Vocal hygiene habits for people with intellectual disabilitiesInstructional and assessment guidelines for the design of didactic materials

Abstract

Vocal hygiene habits (VHH) are beneficial instructions about voice care to prevent illnesses or malfunction. One of the research lines on vocal hygiene understands it as a management technique for individuals with voice disorders. As people with intellectual disabilities (PwID) tend to present diction difficulties, it is relevant for them to gain knowledge on VHH, since this could help to better understand the use of their voice, and improve communication. But how can we introduce PwID in VHH? And how can we prove the learning outcomes? To answer these questions a singing workshop was designed which included VHH activities. The objectives for the participants were to internalize habits on voice hygiene, to foster basic knowledge on our vocal folds and vocal tract, and to unveil fake beliefs about voice care. Our intention was to discover what kind of materials support these educational processes. The 13-early adulthood PwID that participated attended Down Compostela Foundation (DC), and were chosen by convenience. Through several presentations, 11 vocal habits (supplied by experts of a local hospital) were explained. The suitability of the workshop and the understanding level were qualitatively assessed afterwards, by means of multiple choice questions. The later analysis was triangulated with practitioners of DC. After 5 sessions we concluded that what positively affected the assumption/understanding of VHH were the support of images, practical and contextualized examples that accompanied explanations, and repetition of the contents. In this paper some considerations and guidelines regarding VHH instruction with PwID are presented, which may have implications or may guide the development of materials for this purpose. Although it is possible to find many proposals from the speech therapy field, there are not many (almost none in the Galician language) from music education viewpoints. Specific materials are needed to guarantee higher quality in this kind of interventions