Lesley Mayne and I are delighted to announce the publication of our book, Augmentative and Assistive Communication with Children: A Protocol and Intervention to Support Children with Complex Communication Profiles. It is available for order from Routledge, Amazon, Powell's, and Barnes & Noble.
As children with complex communication profiles participate in everyday activities they develop language and communication. They become welcome communication partners with their parents, caregivers, siblings, educators, speech-language pathologists, peers, and community members. We are eager to promote this participation by describing ongoing resources.
Our book, Augmentative and Assistive Communication with Children: A Protocol and Intervention to Support Children with Complex Communication Profiles published in June 2020 by Routledge, advocates for this participation and language development. The protocol Hearing Me Into Voice provided in the book is an assessment tool that anyone can use to describe the relevant current communication. We describe children whom we observed and who showed us hundreds of messages they used in social interaction with their familiar communication partners. We propose activities that serve to enhance interaction with unfamiliar communication partners. For example, we describe ways to encourage literacy, to use tools and strategies across environments and cultures, to prepare for emergencies, and to look for activities in the community that strengthen proficiency in communication and promote the child's preferences, interests, as well as use unique physical strengths. Building upon this more accurate description of each child’s communication proficiency, we suggest activities across five stages anyone of which you could use.
This website will add perspectives gained by interviewing parents of children with complex communication and physical abilities and adding their perspectives that enable other parents and professionals to understand children with complex communication profiles even better. Working together will strengthen each one. We learned to reframe and expand our understanding of realities and hopes. We added some real life course corrections, as it were, that enlarge our vision and flesh out meaningful and joyful participation in the community.
We believe that each child is so unique and demonstrates enduring qualities that their story reveals even beyond their medical diagnosis of autism, cerebral palsy, Rett Syndrome, traumatic brain injury, muscular dystrophy, West syndrome. Who they are and how they develop engages us in continual communication and surprises us by challenging our imagination!
All of us rejoice as we discover new communication and the wonders of developing communication of children with complex communication profiles.
Best wishes,
Dr. Sharon M. Rogers, CCC-SLP