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Words of encouragement: Blugold grad students help individuals with aphasia

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Words of encouragement: Blugold grad students help individuals with aphasia
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The thoughts and ideas are there.  

The words to express those thoughts and ideas can be elusive, however. 

For more than two million Americans, this condition is the result of a neurological disorder known as aphasia, most often caused by a stroke. Aphasia does not affect intelligence, but can affect a person’s ability to speak, write or understand language. 

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For years, students and faculty in UW-Eau Claire’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences have researched various forms of aphasia in an effort to help these individuals communicate more effectively. 

This summer, a two-week intensive aphasia therapy program paired four people with aphasia with four graduate students during a first-of-its-kind aphasia therapy program on the UW-Eau Claire campus. 

The Eau Claire Aphasia Project was developed by Dr. Tom Sather, professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences. His idea to create the camps came from a summer he spent in Canada nearly 20 years ago. 

“Back in 2007, when I was a full-time speech pathologist, I worked for a summer in Nova Scotia at Dalhousie University,” Sather says. “It was one of the first intensive programs for individuals with this disorder. I worked there for a month as a clinician, and that kind of hatched the idea.” 

Sather says now seemed like the right time to pursue this intensive intensive therapy program, thanks in large part to the aphasia community that has been built over the years here in the Chippewa Valley. 

This therapy program brought together four individuals with aphasia — two from the Eau Claire area and two from the Madison area — to work with Sather and the four graduate students.  

“One of the largest looks at speech therapy intervention for people with aphasia has been finding that 20-50 hours of speech therapy services are most effective for language expression or speaking, as well as comprehension,” Sather explains. “So, in that sense, what this program does in four hours of intervention a day is provide opportunities to practice speaking, communicating, conversation, but is also centered around a meaningful project that each participant has chosen.” 

As you will hear from them in the video above, the two-week program does more than bring the graduate students and their clients together. It provides a life-changing learning experience for all of them.  

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