The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: A Month of Authentic Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)

A friend said that I’m photogenic based on my Facebook pictures, and I laughed (thinking of the many pictures I’ve deleted because my eyes were closed or I looked like I was 6 times my weight) and quickly said, “Well, I just don’t post the bad ones.” As I scroll through my newsfeed, I know I’m not alone. Everyone posts the good pictures. We also post extremes..highlights and heartache. We share the things that we think are “newsworthy.”

It would be boring to include ALL of the authentic stuff. Imagine reading and writing a bunch of tweets and Facebook statuses that say things like, “I made dinner and did the dishes.” “I yelled at my kids 28 times today,” or “I did a load of laundry but didn’t feel like folding it so I threw it on the sofa. Now the dog is laying on it, and I have no plans to re-wash it.” (Ya know, just off the top of my head).

We take those mundane times for granted. If someone who is recovering from a stroke posts that they just made dinner and did the dishes, it becomes newsworthy.

Information also becomes newsworthy if someone else can learn from it.

I mess up every single day. I make mistakes in all areas of my life, but to preserve my self image and save you reading time, I’m focusing on my professional “mistakes.”

It’s most glaring when I watch videos of myself with students who are using augmentative and alternative communication  (AAC). I cringe at the nonverbal cue that they gave me that I missed when I was modeling. I ask them to repeat a verbal word that I understand perfectly when I watch the video. By the time I watch the video, I’m home and the moment has passed. I’ve missed the opportunity to acknowledge their verbal communication.

These aren’t generally the experiences that are shared. Usually you see and read about the highlight reel. We show the best moments… moments when the kids get it. We celebrate the moments of success. We don’t show the hours of modeling that we did when the child never even glanced in our direction. We skip the 20 position adjustments it took before the student was able to access the screen well enough to activate it.

As many of you know, May is Better Hearing and Speech Month. It’s basically an opportunity to celebrate speech-language pathology and audiology and educate the public about what we do. This years campaign is “Communication Takes Care.” It’s especially true when we talk about individuals who use AAC. Someone has to care immensely about communication to learn and implement AAC. Someone using AAC has to care enough about communicating to be willing to do the work to learn and use an AAC system.

When I talk to parents and professionals, they care a lot about the individual AAC users they see everyday. Some say they want to model and use AAC with them but “I don’t want to mess it up for them” or “I’m not using it because I’m too worried that I’m going to make a mistake that will ruin their chance at success.” That’s so much pressure! Unfortunately, my not-so-profound response to this is that you’re definitely going to make mistakes. You are going to mess up and forget where the words are. You’re going to forget to charge the device or think of something you should have modeled later, after you’ve already missed the moment.

I think I am a very good speech-language pathologist and I know a lot about AAC. I spend hours and hours every week thinking and reading about AAC, working with students, listening to parents and professionals and working on AAC app development, and in every single one of those areas, I still mess up. I don’t share a lot of those “fail” moments, but I learn from them, and maybe you can too.

So, here’s what I’m thinking. Each weekday in the month of May, I’m going to post an #AuthenticAAC moment from my day…something I learned that I probably should have known, a mistake I made, a tough part of the day or something I missed. The amazing moments are authentic too of course, but my hope this month is to increase confidence and reduce AAC insecurity by showing my “behind the scenes” moments.

Please join me! I’m using #AuthenticAAC, and I’ll post each night on the Speak for Yourself Facebook page. Then I’ll do a round up blog post at the end of the week, for those of you who are not on Facebook.

Here is the really great news: students are extremely graceful in their forgiveness of our imperfect attempts. If you’re genuinely trying to understand people, they give you as much patience as they can. Accept that you’re going to make mistakes, and apologize when you realize that you have because that’s how communication and relationships are built…with care.