#TalkingAAC 2025: Full Schedule

Registration Overview

Act now! We reach capacity and sell out every year.
Registration closes Friday, October 24, 2025 — or sooner if capacity is reached.

Ticket Options

#TalkingAAC: Pre-Conference Workshop
Wednesday, November 5, 2025 | 12:00–4:00 PM
Kellogg Center, East Lansing, MI
- Choose one 4-hour workshop
- Cost: $100
- Full details: talkingaac.org/preconference.html
#TalkingAAC: Two-Day Conference
Thursday & Friday, November 6–7, 2025
- Build your schedule for this two-day event
- Cost: $275
- Price includes breakfast, lunch, & parking

NOTE: To attend all 3 days, you must purchase both a Pre-Conference Workshop ticket and a Two-Day Conference ticket.

Registration & Session Planning

All registration and session planning will be handled via Sched:

Click the green Log In or Sign Up button below to access Sched.
Then proceed to purchase your ticket(s).
After you’ve purchased your ticket(s), you can plan which sessions you’d like to attend.

Meals, Parking, & Lodging Meals (Included with Two-Day Conference)

Continental Breakfast – Thursday & Friday
Lunch & Drink – Thursday & Friday

Parking (Included)

Overnight Guests:
Get your parking pass at hotel check-in and display it on your dashboard.
Non-Overnight Guests:
- Register your vehicle on-site via QR code (posted near registration).
- Bring your license plate number.
- Do not register your vehicle more than once per day.

Note: Please consider carpooling to reduce on-campus traffic.

Lodging

View the 2025 Lodging Options for hotel blocks and discount codes.
Reminder: Pre-Conference Workshops begin at 12:00 PM on Nov. 5 to allow extra travel time.

Terms & Conditions

#TalkingAAC is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization established for continued education.

Refunds & Ticket Transfers

Refunds available up to 10 days before the event (Sched & Stripe fees are non-refundable).
Ticket transfers (e.g., to a coworker) may be approved before October 24, 2025.

Continuing Education

All attendees will receive a Certificate of Attendance.
Note for 2025: SCECH hours will not be offered this year.
ASHA CEUs are not provided. SLPs will receive a Verification of Attendance form to self-report professional learning hours to ASHA.

Networking & Swag

Networking Event – Details coming soon!
Merchandise – #TalkingAAC gear available for purchase on-site.

Stay Informed

Watch for updates from #TalkingAAC and Sched with session details and reminders as the event approaches.

Questions?

www.talkingaac.org
info@talkingaac.org

517-299-5200

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11:45am EST

Click LOG IN if you have Sched account already or Click SIGN UP to create Sched account.

Wednesday November 5, 2025 11:45am - Friday November 7, 2025 4:00pm EST

12:00pm EST

Pre-Conference Workshop: Adapting AAC Training to Impact Communication Partners

Wednesday November 5, 2025 12:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Supporting emergent AAC learners is a team effort. Implementing AAC across all the student’s natural environments, with their daily communication partners, puts new and challenging demands on AAC coaches and specialists. For strong AAC adoption, we need to train a diverse set of classroom staff and parents to do the day-to-day work of modeling, making AAC available, teaching language, and demonstrating new skills. The team is often learning about AAC while being asked to adopt new habits, mindsets, and teaching practices. As AAC coaches and specialists, we are called on to inspire, motivate, and sustain change in the behavior of a wide range of communication partners. This requires us to learn and apply new soft skills in leading and managing change. Sometimes we are successful and AAC is used across the student’s day, while other times, despite our best efforts, we struggle to get everyone on board. If you want to get more consistent and productive results for your students, then this pre-conference is for you! We will share insights and strategies to help you lead change in AAC practice across all members of the IEP team. We will help you evaluate which strategy will be most effective with different team members, so you can adapt your approach, meet each partner where they are at, and maximize your impact.

