New book: Communication and Sensory Loss: Global Perspectives

I am so proud of my colleague A/Prof Kate Crowe who has just had her edited book published by Routledge.

It is titled: Communication and Sensory Loss: Global Perspectives

https://www.routledge.com/Communication-and-Sensory-Loss-Global-Perspectives/Crowe/p/book/9781032211626

Here is the CSU news release: https://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/sensory-loss-and-communication-a-unique-new-book-to-guide-professionals

I was very honoured to write the foreword for the book. Here is a segment of my foreword:

Communication and sensory loss: Global perspectives is a rich resource for governments, professionals, students, communities and families sharing insights about the communication of children and adults with hearing and/or vision differences. The book contains 11 chapters. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) eloquently sets the scene, by clearly articulating terminology, frameworks, and intersectionality to support the strengths and participation of people with sensory loss. The second part focuses on sensory loss in childhood, specifically for children with hearing loss (chapter 3), visual impairment (chapter 4), deafblindness (chapter 5), and with complex communication needs (chapter 6). The third part focuses on sensory loss in adulthood, specifically acquired communication impairment in adults with sensory loss from childhood (chapter 7), adults with hearing loss (chapter 8), vision loss (chapter 9), deafblindness (chapter 10), and complex communication needs (chapter 11). What is remarkable about each of these chapters, is that they are co-authored by people from different professions, different parts of the world, and with different lived experiences so that each chapter acknowledges communication rights of “everyone”. The case studies challenge pre-conceived notions of people with sensory loss, uniquely focussing on the, lives, strengths and challenges of a diverse range of children and adults from across the world. 

This remarkable book is written by 31 different authors who work in Asia, Oceania, North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. All of the authors have professional experience supporting the communication of children and adults with hearing and/or vision differences. Uniquely, a number of the authors also have with lived experience of hearing and/or vision differences, and use their experiences and knowledge to advocate within their own countries and across the world...

Readers can approach this book like they would approach the world‘s most inclusive icecream shop. Readers can find foundational knowledge (vanilla) to understand overarching issues relating to communication and sensory loss. They can find common flavours (chocolate and strawberry) that are included in most books about sensory loss. However, they also can find unique insights about sensory loss from across the world (e.g., lychee, turmeric, durian, honeycomb, rosewater). The case studies provide exquisite additions (e.g., chocolate chips, sprinkles). And, there is attention to everyone – providing a strengths-based approach to inclusion (e.g., lactose free sorbets and gluten free alternatives to icecream cones). Indeed, this book can be read from beginning to end (e.g., like an enormous sundae), or can be revisited again and again gaining a unique combination of insights...

As a result - Kate and I celebrated with icecream!

Communication and sensory loss: Global perspectives

Congratulations to Dr Kate Crowe who has just submitted her edited book titled "Communication and sensory loss: Global perspectives" to Routledge. She wrote "The book has 31 different author, authors with lived experience of hearing and/or vision differences, and authors who work in Asian, Oceanic, North American, South American, European, and African contexts". What a remarkable achievement! Kate has invited me to write the Foreword and I have been enjoying reading the chapters in order to complete this task. Congratulations again Kate!

Dr Kate Crowe submitting her book in Iceland on 1 Nov 2023

2020 Speech and Hearing Foundation of MA Annual Lecture

I was honoured to attend the 2020 Speech and Hearing Foundation of MA (Massachusetts) Annual Lecture presented by Dr. Kate Crowe titled "Why use one language when you can use two... or three or fout? Recognising and supporting the potential of Deaf multilingual learners."

The Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders at Emerson College is pleased to announce the 2020 Speech and Hearing Foundation of MA lecture by Dr. Kathryn Crowe, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Iceland and member of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech. http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07ehb3g6dya9451987&llr=ntsxjg8ab&showPage=true

Siblings of children with hearing loss

Some time ago Kate Crowe, Jacqui Barr and I were invited to write a piece titled "Siblings of children with hearing loss" for the Oxford University Press eBulletin  Raising and Educating Deaf Children: Foundations for Policy, Practice and Outcomes. It has been posted online here: http://www.raisingandeducatingdeafchildren.org/2017/10/16/siblings-of-children-with-hearing-loss/

Achievement, language, and technology use among college-bound deaf learners

Today Kate Crowe's first publication from her Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship was published online. Congratulations Kate!

