New Visiting Professor of Communication Disorders Challenging Himself
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Joseph Agan has several goals in his first teaching position. He joined the communication disorders faculty in the College of Education and Health Professions in August as a visiting assistant professor.
His first goal is to learn to be as good a faculty member as he can.
"I think of a visiting professorship as a teaching post-doc," Agan said. "Teaching is my mission right now. I have attended two new-faculty luncheons at the Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center, and I hope to attend more of those."
He is teaching an undergraduate course in normal language development of children and graduate courses in cognitive communication disorders and fluency disorders as well as supervising students at the Speech and Hearing Clinic.
Agan also wants to spend some time recruiting more diverse students to the communication disorders program, particularly bilingual students. He recently spoke with a group of Spanish-speaking students in Springdale about the possibility of becoming speech-language pathologists.
"There's a huge need for bilingual speech-language pathologists," Agan said. "It can be awkward to work with a client through a translator. With young children especially, the speech-language pathologist needs to build a bond with the client, build a relationship, to be effective."
Agan took some accelerated-Spanish classes while in Houston, adding to his mastery of the language by hanging out with friends whose families spoke Spanish.
"I learned from little kids to grandparents," he said.
Another purpose for Agan's visit to Springdale was to open the high school students' eyes to the opportunities they will have if they attend college.
"If you don't know what's out there, you can't dream about what's possible," Agan said.
Maybe this goal comes from the fact that one of his college professors gave Agan the confidence to succeed. Fran Hagstrom recruited Agan, whom she had mentored when she taught at the University of Houston. Hagstrom contacted Agan after she joined the communication disorders faculty of the University of Arkansas and learned about the Distinguished Doctoral Fellowships created by the $300 million gift from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation in 2002.
Agan won a fellowship to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy in rehabilitation counseling, which he completed last May. He also was named the program's outstanding doctoral student in 2007.
Agan grew up in Illinois and earned a bachelor's degree in microbiology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He worked as a research associate in molecular biology before starting work on his master's degree in Houston.
"I stumbled onto communication disorders," he recalled. "I was interested in physical and occupational therapy and became fascinated by language development and cognition."
Agan worked in acute care and rehabilitation hospitals and outpatient clinical settings before moving to St. Louis, where he worked in a head injury day-treatment facility for adults and older adolescents. The latter job focused primarily on helping people who had been injured return to work and school.
"When I came here for my doctorate, I wanted a field that was oriented toward that focus on returning to work and school," he said. "That's what rehabilitation counseling is based on so I did an interdisciplinary study of the two (rehabilitation counseling and communication disorders)."
He said Hagstrom gave him the confidence to pursue a career in teaching.
Agan's third goal in his new appointment is to generate publications from his dissertation in which he examined the literacy practices of literate males with severe speech disabilities.
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