ACQ Vol 12 no 1 2010

The week-long clinical training sessions in March and July 2009, led by Sue Woodward and co-taught with Marie Atherton, Jacqui Frowen (March) and Felicity Megee (July), were also successful, as participants were keen to apply their knowledge and skills. The experience has fundamentally changed the Australian lecturers and clinical educators, giving them not only a new teaching role and peers with a shared passion for this innovative work but also an international perspective of speech therapy, one which is more inclusive of students who are culturally and linguistically different to those typically found in courses in Australian universities. The outcomes for the participants will be reported in a forthcoming paper on evaluation of the course. Several evaluation, reflection and feedback sessions with staff and participants informed both development and revision of the course as it progressed, so that the content and teaching processes in the second 2-week teaching block held in October 2009 directly targeted participants’ learning needs as they changed throughout the course. In the content, for example, four key unifying themes of clinical processes (derived from the feedback) were used as a basis for teaching in each of the specialist speech therapy topics (such as dysphagia, speech, language, cleft lip and palate). These themes were: diverse team practice, clinical reasoning, therapy planning, and working more effectively with patients. A problem-based learning approach was used in every teaching session. Assessment of participants was continuous throughout the clinical teaching, and they were also required to submit detailed patient case reports. A selection of these case reports was then used in the final teaching block to inform individual oral viva examinations, so that participants’ deep learning was examined. The future To the best of our knowledge, the first Vietnamese national who is fully qualified as a speech therapist has recently returned to Viet Nam. She shares some of her work below. Tri. nh Thi. Kim Ngo. c Speech therapist and Vice-Dean, Faculty of Special Education, The National College of Education, HCMC In 1999, I graduated from Da Nang University of Education, with a 4-year degree majoring in English. I obtained a BSc in Special Education in 2002 at Ha Noi University of Education, and majored in working with children with hearing impairment (HI). After my second degree, I worked as a researcher at the Centre for Children with Disabilities (CwDs), Institute for Education and Research in HCMC. Then I worked as an assistant to the program officer who led inclusive education programs for CwDs at the Save the Children (Sweden) project in Ha Noi. Since 2004, I have been working as a lecturer at the Faculty of Special Education, the National College of Education in HCMC. I taught the audiology module and language development for children with HI and was a leader of the HI Team before going to England in 2007. I completed an MSc in human communication sciences at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University in September 2008. I got a scholarship from the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program with a dream of supporting children with language difficulties. Since I started working with children with different types of disabilities, I have realised that the majority of CwDs have speech and language disorders. My dissertation was compiling a vocabulary checklist for Vietnamese parents so they can assess their children’s language development and identify late-talkers in children from 18–36 months of age.

Foundation Australia, one of whom was an Australian speech pathologist volunteer. Two 2-week teaching blocks combining theory integrated with practice principles were conducted in February and October 2009. Two 5-day clinical training periods were run in March and July. Each course participant was required to attend all of the academic teaching periods, and one week of clinical training. Australian speech therapy lecturers and clinical educators working in teams presented each teaching period. Course content and style Planned in conjunction with all project team members including Dr Dung (see her own reflections later in this article), the first 2-week block taught in February 2009 was designed to include the following topics: principles and processes of speech therapy practice; the implications for practice of essential anatomy, physiology and neurology for speech, swallowing, voice, and hearing; an overview of speech and language development; hearing and its implications for communication impairments; an introduction to speech therapy with head and neck cancer patients; and assessment and treatment of cleft lip and palate, voice and swallowing disorders, in both adults and children. The teaching methods were as varied as we could possibly make them. Small group work, case-based learning, role plays, case presentations, group problem- solving and discussions were all used – methods which were all unfamiliar to the course participants. These were in addition to practical demonstrations and trials, and demonstration modelling and clinical teaching with volunteer patients. Thus, while this period was designed as principally “academic teaching”, the learning was as experiential as possible. Team teaching became the “modus operandi” and often it grew organically as the speech therapy lecturers gained trust, experience and confidence with each others’ preferred teaching style. An example of a practical demonstration was the “normal swallowing practical”. Dr Bernice Mathisen (responsible for the dysphagia component of the course) had organised with course participants and the hospital kitchen for individual portions of a range of Vietnamese food consistencies to be served during a teaching session on swallowing and swallowing disorders. A variety of delicious Vietnamese dishes was presented to the students, ranging from the internationally known Vietnamese specialty, noodle soup (pho), to rice dishes, sweet biscuits, honey, and desserts based on agar-agar. Course participants working in pairs offered food and fluids to each other, in a role-play situation, observing a number of normal parameters, such as the role of texture or positioning, reflecting and discussing afterwards the effects on normal adult swallowing. This session was particularly well received as food and eating play a major role in social participation in Viet Nam. Participants in the short course in speech therapy with the lecturers

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ACQ Volume 12, Number 1 2010

ACQ uiring knowledge in speech, language and hearing