Voice clinic: reflecting on undergraduate education

Abstract

In the academic and scientific history of speech therapy within the field of voice therapy, three different theoretical conceptions prevail: a bias towards a more organicist approach, a more psychoanalytical perspective, and clinical therapy from within the perspective of Bakhtin’s philosophy. Analyzing speech therapy articles published in Brazilian journals, the predominance of an organicist social-historical memory is apparent in the area of voice therapy. This fact raised questions regarding which theoretical conceptions are currently used by professors teaching voice courses. Therefore, the principal objective of this paper is to describe aspects involved in the training process of an undergraduate speech therapy student during supervised practice in the field of voice therapy. This study is part of a larger study in which students participating in supervised practice in the field of voice therapy were observed over one academic semester, resulting in the production of utterances in different concrete situations of discourse. Supervisions and clinical consultations were filmed and interviews were conducted with a group of female students, a female professor and two female patients during a period of supervised practice in an institute of higher education over one academic semester. Of the recordings and observations made, some utterances made by the professor, one of the students and a patient were analyzed for this paper. Results showed that, by understanding that the clinic applied an approach with more organicist tendencies and by viewing the subject in a fragmented manner and not in her constitutive complexity, the student gave little importance to the patient’s voices in the therapeutic process. The Bakhtinian concepts of discourse and utterance, when incorporated into the student’s training, may increase his/her understanding of the singularities and complexities involved in each therapeutic process, thus contributing towards more effective clinical consultations and supervised practice.