Speech and Hearing Awareness Month

In the field of Speech-Language Pathology May is a month dedicated to raising awareness about communication disorders and the role of professionals in providing treatment of such disorders. In order to draw attention to these important topics, members of the class of 2016 decided to organize an event to celebrate “Speech and Hearing Awareness Month.”

Booth5The students took a grassroots approach and decided that the best way to reach people was to talk to them one-on-one. Armed with informative brochures, free goodies, and Freezies the students set-up a display on the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus with the goal of engaging and educating members of the public about speech, language and hearing issues. Students also developed a clever game which served to demonstrate through various tasks the difficulty of losing certain communication abilities. For example, participants were challenged to describe how to make a peanut butter and jam sandwich without using the words ‘peanut’, ‘bread’, ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘jam’ with the goal of simulating word-finding difficulties.

By the end of the day students had reached and educated over 100 people who were previously unaware of communication disorders and the professionals who serve this population. The students had a lot of fun and took pride in representing the field as well as advocating for those affected by communication disorders. They look forward to organizing more events in future years.