CeTasSSD first CONSORT diagram

Today Felicity and I worked out the first version of the 2026 CeTasSSD CONSORT diagram

https://cdn-links.lww.com/permalink/phm/a/phm_00_00_2018_03_14_wu_ajpmr-d-17-00294_sdc1.pdf 

 

CVC2026: 145 abstracts accepted from 35 countries

We have just finalised the following details for the CVC2026 conferece. Thank you Carolyn for your oversight.

I am excited to share that we have accepted 145 submissions to present at CVC2026 from 35 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Fiji, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Viet Nam 
The final number may change as 8 authors are still yet to revise their abstract. It is going to be an awesome conference. 
Dr Carolyn Gregoric Research Manager, CVC2026 Conference Secretary 
Children’s Voices Centre

CVC visiting scholar Dr Zinnia Mevawalla: Kangaroos and sunsets

Our visiting scholar Dr Zinnia Mevawalla, joined A/Prof Kathy Cologon and myself to meet the CSU kangaroos and enjoy the sunset over Bathurst. It was a perfect rural Australian moment during her visit.

There were too many kangaroos to count!

We saw the rare albino kangaroo on Mt Panorama!

 

Welcome to our CVC Adjuncts

CVC is honoured to have adjunct researchers and professors join us from across the world. Today we welcomed some of our new adjuncts this morning:

Welcome to Prof Karla Washington (Canada/Jamaica), Dr Jinjin (Helen) Lu (China), Dr Josephine Bampoe (Ghana), Matthew Stapleton, Dr Amanda Niland, Dr Olivia Karaolis

Dr Zinnia Mevawalla, Prof Sharynne  McLeod, A/Prof Kathy Cologon and some of our new CVC adjuncts

 

CVC visiting scholar: Dr Zinnia Mevawalla: Presentation

We are delighted to welcome Dr Zinnia Mevawalla to the Children's Voices Centre as our visiting scholar. Dr Mevawalla is a Senior Lecturer in Early Years Education at the University of Strathclyde  in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/mevawallazinniadr/

 Here are her presentation details at The Treehouse on Thursday 16 July at 12:00 pm.

Tak tent o sma things - coming together through relational curiosity to change hearts and minds for inclusive education in the early years.

Leadership is essential to actualising the inclusive cause, however access to professional learning opportunities, especially in the Scottish early years workforce have been limited.
The perceived divide between theory and practice related to inclusion has also highlighted discourses such as those echoed in Scottish newspapers - “if inclusion only works in theory, it doesn’t work at all” (McEnaney, 2025). This perceived divide emphasises the importance of grounding any professional learning in a deep understanding of the local intricacies and nuances of “real world” leadership and education practices.
The changing hearts and minds programme (CHAMP) was rooted in the bringing together of leaders from within one local authority, and researches in Scottish and Australian universities. In this paper we report on the “how”, “what” and “so what?” of the CHAMP project, emphasising how we (leaders, parents, practitioners, and researchers) came together, what happened (the key findings and significance) and where we plan to go from here.
This presentation offers a wonderful opportunity to engage with Dr Mevawalla’s work, hear about her current research, and connect with colleagues across the Children’s Voices Centre and wider affiliate network.

People are very welcome to attend either in person at The Treehouse, Building 1451, Bathurst Campus, or online via Zoom: https://charlessturt.zoom.us/j/66761820743
 

 

Children's advisory group at The Treehouse and CSU TV studio

This week members of our CVC Children's Advisory Group came to The Treehouse to create artwork representing their ideal hospital for our advice to the World Health Organization.

Next, they went to the CSU TV studio and recorded their insights about the Disability Discrimination Act and Children Draw Health that will be presented at the CVC2026 conference in September.

It's such a joy to have the children visiting.

 

Welcome Amy Whitfield: CVC Online Content Creator

Welcome to our newest staff member, Amy Whitfield who is our CVC Online Content Creator. Amy has a communications degree from Charles Sturt University and has spent time in Building 1451 before it was The Treehouse. Her main role is to support the CVC2026 conference, but she also will support CVC to profile its impactful work. We are so excited to have you join us Amy.

Carolyn Gregoric, Sharynne  McLeod, Amy Whitfield

Analytics: Communication rights special issue

We have just calculated the most recent analytics for the IJSLP communication rights special issue (International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20(1) https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/iasl20/20/1) from the publisher's website:

• Total Views: 471,297
• Total Cross Ref Citations: 661
• Total Altmetric Score: 1256 

My lead article has had 72,615 views, 133 citations, 180 Altmetric score. 

McLeod, S. (2018). Communication rights: Fundamental human rights for all. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20(1), 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2018.1428687 

This is amazing reach. 

Analytics: Multilingual Children's Speech website

The Multilingual Children's Speech website is popular: 303,488 views by 194,058 active users (1 Jan 2023 - 13 July2026) with the following pages being the most popular 

• Intelligibility in Context Scale: 83,422 views
• Speech acquisition: 34,849 views
• Speech assessment: 32,962 views
• English consonants: 20,699 views

 

CeTasSSD data entry into Phon

Felicity Laurence and Emma Scanlon are working on entering all of the 2026 data from just over 900 students into Phon. We appreciate the input from Prof Yvan Rose to tweak some of the program for our Australian context.

 

Children Draw Belonging: Children's insights

It has been a very special week with my young friends who have had such an influence on my research and how I listen to children. In the past, this group of children have initiated and shaped our research projects: Children Draw Talking, Children Draw Playing and  Children Draw Health. Today they participated in the Children Draw Belonging research. This is the first project that they have not initiated (this time another group of children initiated it). They had some good insights. I love learning from these children.

