Director's Update - June 2023
To our Alumni and friends:
Lisa Archibald, PhD
Incredibly, my first year as Director of Western’s School of Communication Sciences and Disorders is drawing to a close. This has been an exciting year marked with renewal and change. We have spent time leaning into our values of building community, striving for excellence, being principled and aiming for balance and well-being.
This year we, as a collective group, spent time learning about issues related to equity, diversity and inclusion within our discipline and School. To support this work, we held three student gatherings focused on getting to know our equity-deserving students. Our aim was to create opportunities for talking about inclusivity within the program, School and Western. While everyone was welcome to come to any session, each session was designated for issues related to specific communities including:
- Black and other racialized students
- Students with disabilities (visible and invisible)
- Those identifying as 2SLGBTQ+
From our students, we learned about ways we can be more inclusive and accommodating. We are grateful to them for engaging with us in this journey of change.
We also dedicated time this year to examining the student workload imposed by our courses and clinical placements each term. We have already implemented adjustments in response to this exercise. In 2023-24 we will make an important change to the Year 1 speech-language pathology program, introducing a foundational placement aimed at developing foundational clinical skills in structured learning opportunities, including simulated experiences, research-based experiences and community-based services and events, such as screenings or presentations. Across two evenly spaced terms between January and June, students will complete the foundational placement in one term and an initial placement in the H.A. Leeper Speech and Hearing Clinic in the other term.
Over the past year we have expanded our services in the H.A. Leeper Speech and Hearing Clinic. Our clinic manager and Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP), Kim Spylo, joined us in September 2022. In addition to managing our clinic, Kim is providing services to young children with speech sound disorders. We have also added an additional SLP and two audiologists to our clinical team. In the coming year, our audiology students will have the opportunity to participate in expanded clinical services in the clinic.
Our faculty members continue to make important research contributions and have been widely recognized for this success. You will read about the awards and achievements of some of our members in this newsletter. You can find out more by visiting our website or following the School Instagram account at @westernucsd.
We invite your engagement in the School. Please do reach out to me with your thoughts and questions. We would love to hear from you! I hope to see you at Homecoming 2023!
Lisa Archibald, PhD
Director, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
