INSPIRE: Inspiring practice innovation, research and engagement

Abstract

The 2018 National Speech Pathology Australia Conference was held in Adelaide, an Australian city renowned for its church spires. Through its theme of INSPIRE 2018, the aim of this conference was to inspire scholarship and debate across three overlapping elements: Practice Innovation, Research and Engagement. The conference motive illustrated the three elements (or spires) reaching both up and out. This special issue of International Journal of SpeechLanguage Pathology reflects this important theme of the conference and aims to further inspire readers to become innovative practitioners and engage meaningfully with a broad range of consumers and research evidence. The three internationally renowned keynote speakers Professors Elizabeth (Liz) Ward, Ronald Gillam, and Dennis McDermott – along with the oral and poster presentations embodied the conference theme and a selection of these papers is included in this special edition. Ward is Professor at the Queensland Government’s Centre for Functioning and Health Research and The University of Queensland’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. In her Elizabeth Usher memorial lecture and paper, she paid homage to Elizabeth Usher, describing her as a remarkable practice innovator and calling on the profession to embrace the Practice Innovation theme of the conference (Ward, 2019, this issue). This call is in the face of changing community needs along with rising costs and complex problems in the health and education sectors. She cogently argued that speech-language pathology, as a maturing profession, must be flexible enough to enable advances in scope of practice and, at the very least, that all speech-language pathologists (SLPs) must work to their full scope. This is to ensure that we can achieve a “more client-centred, cost-effective health service” (n.d.). Her article outlines clear strategies to further develop practice innovation and expand the scope of practice in order for the speech-language pathology profession to have a “strong identity and the capacity to make meaningful contributions to the modern education and healthcare landscape” (n.d.). Gillam is the Raymond and Eloise Lillywhite Endowed Chair in Speech-Language Pathology at Utah State University, where he is also the Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Neuroscience. In this article, based on his keynote address, he provides a stimulating and excellent example for the Research theme. Testing the cognitive processing abilities of his audience, he took us on a deep dive into the cognitive neuropsychology underlying language. Summarising his own work, and the broader field to date, he sought to explicate the relationships between cognitive processing and sentence comprehension for school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (Gillam, Montgomery, Evans, & Gillam, 2019, this issue). Gillam and his colleagues have applied a rigorous psychometric approach to generate the GillamEvans-Montgomery (GEM) model. This model assigns a pivotal role to complex working memory in mediating the interaction between reasoning, attention, long-term language knowledge, and sentence comprehension, and identifies critical differences between typically developing children and those with developmental language disorders with regard to the magnitude of this effect. He suggested that SLPs who have a good understanding of the reciprocal relationships between language and working memory will be in a better position to understand and explain children’s profiles of strengths and weaknesses to their parents and teachers. On this basis, he challenged SLPs to incorporate a wide range of measures that examine underlying cognitive processes in their assessment of language but warned against taking a bottom-up approach to therapy by focussing on underlying cognitive deficits. Rather, he suggested a