Crowe, K., Marschark, M., Dammeyer, J., & Lehane, C. (in press). Achievement, language, and technology use among college-bound deaf learners. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. doi:10.1093/deafed/enx029 
Here is the abstract:

Deaf learners are a highly heterogeneous group who demonstrate varied levels of academic achievement and attainment. Most prior research involving this population has focused on factors facilitating academic success in young deaf children, with less attention paid to older learners. Recent studies, however, have suggested that while factors such as early cochlear implantation and early sign language fluency are positively associated with academic achievement in younger deaf children, they no longer predict achievement once children reach high school age. This study, involving data from 980 college-bound high school students with hearing loss, examined relations between academic achievement, communication variables (audiological, language), and use of assistive technologies (e.g., cochlear implants [CIs], FM systems) and other support services (e.g., interpreting, real-time text) in the classroom. Spoken language skills were positively related to achievement in some domains, while better sign language skills were related to poorer achievement in others. Among these college-bound students, use of CIs and academic support services in high school accounted for little variability in their college entrance examination scores. 

Kate Crowe's Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar Program has finished

Last week Kate Crowe finished her Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar Program working with Professor Marc Marschark at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
Here are the details about her Fulbright Program: https://www.fulbright.com.au/alumni/profiles/2016-alumni/
Kate's Fulbright blog is here: http://katesfubrightlife.blogspot.com

Prof Marc Marschark and Dr Kate Crowe at Rochester Institute of Technology

At the conclusion of her Fulbright she wrote:

I wasn’t sure where my Fulbright journey would take me, but at the outset I imagined that it would end at a tangible destination. A list of submitted journal papers. Conference papers to present. Future research projects in preparation. A checklist of tasks to indicate a successful scholarship. However, as I check the final items off the list, I am overwhelmed by a feeling that these tangible outcomes are not the destination that I thought they were. As Henry Miller said, “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things”. That is where my Fulbright journey has taken me. To a world that is bigger and brighter, more challenging and more rewarding than I knew. A world full of new friends, new ideas, and of exciting possibilities that I will be exploring for the rest of my life.  

During her Fulbright program she:

• collected data for five studies examining: 1. Semantic fluency skills of students who were Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH), hearing, and users of English and/or American Sign Language. 2. Students’ perceptions of word typicality related to category membership. 3. Students’ categorization skills and their cognitive flexibility in re-categorizing words. 4. The speech intelligibility of DHH college students. 5. The sign intelligibility of American Sign Language users
• engaged with university research staff in project planning, data collection, analysis, and dissemination for other research projects, some involving international collaboration
• attended American Sign Language 1 and 2 subjects (non-credit subjects)
• attended the Fulbright Enrichment seminar hosted in San Diego
• gave presentations at the American Speech-Language-Hearing association conference (Philadelphia), and keynote presentations at the Teaching Deaf Learners conference (Amsterdam) and the European Cochlear Implant Users association symposium (Helsinki).

Congratulations Kate - we are really proud of your achievements - and the fact that RIT has invited you back for next year.

Kate, Prof Marc Marschark and the RIT team

Hei! 你好! !مرحبا: Language acquisition in a multilingual world

Last week Kate Crowe was a keynote speaker at the European Cochlear Implant Users Symposium in Helsinki. Details of the conference are here: http://www.euro-ciu2017.fi/en/
The title of her presentation was: Hei! 你好! !مرحبا: Language acquisition in a multilingual world
The link to her presentation is: here
Here is the abstract:

The growing diversity of D/deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners creates challenges for educators and clinicians. With close to 8,000 language spoken in the world and increasing levels of mobility, the linguistic diversity of DHH learners accessing education and therapy services has never been greater. This presentation will describe parental and professional perspectives on choices about communication mode and language use for DHH children. Current perspectives on multilingualism, focusing on spoken language multilingualism, will be described and related to DHH learners and their families, and the educators and clinicians who work with them. The available research describing the speech and language outcomes for DHH children living and learning in multilingual environments will also be summarized. The need for interdisciplinary collaboration for supporting, assessing, and monitoring the speech and language development of DHH multilingual learners will be discussed.

Papers were presented in either spoken Finnish, spoken English or Finnish Sign Language (there was also a short presentation in spoken Spanish). There was simultaneous interpreting into spoken Finnish, spoken English, Finnish Sign Language, with captioning in written Finnish and English!

Kate presenting her keynote speech

 Kate also met up with Sari Kunnari and Taina Välimaa at the University of Oulu.

Taina Välimaa, Sari Kunnari and Kate Crowe

Kate's invited presentation in Amsterdam

This week Kate Crowe was a keynote speaker at the tri-annual International Conference on Teaching Deaf Learners conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
http://www.kentalis.nl/Teaching-Deaf-Learners
Her presentation was titled: DHH multilingual learners: Language acquisition in a multilingual world. Here is the abstract

Multilingual Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) learners are a group who are both incredibly diverse and under-represented in the literature. However, DHH learners who are acquiring two or more spoken languages, with or without the co-acquisition of signed language/s, are increasingly present in education and therapy services. When working with these learners and their families it is important to consider the differing perspectives of families and professionals on language choices and family language policy and evidence of the advantages and disadvantages of multilingualism in both typically hearing and DHH learners. The majority of evidence currently available describing DHH learners from spoken language multilingual environments suggests that there are no clear advantages of disadvantages of multilingualism on learners’ speech and language outcomes.

