Wrapping Up

I created my website to inform everyone about how dance and speech therapy can be combined. You can find it here. I put up a page explaining what I was trying to do, a page about me, one about the benefits that can be received, and two pages for teachers and parents giving them tips on how to fins or create a program that would do this. I learned that dance works in different areas of the brain and improves brain signals throughout. Since speech is centered in different areas of the brain as well, improving brain signals will help with speech capacities. Dance is also very useful for students with dyslexia, who often attend speech therapy as well. I found some people who already have enrichment programs that allow students to be immersed in dance and speech therapy at the same time.

The presentation went very well. I had many people come up to me and express interest in my studies. Several asked me if I planned to do this in the future. It wasn't a thought I had while doing the project, but now that I am thinking about it I really could be someone who does this for a living. Because I have a background in dance and I will be learning about speech-language disorders, I could create ways to use both of them together. I could help students work on their physical skills as well as their communication skills. I will definitely be looking into ways that I could do this in the future. Hopefully in grad school I will have a way to pursue both of my interests in one place.

Looking at The Finish Line

With just a few more weeks until my 20% project is due, I am pulling together my final sources and starting to create my product that I will present to my peers and the world. I still have a few more sources that I will have to locate. I need to find a few more examples of therapists and schools who are incorporating dance into speech therapy. Once I have found these last few sources, I am going to build a web site that documents all of my findings about how dance can be combined with speech therapy to benefit students. This will demonstrate my knowledge of EDIT 2000 because it not only involves teaching and learning, but I will also have to use some of the tools I discovered in this class to find my sources and build my website. I will post some people who are using dance therapy as well as some techniques that can be used to incorporate dance. Basically I will showcase everything that I've found that relates to dance and speech therapy. I will hopefully organize my website into areas for teachers and therapists, students, and parents, as well as a basic information page so that many different audiences will be able to view and learn from the information I have collected.

I have enjoyed pursuing this 20% project because I have been able to research a topic that is really important to me while using some of the tools and knowledge I have gained in my EDIT 2000 class. I look forward to creating my web pages and showcasing them to my peers and friends.

Dance and Speech Programs

After looking at my comments, I have decided to refine my topic and driving question to include how speech therapy techniques can be combined with dance and movement in order to bring benefit to students who are deaf or have speech-language disorders. I think that this modification will be slightly more specific and help me to find the answers that I am looking for. This topic is also very important to me because I can actually use it when I am a speech therapist. I want to be open and accepting of new ideas and ways to reach and help my clients and students, so if there is a way that I can use dance I will be willing to try it.

Per suggestions, I looked into some programs that use dance and movement therapy in conjunction with speech therapy. At Texas Tech University, some SLP graduate students who were also dancers have started using ballet as a therapy for autistic children. Many children with autism have difficulty expressing themselves to others and can also be diagnosed with various speech and language disorders. There is a high likelihood that I will be working with autistic children in my future. These SLPs have discovered that ballet has helped their students improve in social interaction skills, coordination, and discipline. The individual nature of ballet helps the autistic students interact with each other at a slower and more comfortable pace than with larger team sports. Ballet also helped the students be able to express themselves.

 While these SLPs aren't combining dance and speech therapy into one program, they were able to recognize the link between movement and expression. If this program exists and is helping children with autism be more comfortable expressing themselves to others, I'm sure that other programs exists which can work more individually to improve speech through dance.

In searching for my topic, I found this article. This is exactly what I am looking for. This speech-pathologist is using various forms of dance to help children with the physical aspects of speech therapy and it has been shown to be helpful. Dance does use a lot of motions that move across the midline of the body, so that would be extremely beneficial in improving cross-brain functions. It may also seem counter-intuitive, but dance lessons do improve sense of direction in students with dyslexia. This article supports my theory that using dance as a part of speech therapy is very helpful for students with speech-language disorders.

My Driving Question: How can dance help students in speech therapy?

In my EDIT 2000 course that I am taking this semester, we were given the option to start a 20% Project. The idea was taken from Google engineers who were allowed to spend 20% of their time working on a pet project separate from their area of work. As we learn about how to use technology to teach our students and to learn ourselves, I will be devoting time to my own question I want to pursue.

I took ballet for many years before coming to college and I can honestly say that dance is one of my passions. From time to time, we would learn a dance choreographed in ASL, which I always though were very fun and we'd learn bits and pieces of a different language. Once, we even had a student who was deaf perform an ASL dance with us. This really got me thinking about how other Deaf people learn to dance. A quick Google search will turn up thousands of videos of Deaf dance troupes and their performances and also articles on how dance teachers will help their students learn choreography. Dancers who are deaf are not uncommon and can be just as talented as hearing dancers.

I want to be a speech therapist when I graduate so I will be working with students with hearing impairments as well as students with speech-language impairments. I want to spend time researching how dance and dance therapy can be combined with speech therapy to help students. I will be looking for people who have used dance as a part of speech therapy and how it can help students.