Celebrating International Stuttering Awareness Day with a free collection of articles

Today, 22 October, Stuttering awareness day is marked around the world, and Norway is no exception. NIFS (the Norwegian interest organization for people with stuttering and cluttering) is informing about stuttering many places in the country today.

NIFS has a stand on Egertorget among other places, today. Their campaign is: "Speak with your own stuttering"

Statped is marking the day by launching a brand new, and free (!) publication consisting of 14 articles aimed for SLPs and SLP-students about assessment and treatment of stuttering in children, youth and adults. EST members Linn and Åse are proud to have contributed to the collection (prior to the ESTs projects start). Linn has been co-writing an article about treatment for stuttering in preschool aged children. Åse’s contribution is an article on assessment and treatment of bilingual people who stutter. She has also co-written a paper on how to work with teachers and the staff at school around children who stutter. In addition she was leading the project for some time, before starting her PhD in the EST project. In this week’s blogpost, we would like to tell you a little bit about the publication.

The new publication was put together by members of Nasjonalt Taleflytforum, a forum consisting of SLPs working with fluency disorders in Norway, lead by Statped. The network has previously worked with translations of assessment tools and preparation of information material. The idea of putting together a collection of articles for SLPs came in 2015. Since then an editorial board of four SLPs have worked with collecting articles from co-authors, commenting on them, and preparing them for publication. More than 10 SLPs have contributed to writing the articles.

The topic of the articles have been inspired by a survey the forum conducted among Norwegian SLP prior to starting the project. More than 50 suggestions to topics for articles came in. The need for new material on treatment in Norwegian was apparent! Up until now there has not really existed any practical handbooks or collections of articles in Norwegian about assessment and treatment of stuttering. With this collection SLPs in Norway will finally be able to access new and updated information about treatment, and best of all: it’s free online! (If you prefer to read from a printed hard copy, the publication can be purchased as print on demand here.)

Meeting with the EST reference group

In addition to the EST-project group, we have an advisory board and a reference group. The latter consists of representatives of institutions, organizations or groups of people that our research can be beneficial to. Importantly, an overall aim of reference groups is to involve the users of the research in the research projects and the research projects to benefit from the users experiences and knowledge about the topic under study. In the EST-project, collaboration with many of the representatives were established when drafting the grant proposal, however, we have also gotten some new representatives in the group throughout the two years that the project has been running.

The meeting this time focused on important design issues such as pre- and post-measures, inclusion criteria and collaboration in recruiting participants. The fruitful discussions with the reference group gave us new perspectives, possible solutions, but also some challenges to work further with.

I believe that I can say that I talk from everyone in the EST project group when I say that we are privileged to have such an engaged, knowledgeable and reflective reference group!

From the left: Elisabeth Holm Hansen (USN EST), Karoline Hoff (Statped), Martin Wright (NIFS), Ane Hestmann Melle (Statped), Melanie Kirmess (UiO EST), Kari-Anne Næss (UiO EST), Linn Stokke Guttormsen (UiO EST), Konstantinos Antypas and Hilde Hofslundsengen (HVL EST). Karianne Berg (Nord University) and Astrid-Tine Bjørvik (Statped midt, NTNU) joined on SKYPE.