Gemma White: Teaching Personal Safety Awareness to AAC Users

This week, Rachel invites Gemma White back to TWT to talk about personal safety awareness and self advocacy for AAC users. Gemma recently gave a presentation at AAC in the Cloud, “Where is the Penis?: Equipping AAC Users to Discuss Personal Safety Awareness with Personal Safety Curriculum”. Gemma talks about this presentation, why words like “penis” and “vagina” should be in AAC users devices, ways that we can collaborate to support personal safety awareness, and other ways that we can empower AAC users to protect themselves from neglect and abuse.

Before the interview, Rachel and Chris discuss some comments made by an SLP who works with one of Rachel’s clients and focuses only on verbal speech. This client has Childhood Apraxia of Speech and is highly unintelligible. He has been making good progress with his AAC and is now choosing to use it more often. Recently, the other SLP commented that “AAC is holding back verbal speech” because the client chose to use his AAC more than verbal speech to communicate. Rachel shares how she responded, the reasons why the other SLP may have believed this, and why following the student’s lead is so important when accepting communication modalities.

Key ideas this week:

🔑 If your school or practice has a curriculum developed to teach children about personal safety awareness, then you can collaborate with the whole team to add language to AAC user’s devices that support what they’re learning about their bodies and safety.

🔑 A person’s gender does not always match the body parts they were born with - It’s important to separate words related to gender and labels for private parts to foster a more inclusive environment.

🔑 We need to focus on self-advocacy from the beginning, e.g. "no," "stop," and "all done." Often refusal and negation can be motivating, especially if we are asking a student to do something they don’t want to do.

Links from this Episode:

Gail van Tatenhove: The Power of Core: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqfVAPuGzpI

Gemma White, AAC in the Cloud: “Where is the Penis?: Equipping AAC Users to Discuss Personal Safety Awareness with Personal Safety Curriculum” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-kw4_HH6FI

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