Can you do your job without saying the B word, the C word or the D word?

I started my journey into the field of speech-language pathology in 1994, a little over three decades ago. Since that time I have focused on how we, as speech-language pathologists, serve children who speak languages other than English as their first language and children whose family traditions may not be the same as those of the majority of people in the United States. I’ve had the privilege of doing work in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Belize, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Singapore. One of my career goals has been to help speech-language pathologists in all settings build confidence in their work with children and families who share a different language and different traditions than they do.

Why is this work so important? It’s important because when we do not get it right, children get put on the wrong educational trajectory. When we get diagnostic decisions wrong, we’re not maximizing the potential of our students. Further, it costs a lot of money when we misdiagnose children. We waste special education funds on children who do not need to be in special education. That’s costly for the students because they’re on the wrong track and for the district and society, because they’re spending money to provide services that are not needed.

Okay, so let’s get back to the question in the title of this post. Why did I ask that question? Well, I asked it because I was challenged this week in a way that I have never been challenged in my career. And I have to tell you that I had very mixed feelings about this challenge. I want to walk you through what happened and my range of thoughts about it.

About a year ago I was asked if I would do a professional development workshop for evaluators on dynamic assessment. It was a group I have done many workshops for in the past. I gratefully accepted their invitation and put it on my calendar. As usual, I submitted my handouts two weeks prior to the presentation. This time, however, I got a note that said that my slides had been reviewed and edits were requested.

EDITS WERE REQUESTED!

This is a common practice. Sometimes there are typos :-(, sometimes the group wants to make sure that what you are suggesting matches the resources the group has. A common example involves talking about the use of interpreters. Districts vary widely on how they address certain issues.

But we’re not talking typos here, my friends. We’re talking about content edits. We’re talking about requests to remove all instances of the B word, the C word, and the D word. I probably don’t need to spell those out for you, but just in case, we’re talking about BIAS, CULTURE, and DIVERSITY. Every use of them in the presentation had a note that a new word needed to be selected.

And not only that, there were slides describing peer-reviewed research studies that were requested to be removed from the presentation.

And there were slides about the demographics of teachers, speech-language pathologists, school psychologists, and school children in the United States that were requested to be removed. Yes, this really happened.

The email with these requests came in late at night. I saw it, opened it, and decided it was too much for me to process that night. I went to bed. I woke up and hoped it was just a bad dream. But it wasn’t. I felt like I was being censored.

I want to pause here and remind you that I have a long-standing working relationship with this group. These are smart, kind SLPs who work in one of the largest, most diverse areas of the country. I was invited to specifically to focus on serving children who do not fit the mainstream profile because they know all too well how complicated it is. These are seasoned, boots-on-the-ground SLPs, many of whom are diverse themselves.

I called the person who had asked me to do this workshop and shared that, while I didn’t want to leave her hanging two weeks in advance of the presentation that was booked more than a year ago, I also didn’t like what I was being asked to do. She had some sage words for me.

She shared that she appreciated and understood my concerns. She also shared that the people who made these edit “requests” also appreciated and understood my concerns. And then she shared that their jobs are almost entirely funded by the US Department of Education and that they were required to ensure that they removed anything DEI related from their work. Why? Because they could lose all of their funding, which means losing their jobs, which means not being able to provide the support for the school children they are passionate about supporting.

So, while my gut instinct was to walk away from a presentation that was censored, the person who asked me to do it said something like this to me—Is it worse for people to hear your information without the B word, the C word, and the D word or is it worse for them not to have this information at all?

Okay. Challenge accepted. I will give this talk. I will continue to support speech-language pathologists and other educators in their understanding of the different impacts of tests on people with differing experiences and traditions.

I will continue my work to ensure that children who speak different languages and have different lived experiences are fairly evaluated, accurately diagnosed, and embark on their proper educational trajectory. I will do all of these things, even if I am asked not to use the B word, the C word and the D word. My goals will not change and my work will not change.

Have you been asked to change your vocabulary? Share your experiences in the comments.