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A Celebration of Thirty Years of Bliss in Canada.
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BCI Celebrates Thirty Years of Bliss in Canada.From Shelley Deegan, Hamilton, Ontario
Congratulations to BCI and Bliss users around the world. What a wonderful
celebration today is! I am so sorry that I am not in attendance for this event. A family wedding today has prevented me from being there with you to celebrate.
Blissymbolics has been such a big part of my professional life, in fact Blissymbols are what lead me to my career as a Speech Pathologist. I was taking a Psycholinguistics course at U of T, in 1973 with Peter Reich. He brought Shirley McNaughton in as a guest lecturer. Shirley spoke of the work they were doing at OCCC with Bliss and mentioned the need for volunteers. A fire was lit in me that day that has never gone out. I went to OCCC and became a volunteer in one of the first Blissymbol classrooms. I had the privilege of working with the likes of Karl Harrington and John Dowling. I decided this was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life and went to the University of Buffalo for my masters in Speech Pathology. I was fortunate to meet Cheryl Rogers in Buffalo (another Bliss pioneer), and there I worked with some of the early Bliss users in Buffalo. My working career started at Chedoke Hospital in Hamilton (I only applied to facilities where! knew Bliss was being used!) and there my luck continued, because I was able to work with Barb Rush who was one of the most dedicated teachers I have ever met. I also became a Blissymbol Instructor and was able in a small way to help spread the use of Blissymbols. I gave presentations to students at the University of Wisconsin who were studying with David Yoder. I did a workshop in Washington with Keila Watsvik. And I had the incredible experience of teaching a Bliss course in Zimbabwe.
During my years of working in Hamilton I have known, taught, and worked with many Bliss users. I know several of them are in the audience today - Jason Masters, Shayne Dennis, Dave Dawson, Paul Marshall. I still have several clients who use Bliss as their primary means of communication either on a graphic display or on their voice output communication device. Blissymbolics is today as viable a communication system as it was in the 1970's. It continues to have a significant place in the field of augmentative communication. It's ability to provide a true language system for augmentative communication users has yet to matched by any other augmentative communication strategy. The recent emphasis in the AAC field on language development for AAC users has demonstrated how necessary it is to teach language as part of AAC intervention. In teaching Blissymbolics, language training is integrated into the AAC instruction. The ongoing efforts of BC! to support Blissymbol use around the world is truly remarkable and deserves a great deal of recognition today.
Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts.
I wish all of you well and LONG LIVE BLISS!
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