In this session, we will explore insights from AssistiveWare's research on how parents and teachers adopt new AAC practices. One major finding from our research is that some of the biggest barriers to successful AAC implementation are not about specific AAC skills or knowledge. For many partners, the barriers are about habit formation, the experience of change itself, and the emotions related to starting AAC. We analyzed why different members of the team often have different responses to the planning, support and motivation strategies used by AAC coaches and specialists. We applied insights from change theory, psychology, and cognitive science to identify patterns in these responses. We will share this knowledge with you, to help you recognize these patterns so you can adjust your approach to meet parents and teachers where they are and build their capacity to support AAC learners.

The best part is that the insights we will apply are applicable to anyone leading change. Participants will leave with evidence-based strategies to help build communication partner capacity to support emergent AAC users.

Presenters

Pam Harris

AssistiveWare

Pam has been a part of AssistiveWare for 15 years starting on the Support team. Today, she contributes to our social media content by sharing her insights and advice. Pam also helped develop the Proloquo Coach app, the companion app to Proloquo, designed to support families starting... Read More →

Barbara van ’t Westende

AssistiveWare

Barbara is a speech language therapist with over 20 years of experience working in a special education school in the Netherlands. At AssistiveWare, she applied research on parent support to help develop the Coach app, the companion app to Proloquo designed to support families starting... Read More →

Wednesday November 5, 2025 12:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Pre-Conference Workshop, Communication Partners

12:00pm EST

Pre-Conference Workshop: Neurodiversity Affirming AAC for All?: A Workshop on Historical Contexts, Current Practices, and Future Possibilities

Wednesday November 5, 2025 12:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Neurodiversity affirming practice spans multiple fields and scopes of practice, including speech therapy with complex communicators. The concept of neurodiversity stems from multiple, collective origins and refers to the concept that neurological differences are the result of natural human variation and are valuable to human diversity. Neurodiversity affirming care is not just a buzz word, it is a practice and encompasses and applies to a variety of neurotypes including and beyond the autistic population. However, not all people have historically been represented in the movement toward neurodiversity affirming care, leaving out individuals from multiply marginalized backgrounds, including people of the global majority, those with rare neurocognitive disabilities, and individuals with complex communication needs, among others. Additionally, popular discussions of neurodiversity affirming care have not included discussions of the systems of oppression, intersectional theory, and culturally responsive practice and how leaving those out stalls progress for multiply marginalized communities. Differences in cultural norms and values (i.e. collectivist versus individualistic cultures) may impact the delivery of neurodiversity affirming care. Lastly, current practices in speech pathology focus on teaching AAC users how to enter the language and communication world of neurotypical individuals who use spoken language as their primary communication form, going against principals of neurodiversity affirming practices.

Neurodiversity as a concept has been around for a few decades. However, some of its origins have been misattributed and the theory, including its application, has been observed to be misunderstood and thus misapplied. Led by a speech language pathologist and AAC specialist with over a decade of experience, during this workshop the presenter will partner with and guide attendees to rethink, relearn, reimagine, and redress! what we know about working with neurodiverse AAC users and their communities. The beginning of this talk will work through breaking down this claim by 1. journeying through historical contexts that inform the need for neurodiversity affirming practices and care, 2. discussing current practices among SLPs as related to individuals with complex communication needs, 3. collectively discussing the future possibilities of client/patient and family-centered care practices informed by neurodiversity affirming care principles. The second half of this workshop will include two case studies of students with complex communication needs and incorporate relevant theories and frameworks from the disability, neurodiversity, and AAC literature to reimagine future possibilities for therapeutic AAC services with complex communicators. Attendees will leave this interactive workshop with takeaways that can be applied on “Monday.” Together, we will work through implementation of neurodiversity affirming care practices from pre-referral to recommendation -including clinical reasoning, goal formation, treatment planning, service delivery, and strategies for caregiver and educator coaching.

Presenters

Karina Saechao

Yay Language, LLC

Karina Saechao, M.A., CCC-SLP, ATACP is a speech-language pathologist and AAC/multimodal communication specialist for school-aged children with complex communication needs. She is the owner of Yay Language!, LLC. and Golden Oak Speech Therapy. Karina’s clinical practice and scholarship... Read More →

Wednesday November 5, 2025 12:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Pre-Conference Workshop, Neurodiversity