Section Four: The Culture of Speech-Language Pathology

Speech-language pathology is a culture. As a group, we have shared ancestors and shared history, underlying values and beliefs, intertwined beliefs and behaviors, subcultures, and individual differences. We also tell many stories to try to understand ourselves, as any other culture does! Let’s use our accumulating knowledge and our models about culture, language, and identity to consider our profession itself.

Two women sitting at a conference table, one laughing with a laptop open in front of her. Another woman is gesturing while speaking. A blurred person is in the foreground.

What do we believe?

What do we do?

Why?

Person walking away from the viewer, toward her own destination, on a tree-lined path in autumn sunset