CVC Bimonthly Community Meeting and Lunch

Today CVC affiliates joined us for our bimonthly whole of centre meeting. The agenda included centre updates, collaborative projects, and opportunities to get involved. We also welcomed Amy Whitfield as our new Digital Media Curator

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


 

 

CVC community bimonthly meeting - 16 April 2026

 Today was our CVC community bimonthly meeting. What a celebration of accomplishments and our meaningful and authentic plans for 2026-2027.

Holly's presentation at The Treehouse

Yesterday Holly McAlister (my PhD student) presented an excellent seminar at the Children's Voices Centre Community Research Presentation. Her presentation was titled:

Weaving together culturally responsive and participatory action frameworks

Abstract: Frameworks developed in a Western context have dominated academic research for decades. However, it is vitally important when conducting research with communities from diverse cultural backgrounds that culturally responsive frameworks and methodologies are applied to support culturally safe and appropriate engagement for these communities. Child-focused participatory action research (C-PAR) frameworks, such as the Lundy model (2007), have been developed on the background of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). Hopf and colleagues developed the Culturally Responsive Teamwork Framework in 2021, with the aim of supporting culturally responsive practices on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intraprofessional, and interprofessional levels. Research methodologies have been developed by Pasifika scholars to support culturally responsive research engagement for Pacific Islander communities and include but are not limited to the Samoan fa’afaletui (Tamasese et al., 1997) and Tongan kakala (Johansson Fua, 2014; Thaman, 1997) methodologies. This presentation will compare research frameworks and methodologies developed within Western and Pasifika contexts for child-focused participatory action research (C-PAR) and cultural responsiveness. The relationships between Western and non-Western methodologies and the process of decolonisation of academia and scholarship will also be discussed.

Biography: Holly McAlister is a speech-language pathologist living and working on Wiradjuri country in Young, NSW. Holly completed an Honours degree in 2020 which looked at multilingual Fijian children’s speech sound development. Holly’s PhD research project brings together culturally responsive research frameworks and applies these to the question of how we can provide culturally responsive speech-language pathology services to children and families with Pacific Islander heritage, particularly those living in the diaspora in countries such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Holly has presented her research at national and international conferences in the Pacific, Asia and North America. Holly is also passionate about supporting children’s voices in research and advocacy for the regional allied health workforce.

It was very lovely to have her working in The Beehive at The Treehouse. She brought a bee to add to our collection of bees from visiting scholars around the world.

Welcome to CVC Emma Hayes

Today Emma Hayes began working with the Children's Voices Centre as the administrator for the Children's Voices Conference (CVC2026). It was as though she had been working with us for a long time. Welcome Emma! We are so thrilled to have you working with us. 

 

Our new SAO (senior administration officer)!

CVC Community Research - Thursday presentation

Today I was the CVC Community Research presenter at our weekly Thursday lunch session.

Multilingual Minds are Unlocking Global Knowledge, γνώση, 认识, إدراك, דַעַת, ज्ञान …
Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University
There are over 7,000 languages in the world. Literature about children’s communication development focusses on English, northern hemisphere Indo-European languages (Draper et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022), and “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (Henrich et al., 2010). This presentation will commend the work of multilingual minds (researchers, professionals, and translators) who provide English-language access to global knowledge about speech, language, and communication. It will outline the decade of work of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and knowledge contained within two global initiatives
The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-speech-development-in-languages-of-the-world-9780192868862) 
Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/speech-acq-studies)
The presentation will conclude by challenging our reliance on English as the medium for knowledge dissemination and acknowledging the future potential of our connected multilingual world for greater understandings of speech, language, and communication.

Sharynne McLeod, PhD is a Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia specialising in multilingual children’s speech and language acquisition. She has a legacy of leading interdisciplinary teams, building world-class research capacity to undertake impactful international research. Her transformative research has reframed the speech-language pathology profession by foregrounding communication rights and social justice. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has awarded her Honors and the Certificate of Recognition for Outstanding Contributions in International Achievement. She is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia, Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. The Australian Newspaper describes her as Australia’s Research Field Leader and Best in the World in Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology based on the “quality, volume and impact” of her research. 

19 people attended online and in person. Thanks for your encouragement and great discussion about the importance of home language maintenance and looking beyond English-language research.

Supporting young German children’s speech and language development

This week's weekly research presentation at the Children's Voices Centre

Children's Voices Centre community research lunch

Supporting young German children’s speech and language development
Wiebke Freese
University of Lübeck, Germany

Communication is the key to the world, and children are our future. However, some children need support in their communication development, for example because their speech and language is not developing as it should. This has an impact on children’s futures. This is where speech pathologists can help. They identify the exact causes and support the children with specific interventions. This requires knowledge of speech and language acquisition and specific tools that facilitate identification and differential diagnosis in order to support the right children with the right strategies.
Most of the knowledge about children’s speech and language development is available for English. Since development varies between languages, specific knowledge is also needed for languages other than English. This is where my project comes in: it aims to help gather data on German-speaking children in order to better support them in their development. In this presentation, I will outline the research we conducted with 445 children with and without speech sound disorders, aged two to six years. Using a longitudinal design, we assessed them in different ways (e.g., consistency, non-word repetition, stimulability) to better understand their development and to find tools to identify needs early.

20 CVC staff and affiliates attended from across Australia