The Parent and Client Tutor Schemes

The Parent Tutors are parents of children with severe communication issues who are employed by the speech pathology program to tutor small groups of 2nd year students over a period of six weeks. In the 3rd year curriculum, citizens who have a severe communication issue as a result of neurological damage (Client Tutors) are employed in a similar small group teaching context. The aim of both schemes is to provide well-educated speech therapists committed to a needs-based community-oriented approach to service delivery in regional and rural practice. A central part of a community-based approach is the educating of speech therapists to deeply understand the concept of consultation and negotiation in providing - and advocating - care as a fundamental tenet of their service delivery. The roles of the Parent and Client Tutors are to teach students:

  1. What it is like to live with/have a child with a severe speech and language disorder;
  2. What their experiences of therapy have been (and of the health service in general);
  3. What their needs and dreams are for themselves/their children, and;
  4. How the students can help in meeting these needs.

While both the Parent Tutors and Client Tutors have offered to educate our students for no salary, our program has rejected this option. This is because these two partnerships are seen as core opportunities for students to experience a reversal of power in the clinical context. Parent and Client Tutors are paid at academic tutorial rates, as existing academic staff cannot replicate the value of their educative input. By virtue of their salaried status, the tutors are expected to assume teaching and learning responsibility for their student groups. The University bears this annual staffing cost of several thousand dollars, and we are able to argue for the continuance of this arrangement on the basis of the cost savings made by other community/fieldwork partnerships.

Contact- rbeecham@csu.edu.au.