When Wires Cross: Recognizing How Past Experiences Influence Our Student and Family Interactions Today

Workshop description

Have you ever had a student shut down or lash out when you provided them with feedback on an assignment or their behavior? Has a parent ever become unexpectedly emotional in an email or during an IEP meeting? As educators, administrators, and support staff, we have many interactions with students and their families both during and after school. During these conversations, we sometimes witness topics going off course or emotions that don't seem to align with the tone of the others in the room. Have we considered in those uncomfortable moments that what we are witnessing may actually be tied to trauma from a previous experience the student or family member experienced with another professional months or years earlier? Through this lens, might our response be more supportive of the students and family in determining how to address the issue at hand and move forward successfully? In this presentation, parent advocate and author Valerie James Abbott and trilingual (English, Spanish, American Sign Language) licensed professional counselor Jess Dallman will discuss how families of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, in particular those who are late-identified, often carry a heavy sack of negative experiences that occurred before or after the diagnosis of hearing loss into every interaction they have with other people. And this unconscious bias is reflected in how they respond to change, feedback, and decision-making. This presentation will encourage attendees to know whether their students' hearing loss was congenital or late-identified, reflect on why that might be important to know, and discern one strategy for holding space when a student or family member becomes dysregulated during a conversation or meeting. The goal, of course, is for students, parents, professionals, and educators to establish and maintain open and effective communication in all directions throughout the students' academic career.

Presented by Valerie James Abbott and Jess Dallman.

Valerie James Abbott

Valerie James Abbott is the parent of a child with hearing loss and co-founder of the national Late Onset Hearing Loss Awareness Campaign. She is past chair of the Virginia Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Advisory Committee and past board member of Virginia Hands & Voices. She has been employed in Virginia's early intervention system, is an award-winning author, and has published multiple articles on early childhood hearing loss, including full-page features in AG Bell's Volta Voices magazine and HLAA's Hearing Life magazine. She was a contributing author in the article "A Systematic Review of the Prevalence of Late-Identified Hearing Loss in Childhood," published in the International Journal of Audiology (Aug. 2024) and travels across the country speaking to various audiences about the impacts of late hearing loss identification on early language and literacy and the importance of ongoing hearing health monitoring and more frequent hearing screening between birth and school age.

Jess Dallman

Jess Dallman is a psychotherapist, mental health educator/trainer, reflective supervisor/ consultant (licensed as an LPC in Wisconsin) specializing in nature-based and equine-facilitated methods for healing and growth, and the founder of Natural Wisdom Counseling. In addition, Jess is also trilingual (English, Spanish, American Sign Language) and passionate about working with diverse populations, especially members of marginalized groups, using relational, growth-focused, and nature-based approaches to therapy.