© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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From the Editor |
International Collaborations
I write this column from Merida, Mexico, at surely the hottest time of the year to go to the tropics. Accompanying me are four graduate students at Ohio State University (Katherine Glenn-Applegate, early childhood education; Jaclyn Dynia and Jill Pentimonti, reading and literacy; and Amy Pratt, foreign/second language education) and two speech-language pathology colleagues (Joan Kaderavek from the University of Toledo and Amy Livingston of EBS Healthcare). We are here for 1 week collaborating with the staff of a nonprofit school that serves children ages 2 to 21 with significant disabilities who are not able to participate in the regular schooling system. Our team will engage in a number of activities that include working side by side with school staff to assess children directly; sharing ideas on therapeutic techniques for individual children; providing the school with material resources, including augmentative and alternative communication devices, tests, and about 200 children's books we collected in a book drive; and delivering a 2-day workshop on intervention techniques. Our work is solely volunteer and is made possible through university support and private contributions.
This context provides a backdrop for an important topic to address in this column, namely the unique contribution of international collaborations as a means for fostering the exchange of ideas, the building of research and practice partnerships, and the advancement of our field, which expands well beyond the borders of the United States. Although the title of this journal does emphasize the "American" context of clinical practice, this by no means limits our content to research conducted only within the American borders. On the contrary, our readership would benefit greatly from a broader understanding of practice and theory as they occur worldwide; therefore, I want to welcome such contributions while emphasizing the need to ensure the applicability of the content to our readership. Here, I review the major article types that appear in AJSLP so that readers might consider whether and how the outcomes of their international collaborations might be disseminated:
- Research Article and Research Note. These are full-length research articles and brief research reports, respectively. The results of international research collaborations, for instance, could be reported via this article type.
- Review. These provide a comprehensive overview of an area of speech, language, or hearing sciences and/or disorders. These should be prepared with the same rigor as a research article. Systematic reviews, whether qualitative or quantitative, of clinical theories or practices from an international perspective could be reported via this article type.
- Tutorial. These oftentimes brief reports are usually educational in nature, designed to teach AJSLP readers about innovative topics. Tutorials that offer insights into different cultural patterns, as relevant to clinical practice, would be welcome here, particularly given the increasing diversity of the persons we serve in clinical practice.
- Clinical Focus. These articles generally have a strong clinical focus to present case studies and descriptions of clinical programs and practices. This would be an appropriate mechanism, for instance, to discuss clinical programs and practices used internationally or with diverse patient populations, provided that these descriptions would be of interest to the AJSLP readership.
- World View. These brief reports typically provide our readers with descriptions of pertinent aspects of the profession of speech-language pathology from authors in other countries.
- Review. These provide a comprehensive overview of an area of speech, language, or hearing sciences and/or disorders. These should be prepared with the same rigor as a research article. Systematic reviews, whether qualitative or quantitative, of clinical theories or practices from an international perspective could be reported via this article type.
Given the interest of many persons with the speech-language pathology community in pursuing international collaborations, it is important to know that there are vehicles for disseminating the results of these collaborations. At AJSLP, we certainly welcome the opportunity to review submissions that discuss the work which occurs outside of America's borders.
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