Invitation to speak in Vietnam

I have just received an invitation to speak in Vietnam later this year at the Ha Noi National University of Education 25 year celebration in conjunction with UNICEF. Congratulations to my colleagues as they celebrate this significant achievement.

A/Prof Ben Pham with Sharynne 

Children Draw Playing data analysis: "How is playing good for the world?"

This morning our team analysed the Children Draw Playing journal about "How is playing good for the world". We had 67 children answer this question.

Dr Jo Grimmond, Prof Sharynne  McLeod, Dr Belinda Downey, Dr Katrina Gersbach, Dr Van H. Tran, Dr Kate Freire

Our overarching themes from the content analysis were:

Playing:

• fun, good and entertains us (n = 23)
• keeps us healthy and energetic (n = 17)
• makes the world happy (n = 16)
• brings people together (n = 9)
• we can try new things (n = 9)
• not good/don’t know (n = 4)

 We discussed the following theories

Classical theories of play

• Surplus energy theory
• Recreation or relaxation theory
• Practice or pre-exercise theory
• Recapitulation theory

 Contemporary or modern theories of play:

• Psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Erikson)
• Arousal-seeking or modulation theory
• Metacommunicative theory
• Cognitive theory (Piaget)
• Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky)

 

CVC2026 - Ducks in a row

This morning Dr Carolyn Gregoric (conference secretary) and I met to discuss CVC2026. The ducks are all in a row! We have really enjoyed using EasyChair as the conference platform to manage all of the papers and reviews. Thanks Carolyn for your fastidious and wise oversight of CVC2026. 

We have just sent out the following email to the 174 teams who have submitted abstracts.

CVC2026 Abstract Outcomes and Invitation to Share Children Draw, Create, Share Belonging

We are pleased to advise that decisions have now been made in relation to all CVC2026 abstract submissions.

Notification emails have been sent to corresponding authors via EasyChair. If you have not received a notification, please log in to EasyChair and check the status of your submission before contacting us, as some notifications may have been filtered into junk or spam folders.
 
We also wanted to share with you details of a new Children’s Voices Centre research project, Children Draw, Create, Share Belonging. The project invites children to share their perspectives on belonging through posters, podcasts, and postcards and provides an important opportunity to centre children’s voices in research.

Further information, including the submission link, is available on the Children’s Voices Centre research page: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/childrens-voices-centre/research.

Please feel free to share this opportunity with your networks, colleagues, families, schools, early childhood settings, services or communities who may be interested in participating or helping to promote the project more widely. These works will be displayed via a global online gallery during the conference.

With thanks

Emma Hayes (she/her)
Senior Administration Officer
Children's Voices Centre
Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW

CeTasSSD PhD meeting

Today Felicity, Sarah V and I met to continue discussing Felicity's PhD based within our Catholic Education Tasmania Speech Sound Disorder (CeTasSSD) grant. We have now counted the number of children in 2026 who were assessed using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP).

• 210 children have been assessed with the International Speech Screener + DEAP screener  (120 controls + 90 others)
• 140 students have been assessed with the DEAP Phon (not in the control group)
•  There are 120 controls (passed ICS, ICS-E and had no teacher concern) (who received ISS, DEAP Screener and DEAP Phon) 

CVC Thursday Research Presentation

Today I provided the CVC Thursday Research Presentation. My topic was "Tips and Tricks for Writing Research CVs to Assist with Grant Writing"

Curriculum vitae (CV) is a Latin word meaning the course of one’s life. An academic’s CV is a comprehensive tool that enables a researcher to collect and analyse data about themselves to support their research endeavours. This workshop will encourage researchers to use their CV to document work that is:
Important 

• Changes lives: “Will this make a difference?”
• Generates new knowledge
• Is of national and international significance

The best you can do

• Collaborate when you don’t have the knowledge and methodological expertise

Targeted to specific audiences

• Reviewers, FOR codes, government

McLeod, S. (2014). Undertaking and writing research that is important, targeted, and the best you can do. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 16(2), 95-97. https://doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2014.896106


 

 

Indigenous Cadetship at CVC

We had a fantastic meeting with Addison Stewart to discuss the opportunity for the Children's Voices Centre to host one or two Indigenous Cadetships through CSU. We look forward to progressing this opportunity.

SACHL implementation research - Cantonese and Mandarin/Putonghua

Tonight (7:30-9:00) I was online with Dr Kate Margetson and a group of speech pathologists who speak Cantonese and/or Mandarin/Putonghua. They were advising us about how to adapt the SACHL for children who speak Cantonese and/or Mandarin/Putonghua. What a useful conversation - great insights were shared.

One participant mentioned https://www.evalubox.com/language-sample for language sampling - but none were aware of a similar tool for speech sampling. 

 

World Health Organization Disability Health Equity Network Workstream 4

Tonight (9-10pm) was the 5th meeting of the World Health Organization Disability Health Equity Network Workstream 4. Tonight our international working group discussed updates from the sub-committees and possible cross-workstream opportunities. 

There are four domains of this Workstream 4: 

1. Awareness 
2. Data Indicators 
3. Research and Evidence 
4. Resource Mobilization

 

Economic Value of Speech Pathology Services focus group

This morning I was invited to participate in a Speech Pathology Australia focus group with Nous Group to discuss an analytical framework to consider speech pathology services for early childhood. Their brief is to consider "Economic Value of Speech Pathology Services" Many of our population and intervention studies were relevant to the conversation. This provocation provides a summary of lots of the topics we discussed this morning:

https://provocations.csu.edu.au/communication-is-a-human-right-but-not-everyone-can-communicate-effectively/