Pre-Conference Workshops
The Organising Committee invites you to participate in the pre-conference workshops on offer at AGOSCI 2025. All pre-conference workshops are Full Day and will take place on Wednesday 12 March 2025 at the Adelaide Convention Centre.
Bookings are essential through the registration form.
Click Here To Register Now!
We know that vocabulary instruction for AAC learners is essential. AAC users need a rich vocabulary to organize their thinking, express their ideas, and understand others. Reading and writing are fueled by knowledge of words, yet AAC learners are high-risk for impoverished experience with language. Vocabulary instruction is essential to help these students learn about the world through all the subjects taught in the curriculum.
But where do we start with AAC learners? Which words to prioritize? How do we teach core versus fringe words? How do we ignite a student’s curiosity and engagement with the magic of language? And, perhaps most daunting, how do we support teachers to incorporate daily vocabulary instructional routines in busy classrooms with lots of competing priorities?
This workshop will give you a practical toolkit to enrich your own vocabulary instruction. Better yet, it will help you build capacity and lighten the load for colleagues or educators you support. We will dive into the instructional routines, strategies and technologies that best help our students expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies and explore language in new ways. You will leave with new ideas and quality prepared resources, ready to implement in classrooms or therapy rooms.
Erin Sheldon earned her graduate degree studying the needs of students with significant disabilities included in regular classrooms. Erin is a literacy and vocabulary specialist and is Director of Learning Design at AssistiveWare. She has authored multiple book chapters, articles, and internet modules on AAC implementation. Erin is wildly enthusiastic about vocabulary instruction, so come prepared to think in exciting new ways about the power of word learning!
The field of AAC is emerging in the understanding of both practice and praxis. Speech- generating devices (SGDs) are becoming smaller, more powerful and more accessible to people. While there is a growing body of evidence-based practices that can be drawn upon to support people who use these devices to communicate, there is still little understood about the phenomenon itself. What is it really like to speak with/through an SGD?
This workshop will explore insights into what it might be like to speak through a device derived from a multi- year project researching the meaning of this phenomenon in the lives of those who use SGDs, and implications for pedagogical practice. The phenomenon will be explored and discussed based on the themes of lived relation (relationality), lived body (corporeality), lived space (spatiality), lived time (temporality), and lived things and technology (materiality). Opportunities for participation and reflection by attendees of the session will be infused throughout the day.
This workshop will share current research, clinical and client perspectives on interventions using graphic symbol communication aids and devices to support the development and autonomous use of language from first words to complex syntax. The primary purpose of language, to understand others and be understood, and the role of pragmatics in language development will be discussed. Topics will include vocabulary selection and organisation in AAC graphic symbol systems, creating aided language learning environments and interactions to support aided language development and use for autonomous communication.
This full day workshop will give early career professionals who will be working in the area of AAC/multimodal communication, the foundations to confidently begin their careers. It will cover frameworks for practice, assessment, supervision, ethics, ongoing life learning, other practical skills, and a networking opportunity to meet other early career professionals
Facilitated by: Darren Trentepohl, Melissa Bakes and Laura Ferrie, with some special guest speakers.
Darren Trentepohl
Melissa Bakes
Laura Ferriel
