February 2025
Much of the material on this website was developed during approximately 2020-2024, while I was teaching cultural issues and professional issues courses for undergraduate CMSD students and master’s-level SLP students. But some of the content is much older; the oldest pieces date back to a paper I published with a colleague in 1997 (Finn & Cordes, 1997) and to the first cultural issues seminar I organized for students and faculty at the University of Georgia in 2005. It has all been through several iterations, and my basic plan until very recently was to finish it as a textbook and then try (again) to find an academic publisher who would take it on.
Given our national politics as of February 2025, however, I find myself at a bit of a loss. Has my little book about culture and identity in SLP somehow become illegal? Will ASHA’s mission statement about making communication “accessible and achievable for all” soon be in our federal government’s crosshairs, or is the material on ASHA’s Multicultural Affairs and Resources webpage related to specific groups of people or historic inequities among groups about to disappear? What about the Department of Health and Human Services’ CLAS materials, or the notion of federally mandated supports for public-school students with a wide range of needs? Are we as speech-language pathologists now somehow expected to help people with their communication and swallowing needs without discussing or addressing their culture, their language, or their identities as women or truckdrivers or third-generation Vietnamese Americans or whatever they might be?
I don’t tend to jump to politically motivated extremes, but February 2025 just feels different. How could or should we be responding, if at all?
My answer, for myself, is that culture, language, and identity obviously remain fundamental to everything about client-centered speech-language pathology. My other answer is that it seems more important to me than ever for me to do what little I can, including sharing the instructional materials I have developed over the years with other current and future speech-language pathologists.
So I am sharing. I am using my draft chapters and my existing teaching materials to create this website, and I am doing it in real time. You will find many incomplete sections and links to nowhere. I’m working on that. You will find some distinctly low-quality graphics and boring visual layouts that serve the purpose for now. I’m working on that, too.
Come back often, because there will be more soon! And please encourage your friends, colleagues, students, supervisors, and instructors to do the same. My goal is to create an interactive set of materials that can be used for self-study, for in-services or other conversations among professionals, or as the basis of an entire semester-length course for undergraduate or graduate students (which, again, is where much of this material originally came from).
If you are struggling this month, as I am, to make sense of your goals and our profession in a society that seems to have declared Cross et al.’s (1989) “cultural blindness” stage to somehow be the ideal and the goal, then please, yes, welcome, come in. I am glad you are here.
Anne Marcotte | February 26, 2025