Have you ever supervised a graduate student? It's not that easy sometimes. If you're really fortunate you may get a student who is better than sliced bread, other times, you have to spend quite a bit of time just calming them down from fear of the groups they have to work with in your caseload. I remember my public school practicum experience. Nothing noteworthy, other than I didn't know what I was doing most of the time and my supervisor wasn't around during those times that I was lost. But I made it and I can?t say that it was a great experience. Graduate students know when they've been guided and when they've been let free to fly off the tree and crash into the ground below. I did learn from my experience that supervisors are important, the clients and the supervisor make the experience a real learning opportunity.
I've been talking to supervisors of bilingual graduate students lately. They're not bilingual themselves, but their caseloads are high density of Hispanics and so bilingual students are assigned to them. There are few bilingual supervisors at many and actually, there are few bilingual supervisors available in most universities or school districts. Those who are bilingual may not have the time, energy or approval by administration to supervise. Too bad isn't it, we need bilingual clinicians, and they need to be supervised by bilingual SLP's, but the system isn't quite there yet to provide a quality practicum experience for these bilingual graduate students. Then there's the competent supervisor who doesn?t speak the language to adequately supervise the bilingual graduate student. How do they do it?
Some questions to consider when selecting supervisors may be the following: What academic/clinical competencies should the supervisor possess to supervise bilingual graduate students? and How can these be acquired? What clinical resources are available or can be developed to support the supervisor who is supervising bilingual students?
ASHA does have a number of Position Statements concerning competency
with minority language populations. There is also the Definition
of Bilingual Speech-language pathologists and Audiologists. To
provide bilingual assessment and remediation services in the client's
language, the bilingual speech-language pathologists or audiologist
should possess: 1) ability to describe the process of normal speech
and language acquisition for both bilingual and monolingual individuals
and how those processes are manifested in oral (or manually coded)
and written language; 2) ability to administer and interpret formal
and informal assessment procedures to distinguish between communication
differences and communication disorders in oral (or manually coded)
and written language; 3) ability to apply intervention strategies
for treatment of communicative disorders in the clients language;
and 4) ability to recognize cultural factors which affect the
delivery of speech-language pathology and audiology services to
the client's language community. This definition could also describe
the competencies of anyone who provides services to bilingual
clients.
If a program is serious about their commitment to training bilingual graduate students, the supervisor has to be part of that training. It doesn't make sense to train students concerning the state of the art in assessment and intervention for bilingual clients, and then have supervisors who do not have the background or skills to support what has been part of academic training. The supervisor is the bridge from theory to application. The supervisor has to be provided the opportunity to retool and develop those skills that the bilingual students are receiving also. In looking at the above competencies, I can?t see why anyone could be educated to understand the needs of bilingual populations. The supervisor may not be able to understand the therapy session, but they certainly could assist the learning curve of students if they understood the theoretical and clinical basis of assessment and intervention with bilingual clients.
How can universities and others help? Maybe we could be resources to these monolingual supervisors. Maybe we could provide free coursework at the university level, have bilingual students provide workshops to supervisors, support groups during the academic year might be useful, maybe a library of reading materials for supervisors could be organized, or even an internet chat room to problem solve situations with a bilingual supervisor to negotiate and facilitate the session. I'm sure there are many other possibilities, but supervisors need to be supported, especially if they're not bilingual and they're supervising bilingual graduate students. I think this could possibly be a great way to support bilingual supervisors also.
The worst scenario is the monolingual supervisor who has a bilingual graduate student and neither have had any guidance in assessment and intervention coursework with bilingual populations. This becomes worst than my school practicum experience. Hopefully, graduate programs are recognizing that there are bilingual programs for speech language pathology, ASHA has a list of these and that the bilingual supervisor or a knowledgeable monolingual supervisor is the edge when it comes to training bilingual graduate students.
