What Gets In The Way of Recognizing That All Communication Has Value? An episode with Jess Burchiel, M.A., CCC-SLP

Exploring the Impact of Societal Pressures, Cultural Differences, & Trauma on Communicative Intent

In this episode, Ayelet Marinovich and Jess Burchiel discuss the importance of communicative intent and access to communication as a human right. Jess, a speech-language pathologist, shares her experiences working with children, emphasizing the value of responsive parenting and the challenges parents face in recognizing their children’s communicative actions.

We talk about:

• Communicative intent and Early Intervention
• Challenges in recognizing communicative intent
• The importance of slowing down and noticing each other, valuing all forms of communication
• How communicative intent is connected to broader social issues, and communication as a human right
• The impact of cultural differences, societal pressures, and trauma on communication

We look forward to hearing the ways in which this conversation sparked your curiosity, and what new questions arise from listening!

Helpful Resources Related to This Episode

Learn With Less® Podcast episode: Assuming Intentionality – How to Respond to Early Communication

Connect Learn Play – Digital / Printable infant, toddler, and pre-school aged ideas to provide simple, enriching ways to support early development through play, language, music, and movement – using everyday items – helping you Learn With Less®!

The Learn With Less® Infant/Toddler Development Blueprint

Lead caregiver/baby groups using the Learn With Less® curriculum by becoming a licensed facilitator

Book recommendation: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life With Children Ages 2 – 7, by Joanna Faber

Donate to Operation Olive Branch, a direct aid fund for families on the ground in Gaza

Support Palestinian Liberation by learning more about the BDS or Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement which has strategic boycott targets for consumers

Learn more about the root causes of violence in Palestine, we recommend you watch this short history video or read The Hundreds Year War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

Connect With Us

Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest

Jess: Facebook / Instagram

Text Transcript of the Episode

Ayelet: Welcome to another episode of Learn With Less®. I’m here today with Jess Burchiel. Jess just told me that a great way to remember how to pronounce her last name is: it rhymes with Churchill. Hahaha. Jess, would you like to introduce folks a little bit to you & to the kind of work that you do?

Jess: I would love that. Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon from the west coast. My pronouns are she/her, I live in Bellingham, Washington, on occupied Salish and Nooksack and lami territory. I’m a speech-language pathologist here at a private clinic. I’ve been working with kids young as 2, and as old as 25, for about four years here. For years before that, I worked at a small community hospital in the county. I don’t know, I love cats, and I really like my job! I really like doing what I do, what we do, which has been so wonderful to continue to know.

Ayelet: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, I’m really happy to have you for this recorded conversation. You and I have been in touch over the last year and a half or so, mostly over social media. More recently, we’ve been in actual conversation with synchronous face to face contact, which is lovely. It’s been about a number of topics. These are including and not limited to: communicative intent, access to communication, the fact that everyone deserves access to communication, communication as a human right, human rights in general.

We’re both Jewish or Jewish adjacent, and quite outspoken within the movement for Palestinian Liberation and what is happening in Gaza and The West Bank. Really looking at how we communicate, what is being communicated, communicative intent, looking at the full spectrum of communication here, from both a political lens and a education lens. And as we all know, everything is political at the end of the day. So with that all said, let’s start there, right?

Jess: Let’s start there. I really gravitate to people who have a passion for what we do, for people who are internally curious about we do and how we do it. In particular now in the last year & a half, for people who are willing to speak up and say hard things. I think that is required of us, and I’m really excited to ask you some questions about communicative intent today. What do you think?

Ayelet: I love it. I want to start just because before we hit the record button, we were doing a nice little grounding practice. As we sit here recording, it’s spring break. I have kids at home. They’re in the other room doing “video game camp” in the living room. And it’s been a day, it’s been a week. Let’s get on the same page here. Let’s ground ourselves. And Jess, you were introducing this lovely exercise, and I was wondering if we could just start with that, as well.

Grounding Exercise and Initial Discussion

Jess: A quick note, this is a grounding exercises, very new for me. It’s very much something I don’t want to do, which is why I’m trying to lean into it. I borrowed it directly from my therapist, who’s very much grounded in Buddhist teaching.

As people who’re very busy and often disconnected, one of the hardest things is just to slow down and stop. We’re going to do that by, me and you & everyone who’s listening, taking a second, truly, to put your feet on the ground. Feel your feet on the ground, and take a couple deep breaths.

Maybe I’m going to ask myself and you to identify a sensation in your body, and I’ll do the same. I will name mine as my heart is racing a little bit. I can taste the cupcake that a kid gave me this morning in the back of my mouth. Yeah. How about you?

Ayelet: I’m feeling some congestion in my nose and throat. I have celebrated a birthday of one of my children this weekend. I had a nine year old literally fall directly into my face while coughing. Oh yeah, it’s very cute. I’m just feeling some tightness in my back, looking forward to just getting to connect and talk today. So some ease in my belly and openness in my solar plexus. Jess, thank you.

Communicative Intent and Early Intervention

So you had emailed me and you had asked about resources, thoughts, ideas around communicative intent. I’m going to open up this email, if that’s alright with you, as I read it out loud. So you had said, “I’m sure you’ve spoken about this countless times. Along with our mental health therapist, I am co-leading a support group for families with autistic kids. Something that came up last meeting was the concept that everything kids do has a communicative value. I think this is a really simple concept, but it seemed more challenging to go into depth about this with parents”. You’d said, “I’m wondering if there is a specific resource or podcast episode of yours that might help explain this concept to parents.”

I had shared with you that, yes, in fact, I do I have a podcast episode about this. It’s called Assuming Intentionality, Responding to Early Communication. And of course, so much of what I focus on here at Learn With Less® is with early intervention… Those earliest years of infancy and toddlerhood, zero to three. A lot is focused on parent education. Also educators and or therapists who are serving that population. This is both in a family centered approach or just the kids or just the parents. That was the nuts & bolts focus of that episode, but I want to hear anything that was helpful around listening.

Before we started recording, we started talking about how so much of looking at communicative intent and assuming intentionality, assuming that there is intent behind any action, essentially, is that it actually doesn’t matter what age the child is. You and I share a lot of experience, having worked with autistic kids. We’ve both worked with assistive technology, specifically augmentative & alternative communication.

Utilizing assistive technology within the realm of communication might look like a speech generating device that’s high tech. It might look like a picture based or visual co