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New Mexico’s two biggest universities are teaming up to develop a unique program for bilingual students.
Barbara Rodriguez, a UNM chairperson for the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, and Deborah Rhein, an associate professor for Communication Disorders Program at New Mexico State University, will share a $1.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a bilingual speech-language pathology program.
The universities received the grant in August, Rodriguez said.
The grant program would provide specialized speech-language pathology training to bilingual students, Rodriguez said. In order for students to participate in this program, they would need to take the graduate program in speech-language pathology with additional coursework requirements.
“They will need to take three additional graduate level courses that focus on bilingual issues, and then our students need to take nearly 400 hours of patient-contact time as part of the graduate program,” she said. “These students will have 100 of those hours devoted to working with speakers from another language.”
Rodriguez explained speech-language pathology as practice in which specialists help people of all ages deal with communication difficulty. She said the difficulty could be caused by any number of issues, such as a voice disorder, a swallowing disorder, hearing loss or a mental disorder.
According to a press release, the three additional courses are in second-language acquisition, bilingual assessment and Spanish linguistics.
Rodriguez said the students would also need to have near-native proficiency in a second language, such as Spanish or Navajo, in order to participate in the program.
“When you work with folks in a clinical setting who are not bilingual, who are monolingual Spanish-speaking, you have to have some good proficiency to know what’s a disorder and what’s not, what might be a difference as opposed to a difficulty,” she said. “So it takes proficiency in order to administer some of our measures and to know how to treat, and to know what to treat.”
Students who get selected for this program will get paid tuition, stipend money and travel funds, Rodriguez said. She said in return, participating students must commit to service after graduation.
“They have to sign a note that says, ‘I will work with individuals from the age of three to 21 who have disabilities,’” she said. “So for every year of funding that the graduate students get, they have to provide services to that population for two years.”
Rodriguez said that although the program focuses mainly on bilingual Spanish speakers, Navajo speakers would be a great benefit to the program as well.
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“I would be thrilled if I could recruit speakers of other language, for example Navajo-English, or one of the Pueblo languages plus English,” she said. “I think that would be very much a benefit to the program here, but more importantly a benefit to the community.”
Rodriguez said the end goals of the grant are to institutionalize the program and address workforce issues in New Mexico.
“The state is in desperate need of highly trained, bilingual speech-language pathologists,” she said. “That’s an immediate goal. The second goal of this program is to institutionalize the aspects to our program, so that once the funding is gone, we can continue to offer this kind of specialized training.”
UNM decided to team up with NMSU in order to maximize their resources to win the grant, Rodriguez said.
Rhein said NMSU had already received a grant to develop its bilingual speech-pathology program before this one.
“This is the first grant we’ve done jointly, but NMSU had a grant before this one,” she said. “And on the grant before this one, I received funding to develop a bilingual program and train bilingual SLPs.”
Rhein said that because NMSU already has a more established bilingual speech pathology program, it will begin recruiting graduate students earlier than UNM.
“We budgeted for 48 students to receive the funding,” she said. “That won’t be exactly half and half because I’m admitting some students this year.”
Rhein said the collaboration between the two universities benefits New Mexico because it gains another program that offers bilingual speech-language pathology.
“Out of 258 accredited programs (nationwide) in speech-language pathology, only 14 of them offer this strand,” she said. “UNM will be the 15th. So to have two out of those 15 programs for New Mexico is fantastic for New Mexico.”
Rodriguez said the collaboration between the universities also helped make the grant proposal more favorable. She said she thinks the model could be replicated at other universities.
“In a time where money is tight, I think more institutions need to be looking at ‘How can we collaborate and share resources,’ rather than always going to the Legislature or somewhere else where there’s not much money anyway,” she said. “We need to build on what we have and build collaborative relationships.”
