By Jason Smith, PRC Regional Consultant
How do I get him to initiate communication with the device? This is a common refrain from parents and caregivers early on in the AAC process. For evaluating therapists and those who consult with them, it can be a rather high-pressure proposition, as you may only have one session in which that child and device can come together to determine whether it’s an appropriate fit. I’ve thought about (fretted about?) this often in my role as consultant, and I’ve come up with a few guiding principles that I try to keep at the front of my mind during those initial sessions. One principle that I return to often is communication gives you the power to affect other people.
We adults might get a bit twitchy thinking about children having “power” over us, but when you think about it, it simply must happen in order to learn communication. It’s a power we gladly grant our own children. When I as an infant in the crib move my lips and tongue about while playing with my voice and stumble across “mamamama”, the world goes bonkers! And whenever I repeat that sound, the nice lady with the food and warmth and smiles comes to me. They initiate, we respond. That is powerful. That is effective.
This power develops from initially having very concrete, observable effects, to more and more abstract ones. At first, we’re making mom and dad move their whole bodies to get us things or to move us when and where we cannot. Then we make them just talk a lot, answering endless questions (“Whassat?”, “Why?”). This effective power continues to spread in its abstraction, and eventually we get to the point where we’re simply trying to get someone to change what they think (e.g., changing a reader’s thoughts about AAC).
I have found it’s easy to forget about the concrete nature of early communication when we begin working with our AAC users. In fact, I often see – and was so very often guilty of – an explicit flipping of this direction of early communication on its head! We tend to put the child in the role of responder rather than initiator, and then we’re unhappy that they don’t initiate. The only “power” that we let them have over us in this arrangement is the power to please us by using the device. While pleasing others is indeed one of the powers of communication, it is unlikely that we’re teaching that, and it’s clearly not the right place to start.
The way I’ve learned to combat this tendency in my own work is to explicitly turn myself into a robot. More specifically, I become a robot which the AAC user can program with the words they say on the device. To me, this is the most direct and concrete way of showing the child that the words that they say with the device affect other people, to help you get what you want.
What the user wants is not necessarily a thing. It could simply be a moment of joy that comes from someone doing something surprising. We at PRC talk a lot about core vocabulary, and in my role of AAC robot, I think I’ve discovered the most hard-core word of all: “sleep”. I doubt it’s what you were expecting, but I’ve found this word to be so effective in sparking joy in early AAC sessions that I’m beginning to believe it’s magical. I’ve used it with children as young as 2 and as old as 12 (and probably older, but I’m not recalling an instance), with communication impairments from across the full span of those which we see in our AAC clinics. When they see that saying the word “sleep” on the device makes me (and any other adults in the room) hit the floor and start “sawing logs”, they definitely feel the power of communication. Some have literally frozen in their tracks in awe, and you can see them thinking, “Did I do that?” Others just burst out laughing. But what they all have in common is they want to make that happen again!
I certainly can’t claim “sleep” has worked every time, but it’s definitely now among the few words I always have showing during the first session. Core vocabulary in general is very useful for moving us human robots around, getting across the concept that words _effect people. Try to keep this concept in mind when struggling to get that new AAC user to initiate communication, and see whether that gets you over a few more hurdles.
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