School of
Clinical and Rehabilitation Sciences

One of the things I always tell the students to make sure to ask is to say it to their volunteer, what do you want us to know about aphasia, or what do you want us to know about having aphasia. You can see everything in your brain. You wanna be able to say exactly what you wanted to do, and they’ll thing that is a little fuzzy for me with aphasia is I could see everything in the back of my brain. I see every word, but it’s like Steve, I’m not gonna let you say that particular word. So aphasia is a language disorder. It’s a problem being able to communicate about what you are thinking about. The Afagia workshop is a program that I developed at northeastern speech language and hearing center in which a volunteer comes in and meets with a group of, SLP, speech language pathology students. We have had a hundred and twenty graduate students participate in the program so far. And we’ve had about ten to twelve volunteers. And if you do the math, that means that we’ve had many volunteers come back several times. In the workshop, I learned how to administer aphasia tests and batteries. And basically, like, learn more about the participant and how they dealt with thephasia. Until you sit down with someone who’s had a stroke or has aphasia, you’re not gonna fully understand it. This was an amazing experience to hear what it’s like to have aphasia, to see it, and then to see the emotional side of how it affects someone in their life. So I would say that, when I first came here, it was truly a struggle, and I would say maybe ten, fifteen percent of what I was doing. Now I would say I’m close to ninety percent of where I should be But it’s, again, it’s a work in progress. I learned more about people with aphasia and, like, their difficult because the participant today, he would describe, like, what he got stuck on and why he got stuck on it. And we’d kinda get to see the strategies he used, when a communication breakdown occurred. The participant that we were working with, gave us a lot of great advice as how missions can, better interact with adults with aphasia, how we can’t do testing and how we can do some therapy ideas with them, and that’ll be really great. The more I am today, it just it has made such a difference in that communication with you here. It’s been amazing. Sort of the, the connection.