ASHA SLPs in China Teach Teachers About Their Students With Disabilities

“Children can’t wait,” declared Dr. Li-Rong Lilly Cheng, CCC-SLP, ASHA Honoree and Professor, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University, in her opening comments of the weeklong June and December 2013 symposia on children with disabilities offered for general education teachers in Guangzhou, China. Borrowing words from Gabriela Mistral’s poem, “His Name is Today,” Dr. Cheng introduced the theme of each of the Guangzhou International Symposium on Special Education, “Their time is now, which is why we are all here.” The “We” were the 600 primary and secondary teachers from the Guangzhou China province, the Director General of Education (Qu Shaobing), Division Chief for the Guangzhou Education Bureau (Xu Wenqian), and the Dean of the Teachers’ Training School of Guangzhou University (Qi Guosheng), and local parents of schoolchildren with disabilities, American families in the process of adopting Chinese children, most of whom presented with a disability, and the two co-authors of this report, Dr. Vicki A. Reed, CCC-SLP and Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Dr. Geraldine P. Wallach, CCC-SLP and Professor and Clinic Director, Communicative Disorders, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, California, who accompanied Dr. Cheng as American members of an invited, seven-member international panel of faculty presenters: Drs. Kenneth Sin, Special Education; Kevin Yuen, Audiology; and Benjamin Tsou, Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong; and Dr. Jean Torng, Speech-Language Pathology, National Taipei University of Nursing and Health Science, Taiwan.

Education of children with disabilities in regular classrooms with general education teachers has been China’s long-standing national policy (Yu, Su, & Liu, 2011), but a policy that has not been well supported by the realities of classroom teachers’ limited pre- and in-service preparation in education of children with disabilities and relatively few special education teachers and even fewer speech-language pathologists. To address these issues, the Bureau of Education of Guangzhou, the University of Guangzhou, the Confucius Institute at San Diego State University, and the BELA Education Group of Vancouver, Canada, jointly sponsored and organized the four identical symposia. The faculty’s presentations had an interwoven theme of language and literacy in learning across their topics, which included language and learning disabilities, cognitive and behavioral disabilities, hearing loss, autism, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and second language and dialectal influences. The last topic was especially relevant since multiple languages (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese) and dialects are spoken in China, print forms vary across languages and dialects, and China has established a policy regarding the language(s) that are permitted to be used for education in schools. Most of the topics covered during the intense several days represented new and unfamiliar territory for the teachers who were eager to learn and participated actively in discussions. Cases provided by the teachers, and woven into the presentations, were highly successful in achieving immediate relevance of more theoretical and academic foundation information, and presenters and teachers quickly found common ground as all searched for answers to complex questions about complex children. Presentations and interactions were in Chinese, which presented unique challenges for Drs. Reed and Wallach, the only non-Chinese-speaking members of the panel. Exceptional interpretation provided by Drs. Cheng, Torng, and Yuen, with their outstanding professional and disciplinary expertise in combination with their Chinese language proficiency, allowed Drs. Reed and Wallach to feel fully included and able to communicate with the teachers.

Among the most poignant and immediately effective aspects of the symposium were the team panels and evenings of parent forums. Parents of children with disabilities and teachers attempting to educate the children in their classrooms questioned the panel members about their children and sought the panel’s comments and opinions. All panel members freely complemented and supplemented each other’s observations and responded to the parents and teachers who expressed appreciation for the panel members’ sharing of expertise and their empathy. The panel also conducted case histories and communication sampling techniques with American parents who were in Guangzhou to adopt Chinese children with special needs. China’s one-child policy has resulted in a population of infants and toddlers with disabilities, many physical and observable in nature such as cleft lip and palate, who are abandoned and placed in orphanages. The American parents heard of the symposium and volunteered to attend with their new child because they were aware they could obtain professional opinions and at the same time assist teachers to better understand needs of children with disabilities.

From primary to secondary school, we were challenged to provide meaningful guidelines for educating students with a variety of communication, language, literacy, behavioral, and academic problems. We tried to strike a reasonable balance between theory and practice, especially at this point in the teachers’ level of preparation. We helped them understand principles behind assessment and intervention, the importance of language and communication in understanding children’s learning challenges, and recognize the individuality of each child. Collectively, we emphasized the importance of a “shared literacy” framework for teachers. These initial and important efforts in providing training represented what is anticipated to be a continuing journey for Guangzhou educators. Inspired by the poet Robert Frost, it was clear to all of us at the end of both June and December symposia that there are “miles to go before we sleep” on this road less traveled in China, but we came away with the sense that some of the miles had just been traveled. We also came away from the experiences wondering who learned more, the teachers or us.