Fostering Clinical and Academic Faculty Collaborations to Improve Graduate Education

Accredited graduate programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) work to integrate academic coursework, a breadth of clinical experiences, and an overarching capstone project (e.g. summative assessment). The best graduate programs focus on integrating these three elements through high quality collaborations between academic and clinical faculty. These collaborations are fostered when clinical and academic faculty attempt to provide students with experiences that intersect academic, research, and clinical areas of speech language pathology. The purpose of this paper describes the collaborative efforts undertaken by the CSD department at the Pennsylvania State University. We present a model for collaborations in graduate education and discuss examples of our current integrative projects.