![]() ![]() ![]() More varied and well designed AAC systems were being developed. Meanwhile, the rest of the AAC world was developing. ![]() (*Edited to add that I have now had a number of people tell me that PECS does, in fact, include a way of teaching saying “no” at Stage 3 so my apologies for being so definite that that was not in the program.) And so, due to the limited positive outcomes and the unfortunate negative outcomes, I started to use PECS less. At no stage in PECS do we teach an individual how to protest or reject in a socially appropriate way.* So – once we got to the stage where we were having to tell an individual that they couldn’t get items every time they requested them, they had to revert to body language, facial expression and behaviour to express their dissatisfaction with this change! This was not ideal. At that point, we often saw a big increase in challenging behaviour again – and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Over time, you fade the requests so that students “don’t always get what they want”. For example, the structure of PECS teaches an individual to request – and sometimes the ability to request and receive their favourite items reduces challenging behaviour. Compared to aided language displays, I saw a smaller number of individuals where PECS made an impact on their communication – and for many of them the initial positive changes were often negated over time by other changes. Where aided language displays were based in natural communication interactions, “PECS relies on the principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA) so that distinct prompting, reinforcement, and error correction strategies are specifed at each training phase in order to teach spontaneous, functional communication.” (Bondy & Frost, 2001, p.728).Īnd so, in the late 90s I attended PECS training, listened to their rationale and started implementing it with some students. PECS came at communication from a completely different perspective to the approach introduced by Goossens’. It started being used in Australia in the mid to late 90s and quickly gained a lot of popularity in use with autistic students. The next big change that came along, was PECS. (See Goossens’, C., Crain, S., & Elder, P. Carol taught us so much – from how to engineer the environment for communication success, to thinking about the range of vocabulary needed in a situation for an individual to participate and to have multiple communication turns. We started making aided language displays, using them in multiple situations – and we saw many individuals with complex communication needs really blossom as communicators. Carol Goossens’ visited Australia and talked about aided language displays and that we needed to “speak AAC for individuals to learn AAC.” This was a completely new concept for me – and for those I worked with. The first big change that happened in my AAC world, changed me forever as a clinician. In the beginning, I wasn’t very good at implementing AAC – partly because I was such a new graduate and partly because the field was still learning an enormous amount about what we should do!! Very quickly, I became heavily interested in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and started to work more and more with individuals with complex communication needs. 30 years ago, in 1991, I became a speech pathologist. ![]()
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