For us to love each other we must first know each other. We come to know each other through communication, the purpose of which is communion. Traditionally, we think of stuttering and cluttering as impairing this communion. Disfluency prevents us from sharing ourselves with others by distorting our message and increasing the effort it takes for us to speak. This need not be the case. Our disfluencies are as much a part of us as any other attribute. For others to know us deeply, they must also know our stuttering and cluttering. Likewise, for us to know others, we must know how they react to us – all of us – including our disfluencies. In this talk, I propose that by stuttering and cluttering openly and sincerely we are able to share more of ourselves with others and therefore enter into a deeper communion than would be possible if we hid our disfluencies. Stuttering and cluttering introduce vulnerability into our conversations that would be absent had we been fluent. This vulnerability, when reciprocated, allows for intimacy. We know from recent research that the less spontaneously we speak and the more we conceal our disfluencies, the more they negatively affect us. By embracing our disfluencies, we not only lessen the negative impact of stuttering and cluttering but we also increase our ability to know, and therefore, love each other.

Christopher Constantino lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Megan, and sons, Augustine and Sebastian. He is a speech-language pathologist at Florida State University. He clinically supervises graduate students and researches how to improve the experience of stuttering. He teaches graduate classes on stuttering and counseling. Chris enjoys riding his bicycle.

Continuous growth in cultural and linguistic diversity influences service delivery to individuals from diverse backgrounds, including individuals who stutter and clutter. Research findings and clinical observations indicate cultural and linguistic differences in the perception of stuttering and cluttering as well as the presentation of speech and related behaviors. This motivates a need to strongly consider the importance of providing culturally responsive service-delivery to individuals who stutter and clutter as well as related best practices. At the conclusion of this session, attendees will leave with tools to understand why culturally responsive assessment and treatment of both stuttering and cluttering is important, but also how to do it.

Kia Noelle Johnson, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is the Associate Director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Stuttering Education and Research – Atlanta Satellite through the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in developmental stuttering with a focus on culturally diverse populations. She is also a growing leader in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion in clinical and professional settings.  She has previously served on the ASHA Board of Directors and as National Advisor to National NSSLHA. She currently serves as the immediate Past-Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing and is a member of the ASHA Board of Ethics.

"Resilience science over the last 50 years has converged to show that “resilience” refers to a complex and dynamic set of internal and external factors that promote positive
outcomes in the face of various sources of chronic adversity. Over the past 15 years or so, researchers in the nature and treatment of stuttering have used this work as a basis for identifying so-called “protective” factors that can either prevent or reduce the adverse effects of stuttering on one’s quality of life. In this presentation, I will summarize key findings from the stuttering literature and suggest research directions that consider age, interval from stuttering onset, severity/chronicity of stuttering (I.e., dose or cumulative risk), risk assessment and the potential for tailored therapy approaches based on these and other factors."

"Tricia Zebrowski is Professor Emerita in Communication Sciences and Disorders at The University of Iowa. Her research, teaching and clinical work focused on the nature and treatment of stuttering across the lifespan, particularly stuttering in adolescence. From over 20 years she directed UISPEAKS for Teens, a summer residential program for teenagers who stutter, held at The University of Iowa. In her most recent research, Tricia sought to understand the change process underlying adolescents’ readiness to actively address one or more aspects of stuttering. Based on the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) model of intentional behavior change, she and her team of graduate students developed a series of empirically validated measures of assessing change readiness in teenagers who stutter."

Underserved populations within a broad range of diversity indicators (e.g., income, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation) continue to experience significant barriers to access high quality counseling services. This constitutes a pressing challenge in the field of stuttering and cluttering. In this keynote presentation, Parra-Cardona will reflect on 15 years of implementation of prevention parenting programs in the United States, Mexico, and Chile with underserved Latinx populations. He will elaborate on the importance of addressing key cultural and contextual experiences within counseling services (e.g., the ways in which discrimination negatively impacts parenting practices), the importance of embracing advocacy approaches informed by social justice as a core component of counseling services, and the need to scale-up services for populations that continue to experience significant contextual barriers to access high quality counseling services. In closing, he will reflect on the ethical mandate to develop sustainable models of intervention grounded in social justice principles, as a way of addressing the quality of life of populations that continue to be underserved and excluded from mainstream services.

Rubén Parra-Cardona, Ph.D, is a Professor and Associate Dean for Global Engagement at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work. He is also Area Director for Research at the UT-Austin Latino Research Institute. He was funded by NIMH to investigate the treatment efficacy and relevance of two versions of an evidence-based parenting intervention culturally adapted for Latino families with young children. He is currently funded by NIDA to extend this line of research to Latinx families with adolescent children. He also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Prevention Research. He has extensive experience on research collaborations across the U.S.-Mexico border. Currently, he is Co-Principal Investigator on a large-scale initiative to disseminate a culturally adapted parenting program in Chile. He was recently invited to serve as an expert co-author on a Parenting Intervention Handbook to be published by the World Health Organization, focused on helping international organizations and governments select, design, evaluate, implement, monitor, and scale up evidence-based parenting interventions to prevent maltreatment and enhance parent-child relationships in children aged 0-17 years

This talk aims to redefine developmental stuttering from a holistic perspective. Evidence from recent genetic discoveries, underlying and shared biological mechanisms, and medical health profiling supports broadening the recognized clinical profile of stuttering.

Shelly Jo Kraft, PhD, CCC-SLP is the Director of the Behavior, Speech & Genetics Lab at Wayne State University (Detroit, USA), where her current research focuses on the biological and behavioral genetics of developmental stuttering. Other research interests include auditory feedback mechanisms of speech motor control, and the relationship between cognition, temperament, and stuttering severity.