Making Race Visible in the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this critical discourse analytic study is to identify how two key professional standards documents in the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences field—the Standards for Certification document and the Essential Functions rubric—contribute to the discursive construction of the ideal speech-language pathologist and audiologist, and to examine whether the experiences and needs of people of color are taken into consideration in these documents. Method Critical discourse analysis was used as both a conceptual and methodological lens for the systematic analysis of the targeted text. Results The findings show that considerations of race and racism were almost entirely absent from both documents and thus reflected a discourse of race neutrality that is ideologically consistent with color-blind racism. The enactment of racially coded expectations within a construct of race-neutral discourse maintains racial inequities in the speech, language, and hearing sciences professions. Conclusions The findings highlight the need for the open acknowledgment of racism in our institutional policies and discourses and official and ongoing commitments to concrete and measurable antiracist actions to counteract systemic racism. Recommendations for and examples of antiracist measures are offered.

University Social Responsibility: Challenging Systemic Racism in the Aftermath of George Floyd’s Murder

“…CDA allows one to examine how lexical choice, grammatical construction, and phrasing reflect, evoke, and reflect the writer's ideological values and positioning. The use of CDA also includes identifying visibly absent elements (Yu et al 2021), for example, the absence of the word goal or goals when writing a strategic plan. One would never do this, but inevitably it happens when the topic is racial injustice or systemic racism.…”

“…An evaluation of mission statements and strategic plans helps us to understand social problems and how/if universities are working to balance these social inequities (Rogers et al 2005). In qualitative research, the markers of rigor include systematicity, triangulation, transparency, and accountability (Golafshani 2003;Yu et al 2021). The analytical process used in the current study adopted Mullet's (2018) analytic process, which includes seven stages (selecting the discourse, locating and preparing the data sources, exploring the background of the texts, identifying overarching themes, analyzing external relations in the texts, analyzing the internal relations in the texts, and interpreting the data) and allows the researcher to move back and forth between data sources, as is carried out with constant comparative analysis.…”

Diversity of Research Participant Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Communication Sciences and Disorders: A Systematic Review and Quantitative Synthesis of ASHA Publications in 2020

“…The field of communication sciences and disorders (CSD) currently faces overlapping challenges regarding a lack of sex, gender, racial, and ethnic diversity and equity that are urgent and endemic within research and clinical practice (e.g., Yu et al, 2022). One manifestation of systemic inequality in CSD, and a focus of the current study, is the chronic underrepresentation of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among participant samples in research, which has been widely documented in other areas of biomedical, psychological, and educational research (e.g., Bentley et al, 2017;Erves et al, 2017;Flores et al, 2021;Geller et al, 2018;Hruschka et al, 2018;Oh et al, 2015).…”

Experiences of Latine Speech Language Pathologist Assistants (SLPAs) in California

“…According to the ASHA membership survey of 2020, less than 9% of SLPs identify as a nonwhite racial identity, while only 6.3% identify ethnically as Hispanic/Latino (Yu, et al, 2021).…”