What'd Ya Say? Wednesday: Community Literacy/Action and SLP

Currently, as you may know from a past post, I'm taking a class on literacy, the different aspects of it, and the uses of it. In the class we've covered that literacy doesn't just encompass reading, writing, and direct communication... you can have literacy in all sort of things. There's: cultural literacy, that with is related to the space around you and your heritage; technological literacy, literacy of machines, computers, etc; spatial literacy, how each area/place/space can have its own literacy to understand... the list goes on.

As part of the course, we are now required to create a project pertaining to community literacy that has some involvement and an end product, whether its a book, gallery, website, video, poster, etc. I wanted to relate mine to Speech-Language Pathology, as it is my future profession, and it does entail some aspects of literacy. This can be as direct as dyslexia, or the deeper connections of tying letters and words to certain structures and meaning. (In our class definition, we also included being able to understand and be understood when communicating, which are the parallels to receptive and expressive communication in SLP.

Now, I've been thinking about my project a great deal and still am finding some hurdles... mostly dealing with what I want to accomplish (I have a few different ideas) and getting participants. I have 3 options as of now: 1. create a video with professionals and patients pertaining to life  with the disorder/ working with it and bullying. The community literacy aspect would then be educating others about the disorders through this video. 2. Having some sort of reading or writing workshop with a group of individuals with these disorders to promote literacy and perhaps function as a support group. 3. Have each of them draw/write/speak a short story in relation to a subject, perhaps their vision of a hero, then share them with others to promote knowledge about the vast array that these disorders come in.

Originally, my goal was to have something that I could continue after the semester and into following semesters but that is looking unlikely. What do you guys think? Are one of these options plausible? Or what are other ideas? As you see, community literacy can be advocacy as well.



If you want more information about how Literacy is something to be considered for SLPs to be knowledgeable in, feel free to see my blog post "Literacy and Therapy."