Her invited presentation was captioned in real time, and relayed by three sign language interpreters. Congratulations Kate! We were cheering for you from Australia.

Workshop at the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children

Yesterday Dr Kate Crowe and I presented a 4-hour workshop at the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC) Renwick Centre. The workshop was titled: Multilingual speech acquisition: Strategies for working with multilingual children with hearing loss. The enthusiastic audience included teachers of the deaf, speech pathologists and a pediatrician. One participant even flew from Brisbane to attend. Here is the abstract

The cultural and linguistic diversity of Australian children, including children with hearing loss is increasing. Educators and clinicians require knowledge of typical and atypical speech acquisition across a range of languages to meet the needs of the children and families they provide services too. In this workshop Professor McLeod and Dr Crowe will: 

• summarize the multilingual diversity of Australia’s children, including of Australian children with hearing loss
• outline factors families consider when selecting languages for children with hearing loss
• provide an overview on the International Phonetic Alphabet for transcription of typical and atypical speech across a range of languages common in Australia
•  compare and contrast the phonetic inventories of English and a range of languages common in Australia
• describe phonological processes in a range of languages
• provide tools and strategies for assessing speech skills in languages other than English  

Kate Crowe, Sharynne McLeod, Sally Hewett, Ali Burdon and Sharon Hurt at RIDBC

Sharynne and Kate before the workshop at RIDBC

More than words and signs: Vocabulary development and children with hearing loss

Yesterday Kate Crowe gave an online workshop titled "More than words and signs: Vocabulary development and children with hearing loss" to teachers of the deaf and speech pathologists who registered through the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC) Renwick Centre.

Congratulations Kate: MSpecEd (SD) graduation

Today Kate Crowe graduated (again!). This time she graduated with a Master of Special Education (Sensory Disabilities) from the University of Newcastle.  Her degree consisted of coursework and a thesis that was titled: Professionals’ Perspectives On Spoken Language Multilingualism For Children With Hearing Loss. Congratulations Kate (again!)!

PhD publications

The following papers have just been published that have been written as part of Suzanne and Kate's PhDs. Congratulations Suzanne and Kate!

Hopf, S. C., & McLeod, S. (2015). Services for people with communication disability in Fiji: Barriers and drivers of change. Rural and Remote Health, 15, 2863. (Online). Retrieved from http://www.rrh.org.au/articles/subviewnew.asp?ArticleID=2863

Here is the blogpost from when it was accepted for publication earlier this year.

Crowe, K., McLeod, S., McKinnon, D. H., & Ching, T. Y. C. (2015).  Attitudes towards the capabilities of deaf and hard of hearing adults:  Insights from the parents of deaf and hard of hearing children.  American Annals of the Deaf, 160(1), 24–35. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/american_annals_of_the_deaf/v160/160.1.crowe.pdf

Here is the blogpost from when it was accepted for publication in September 2014.

International Congress on Education of the Deaf, Athens, Greece

Kate Crowe has just presented a paper at the International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Athens, Greece. Her paper was titled: Spoken language multilingualism and children with hearing loss: Perspectives from parents and professionals. The paper was very well received with not enough seats for the audience (people were standing around the walls and outside the door). The importance of the paper was commented on by members of the audience.

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The use of more than one language is a necessity of the majority of people in the world, including children with hearing loss. Children with hearing loss who use two or more spoken languages (multilingual children) are a complex group and little is known about their prevalence and development, or how choices are made about their language use.
Purpose: Parents raising children with hearing loss in multilingual environments need to make informed choices about which language/s to use. Supporting such parents requires an explicit understanding of the factors parents and professionals consider when making these decisions.
Method: Three perspectives were examined. First, the incidence of multilingualism for children (n=406) and their parents (n=792) was explored within a population-based sample of children with hearing loss. Second, parents were consulted regarding their choices about multilingualism and language use for their children. Third, professionals working in education settings with children with hearing loss were consulted about what they feel influence decisions about multilingualism and language choice.
Results: Lower levels of multilingualism were evident in children (13%) compared to their parents (20%). Parents’ decisions were influenced by children’s audiological characteristics, planning for their children’s future academic success, culture and community considerations, and access to intervention and education in appropriate languages.
Conclusions: Australian children with hearing loss used a diverse range of languages and some were multilingual. Parent and professional insights into decision-making about multilingualism and language choice will support the development of appropriate services and supports for families raising children in multilingual environments.

