A culturally adapted communication partner intervention for educators in South Africa

Abstract

Many children with disabilities require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems to communicate and fully participate in home, school, and community environments. Children who use AAC represent one of the most vulnerable groups of children in the world – those who are still developing their ability to communicate independently and need educators who can use strategies to support their communication development (Kent-Walsh et al., 2015) and give them tools to communicate independently. Several AAC training programs have been developed and tested for use with educators (Kent-Walsh et al., 2015). These trainings show promise in teaching skills to educators as well as to support communication development in children who use AAC (Douglas et al., 2022; Kent-Walsh et al., 2015). However, most have been carried out with partners from racial/ethnic majority backgrounds (Davenport et al., 2018), with little attention to the diversity present in the countries in which they were conducted. The diversity in countries such as the United States (Colby & Ortman, 2015) and South Africa (Dada et al., 2017) necessitate training that is culturally responsive, tested, and implemented with diverse populations including application to middle and low-income countries (Wong et al., 2015), a clear gap within the current literature. There is an urgent need to develop culturally responsive training for educators who support children who use AAC. This presentation will detail the process and outcomes of a cultural adaptation to an existing training program – POWR (Douglas et al., 2024) which is designed to support educators in implementing AAC with children with disabilities. The adaptation was part of a Fulbright Scholar research project (Douglas, 2026) and was conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication at the University of Pretoria. Educators in South Africa, a middle-income country, participated in the study. The adaptation process included focus groups with educators who had AAC experience and was carried out using the guidelines in the Cultural Adaptation Checklist (Lee et al., 2023). Following completion of the POWR adaptation, a study was conducted to test the adapted materials with in-service teachers. A two-arm control trial with wait list control group was utilized to test the effectiveness of the training with educators on their knowledge, clinical reasoning, and self-efficacy. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: intervention or wait list. The intervention group completed training first and outcomes were measured using pre-post assessments. The wait list group completed assessments at the same timepoints but did not have access to the training until after assessments were complete. We measured the change at these two time-points based on participant group assignment. Study outcomes and next steps will be discussed.