Helen Beebe

Helen Louise Hulick Beebe (born December 27, 1908 in Easton , Northampton County , Pennsylvania , † March 18, 1989 ibid), was an American educator and pioneer of auditory-verbal education .

Life

Helen Hulick grew up in Easton, where she lived most of her life. She attended Wellesley College from 1927 to 1929 and received her PhD in 1930 from the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton (Massachusetts) . She taught in deaf schools in Oregon and California before returning to the East Coast in 1942. In 1938 she made headlines because she wore trousers as a witness in court and as a woman and had to go to jail for it.

In 1942 she moved to New York , where she studied with the Viennese speech therapist and individual psychologist Emil Fröschels and got to know the unisensory method . Its beginnings go back to the Viennese ENT doctor Viktor Urbantschitsch , for whom Fröschels worked. That was the beginning of a twenty-year collaboration with Fröschels. She worked side by side with Fröschels and after his death in 1972 she continued to develop and disseminate his technique, now known as the auditory-verbal approach , while studying speech therapy at Columbia University .

She founded her Easton practice, later the Helen Beebe Speech and Hearing Center, in 1944 and served as its director for forty years. In 1950 she was able to present her philosophy at the congress of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) in Amsterdam.

In 1972 the Larry Jarret Memorial Foundation was established by a small group of parents of their students to promote Helen Beebe's method of unisensory training to make this training available to all hearing impaired children. Helen Beebe donated her private practice to the foundation in 1978. It later became the Helen Beebe Speech and Hearing Center , a non-profit, non-profit organization . Nobody was turned away there because they had no money for training. In the early 1980s, they moved into a new building that included the clinic and Larry Jarret House, where parents were taught how to use the method at home. Many families came from Europe and South America for a week of intensive training.

She was active in various specialist groups and was an honorary member of the American Speech and Hearing Association . She was co-founder and first president of Auditory-Verbal International (AVI) ( AG Bell Academy for Listening and Spoken Language since 2005 ), a group that promoted the auditory-verbal approach to listening and speaking and trains teachers worldwide. She served on the boards of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and the Foundation for Children's Hearing, Education and Research.

Helen Beebe worked as a therapist, teacher and counselor until shortly before her death.

plant

With the application and further development of the methods of her mentor Emil Fröschels in deaf children, Beebe became a pioneer of the “unisensory approach”, which is known today as the auditory-verbal approach. She wrote innumerable newspaper articles and spread her knowledge and experiences through lectures and lectures all over the world. From Fröschels she also learned the chewing method for language problems, stuttering , etc. She was firmly convinced that deaf children with their residual hearing - regardless of how little it was - develop a spoken language with natural intonation . Her expectations of the children were very high and she still had hope when no one else had her.

In her 1953 book, A Guide to Help the Severely Hard of Hearing Child , she wrote: Lip reading should be avoided as much as possible at home and in therapy. Otherwise the child would become dependent on lip reading and would not use their hearing .

She started her practice for deaf children at home with a single student, Mardie Crannell Younglof who was deaf from birth and one of the first wearable miniature electron tube - hearing aids (vacuum-tube hearing aid), the 1940s in the early years came on the market, wore. Before that, the mother had talked to her daughter all day through a rubber tube with a funnel attached to one end and ear plugs attached to the other.

Beebe kept a diary (Experience Book) for each child, in which the parents also made their entries. In this way she was able to quickly get an idea of ​​what the child needed and what the parents needed to help their child, even from parents who came from all over the world. Each child came to therapy with their diary, which enabled them to see what the child had learned at home since the last therapy session.

Another pioneering act was that she invited young teachers to her therapy center, where they taught about fifty students from babies to teenagers. The students had individual therapy twice a week, which enabled them to attend regular school with their hearing peers.

Beebe developed a method introduced by Alexander Graham Bell by equipping a deaf child with two hearing aids. With the maximum use of the hearing aids, it was able to learn language through the ear before becoming dependent on sign language or lip reading or visual signals.

In a 1983 interview, one of her former Deaf students, David Davis, stated that he could only have graduated from Harvard University because he was able to study at Beebes Center as a young child. She taught him how to distinguish tones and how to respond to them. It was more of a mental process that included logic and rational thinking. He learned the language one small step at a time.

Honors

• 1983 Mentioned in Pennsylvania Women in History: Our Hidden Heritage
• 1985 she was from Lafayette College of Honorary Doctor of Humanities awarded for her life's work as a teacher, researcher and pioneer of auditory-verbal therapy.
• In 1986, her work was recognized in the book Sound Waves by David Colley, which is about her teaching and the experiences of a family and their deaf daughter.
• In 1988 she received the Alexander Graham Bell Association's highest award for the Deaf .

Publications (selection)

• A Guide to Help the Severely Hard of Hearing Child, Verlag S. Karger December 1953, ISBN 3-8055-1759-9 .
• with Deso A. Weiss: The Chewing Approach in Speech and Voice Therapy. Verlag Karger Basel; New York 1951

literature

• David Colley: Sound Waves. The true story of a deaf child who learned to hear using a revolutionary method . Publisher St. Martins Press; December 1985, ISBN 0-312-74607-5

Web links

• The New York Times, March 22, 1989: Obituary for Helen H. Beebe
• AG Bell: Helen Beebe's Legacy
• Helen Beebe, 80; Hailed For Work With Deaf Children
• Helen Beebe biography
• Helen Beebe, obituary and biography
• Alexander Graham Bell Association - David Davis: Remembering Beebe, 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Los Angeles Times of November 10, 2016: California Retrospective In 1938, LA woman went to jail for wearing slacks in courtroom
2. ↑ Bytes daily, December 2015: Helen Hulick
3. ^ Finding the Value of Experience Books
4. ↑ David Davis: Breaking the Sound Barrier ( Memento of the original from October 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Our hidden heritage: Pennsylvania women in history
6. ^ The Morning Call of May 26, 1985: Lafayette Adds Three To Honors Easton's Helen Beebe To Get Special Degree