we were closer to the clinic, K.J. began talking about the technical aspects about the camera. She pointed and remarked about the "22" megapixel count. She immediately noticed her mistake and tried to say twelve. She couldn't get the word out, so she began counting from one. These cues and patterns she's learned obviously greatly help her outside of the clinic, and it's awesome to have the privilege of being involved in her recovery.