Authors: Kathryn Crowe, Sharynne McLeod, Breda Carty, Teresa Ching, David McKinnon

Families’ communication choices for children with hearing loss

This week Charles Sturt University published a media release profiling Kate Crowe's research into families' communication choices for children with hearing loss. http://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/education/ripple/families-communication-choices-for-children-with-hearing-loss. She found that parents' choices are influenced by advice from professionals, their children's access to hearing aids and cochlear implants, children's intervention experiences, children's future opportunities, practicalities of communication, and creating a sense of belonging for their children. The research was published in an article titled Communication choices: Translating research to practice for professionals working with children with hearing loss which recently won the  Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology (JCPSLP) Editor's Prize for 2014.
The story has been picked up on the HealthCanal

JCPSLP Editor Dr David Trembath with
Kate Crowe and Sharynne McLeod

Dr Kate Crowe - Master of Special Education

Recently Dr Kate Crowe has been working to add to her qualifications. She submitted her thesis to finalise her Master of Special Education (Sensory Disabilities) from The University of Newcastle. Her thesis was titled: "Professionals' perspectives on spoken language multilingualism for children with hearing loss." Congratulations Kate!

Kate Crowe and Dr Breda Carty

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology (JCPSLP) Editor's Prize for 2014

At the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference, the article written by Kate Crowe and myself titled Communication choices: Translating research to practice for professionals working with children with hearing loss won the  Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology (JCPSLP) Editor's Prize for 2014. The award was presented at the Speech Pathology Australia AGM on 18^th May. This article translated Kate’s PhD research to a professional audience – so the award is not only for her article, but also for her outstanding PhD research.

Attitudes towards the capabilities of deaf and hard of hearing adults: Insights from the parents of deaf and hard of hearing children

The following manuscript has been accepted for publication. It is the last paper from the data collected as part of Kate Crowe’s PhD.

Crowe, K., McLeod, S., McKinnon, D. H., & Ching, T. Y. C. (2014, in press September). Attitudes towards the capabilities of deaf and hard of hearing adults: Insights from the parents of deaf and hard of hearing children. American Annals of the Deaf

Here is the abstract

Children who are Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) grow-up in environments influenced by their parents’ attitudes. These attitudes may act as barriers or facilitators to children’s development and participation (World Health Organization, 2007). The attitudes held by 152 Australian parents of DHH children aged between 3;7 years and 9;5 years (mean = 6;5) were investigated using the Opinions about Deaf People scale (Berkay, Gardner, & Smith, 1995b). The parents’ responses showed they had very positive attitudes towards the capabilities of DHH adults and consistently had strongly positive responses to items describing the intellectual and vocational capabilities of DHH adults. Parents’ responses to the majority of items on the Opinions about Deaf People scale were positively skewed. This raises questions about the validity of this scale as a research tool when used with parents of DHH children. These findings suggest that for these DHH children, parents’ attitudes may be facilitative, rather than presenting an environmental barrier to children’s development.

Invited keynote address to teachers of the deaf

Today Dr Kate Crowe presented an invited keynote address to itinerant teachers of the deaf titled: Cultural and linguistic diverse deaf learners: Overcoming the hidden curriculum. Here is the abstract.

Cultural and linguistic diverse deaf learners: Overcoming the hidden curriculum

Kate Crowe has been invited as a keynote speaker at the Itinerant Teacher of the Deaf Conference to be held Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children in September. The topic of the presentation is Cultural and linguistic diverse deaf learners: Overcoming the hidden curriculum. She is co-presenting with Professor Greg Leigh, Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children/The University of Newcastle.

There are high levels of cultural and linguistic diversity among learners with hearing loss in Australia and around the world. Such diversity requires educational agendas, services, and professionals who are inclusive, socially just, and skilled in working with culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Such an approach requires all aspects of education to acknowledge and accommodate many different possible cultural identities of learners and to foster their acquisition and use of languages concordant with those identities. The cultural competency of professionals who work with learners with hearing loss must encompass (a) knowledge about, and sensitivity to, the issues that may arise in teaching and learning contexts; and (b) undertake rigorous and continuous examination of their own attitudes, values, and beliefs in regard to people from other cultures and linguistic backgrounds. If left unexamined or taken for granted, values and attitudes across any or all of these areas may create a hidden curriculum — unplanned and unrecognized teaching and learning of beliefs, norms, and cultural mores that reflect the cultural or ideological perspective of teachers or other professionals. This presentation deals briefly with these issues and considers their importance in educational settings and strategies and resources for approaching the education of culturally and linguistically diverse learners with hearing loss.

Page proofs

Kate Crowe has just received the page proofs for her final paper of her PhD:
Crowe, K., McLeod, S., McKinnon, D. H., & Ching, T. Y. C. (in press, February 2014). Speech, sign, or multilingualism for children with hearing loss: Quantitative insights into caregivers’ decision-making. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
We look forward to seeing this paper published soon.