Speech and language therapists/teachers of the deaf who are working with children are also in contact with their parents. In the traditional view, the expert was the one who assumed the main, expert role and was the dominant member of the help process, but today the importance of parental equality and their important role in all aspects of intervention is being emphasized: in assessment, setting goals, evaluating goals and implementing the program. Since the cooperation of mobile speech and language therapists/teachers of the deaf with parents has not been studied in Slovenia, the aim of the research was to analyze this area. The theoretical part presents various models of experts' cooperation with parents, or, more precisely, the features of a partnership with parents, as this is considered the most established model. Parents' expectations regarding their involvement are identified and in what ways and with which strategies the experts involve them. The experts' roles and characteristics required for quality cooperation and the importance of cooperation for them, the parents and the children are highlighted. Factors and obstacles that influence this process are also presented. In the empirical part, a questionnaire was tested on a sample of 50 speech and language therapists/teachers of the deaf, who carried out additional professional help in the 2018/19 school year, by means of a quantitative approach and a descriptive and causal-non-experimental method, in order to determine the situation in practice. The research has shown that mobile speech and language therapists/teachers of the deaf most often cooperate with parents at the expert group meetings, and, most rarely, at the additional professional help lessons. They miss the latter method the most and want to use it more often. All of this indicates the traditional way of cooperation, which greatly depends on the systemic organization, quantity, and distribution of work, which prevents a faster development of a partnership with parents. They strongly agree with the effects of cooperation on the child, the parents and themselves, and they use several parental involvement strategies in their work. In some of them, differences have been observed in terms of the length of service and the number of locations in which additional professional help is implemented. In practice, certain obstacles emerge when establishing cooperation with parents. The most common suggestions for improving cooperation are related to training programs for parents and the speech and language therapists/teachers of the deaf, improving the organizational/financial aspect of work, and relying on the positive features of the speech and language therapist/teacher of the deaf.
|