About the Native American Program at WSU
Program Director: Ella Inglebret

Cultural Interfacing:
Preparation of Personnel to Work with Native Americans

There is a critical shortage of qualified individuals to provide speech, language, and hearing services to Native Americans, even as the population of Native Americans is increasing. At best, Native American infants, toddlers, children, and youth often receive services not adequately accounting for cultural characteristics, thereby threatening the success of the educational process.

This project addresses these issues, as follows. First, we recruit qualified Native American students who are committed to serving the Native American population and prepare them for service and leadership roles. Second, an innovative clinical service delivery model is being developed in which Native American and non-Native Americans students work as members and leaders of cross-disciplinary, multicultural teams, a process arising from collaboration with students preparing to be public school educators. Finally, the project is developing and will disseminate, without charge to university programs in speech and hearing sciences, three interactive multimedia curriculum units addressing cultural, assessment, and intervention concerns specific to Native Americans. Further description of the program components follows.

Component 1. Native American students are recruited and retained within the program using a proven social/academic support model that provides an extension of Native American culture into the academic setting. Recruitment capitalizes upon eleven years of networking and trust-building with Native American communities in the Northwest. Retention is achieved through recognition of the extreme importance of community to Native Americans: The project establishes a "critical mass" of Native American students within the department from which students derive psychosocial support that acknowledges this community-focused element of the culture. This support is further extended through professional mentorship and academic instruction.

Component 2. Acknowledging that many teachers working with Native American children are not themselves Native American, this project prepares nonnative American students for work in diverse cultural settings. Students from diverse cultural backgrounds will team to provide direct clinical and academic services within the clinic and public school setting. Teaming will be integral to all aspects of instruction, including course content, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and direct service delivery.

Component 3. To address the goals of improved service delivery through enhanced cultural awareness, the project will develop a series of three interactive multimedia units in compact disk format to be distributed broadly. The first unit focuses upon broad issues of culture, education, and intervention, applicable to all services within the educational setting (e.g., educators, social services, and school psychologists would benefit from knowledge of appropriate patterns of eye contact within the culture, even as occupational or physical therapists would need sensitization to cultural norms for touch and body space). The second unit addresses issues of assessment of Native American communication deficit, and the third unit deals with intervention through multimedia case studies.