Education Content
Technical Writer & UX Design
Speech Clinical Documentation
Contributions: Legal documentation for school and patient/family
Role: Technical Writer
Problem: Effective and concise documentation is one of the most important aspects of a speech-language pathologist’s role in all health and educational settings. The SLP must be able to precisely express a patients’ needs to colleagues and insurance companies, while simply communicating the situation to their loved ones. This balancing act required me to directly write and empathize with multiple audiences.
Solution: In the following example, I have written two paragraphs that describe a fictional client’s means for eligibility of speech services. While writing for a multidisciplinary team of educational professionals, I aimed to describe technical processes of legality. While writing for the client’s parents, I explained these technical processes with more general description and with less professional jargon.
Audience: Educational law professionals
Goal: Provide information on how client is eligible for speech therapy
For a student to meet the eligibility criteria for Speech and Language Impairment under Fluency Disorder, three elements must be met to establish eligibility. 1) The student must exhibit a disorder in the flow of verbal expression, including rate and rhythm. 2) The flow of verbal expression adversely affects communication between the student and listener. 3) By reason of the disability, the student needs special education and related services. Student is impacted in all three elements and is eligible for speech and language services.
Example Two:
Audience: Client’s parents
Goal: Provide a simple framework to family on how client is eligible for speech therapy
The student is a polite and responsible individual who has developed rapport with his close peers and a few teachers. He primarily presents with initial sound repetitions (e.g. “l-l-l lobby”), but main concerns involve student’s self-perceptions of stuttering, his difficulty with communication in daily situations, and the overall impact stuttering has on his quality of life. He reports higher instances of stuttering with close friends and his parents, but higher difficulty in conversing with adults and when only a few people are around. Within the context of school, the student’s academic development is adversely affected because of a resulting difficulty in participating in classroom discussion, reaching out to his teachers, and presenting in front of others. The student is aware of how his stuttering has had a direct impact on his confidence and ability to have a good life; more specifically, he feels that his current fluency ability interferes with achieving academic excellence.
Example One:
SPARC Book Club
Role: Student Clinician, UX Designer
Description:
In the Spartan Aphasia Research Clinic (SPARC), I had the wonderful opportunity of co-leading Book Club therapy sessions for a diverse group of clients who varied immensely in their presenting aphasia type and severity via telehealth. Aphasia is a language disorder that affects an individual’s expressive and receptive abilities. This was an excellent assignment because it enhanced my ability to design aphasia-friendly content presented at a suitable linguistic, cognitive, and social level of communication. Materials, otherwise known as “reading ramps,” included summaries of book chapters and pictographic lists of keywords from each chapter.
These reading ramps on the left come from a set of Google slides my co-facilitator prepared and presented on Chapter Seven of the novel, “A Long Way Home” by Saroo Brierly.
Clinical Work on Pragmatics
Role: Student Clinician, UX Designer
Description:
Working with a client with autism, one of our main therapeutic goals was focused on expanding their pragmatic skill-set. Specifically, this meant breaking down a few tenets of conversational turn-taking and topic maintenance - such as asking questions and making comments. Both of these elements target the development of empathy within conversation, ideally, in which we are mindful and thoughtful of another’s thoughts. The following flowcharts and storyboards I designed were instructional tools that sought to demonstrate these everyday communication skills while also being visually pleasing.
Podcast Development
Role: Intern, Instructional Designer
Description:
During my time for 826 Valencia, I was tasked with leading preschoolers to high school students from vulnerable communities within San Francisco in the development and execution of creative writing projects expressed in podcast form. This role required me to explain the importance of prototyping and drafting before recording podcast topics that ranged from personal to comical, slice-of-life narratives. All student projects required consistent refinement of copywork and collaboration that brainstormed essential relevant and thematic elements. A few final steps in the development process included recording, editing, and publishing to 826 Valencia’s SoundCloud Series, Message in the Bottle. The following is a playlist of featured pieces by elementary studies released during the course of my internship.
