HESP Alumna is Committed to Improving Children’s Educational Outcomes

Arynn Byrd, HESP Ph.D. ’24, is Using Her Hearing and Speech Skills to Help Students from all Backgrounds and Experiences Thrive in School  

Arynn Byrd wasn’t planning on pursuing a Ph.D. in hearing and speech sciences as soon as she did. In fact, she says her decision to move from her Decatur, Georgia hometown to College Park, Maryland shortly after graduating with her master’s degree from the University of Georgia happened rather “serendipitously” due to her master’s thesis.

As a master’s student, Byrd took a class that piqued her interest in learning more about various dialects, and the theory that kids who speak dialects other than American English have difficulty with academic and literacy outcomes.

“A lot of our language assessments and our educational requirements are built around the Mainstream American English dialect, however, the real norm is that kids speak a lot of different dialects, like African American English, Southern American English, Midwestern American English, Hispanic American English, etc. So, if you’re a speech-language pathologist who doesn’t speak the same dialect as a student you are assessing, or you don’t know about its structure, you may qualify this child as having a speech and language disorder and they may not,” she explained.

As a result, Byrd made the focus of her master’s thesis developing a “dialect-shifting curriculum” that was designed to teach kids how to understand different features of the dialect they were learning in class versus the dialect they themselves spoke, enabling the kids to more easily go back and forth between the two. Byrd then tested the curriculum with students attending an Athens, Georgia private school that primarily served African American students who spoke different dialects of American English.

During the last semester of her master’s, Byrd presented the results of her work at the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing, where it caught the eye of a friend of HESP Professor Jan Edwards’. Edwards was working on a similar project in Baltimore, Md. at that time, so Edwards reached out to Byrd, and the rest is history.

“What UMD’s hearing and speech Ph.D. added to my experience is not only a better theoretical perspective on speech and language—theories about language processing and language variation that are behind a lot of the clinical things speech-language pathologists do—but also an interdisciplinary perspective. For example, my dissertation committee had people from linguistics, from the College of Education, and the Second Language Acquisition program,” said Byrd. “Even though I didn’t necessarily know what exactly I was applying for when I applied to HESP’s Ph.D. program, I am grateful I did because it stretched me outside of my comfort zone and added a bunch of skills onto me that I didn’t get in master’s.”

Today, Byrd is continuing to apply her hearing and speech skills to benefit K-12 students as a Speech-Language Pathologist at KIPP DC Public Schools, which educates and supports students in the District of Columbia who have historically had limited access to quality educational options.

Byrd is currently using her knowledge of dialect variation to ensure that students are appropriately assessed, and to strengthen children’s articulation and language skills. Byrd says that most of the elementary-aged children she works with have a hard time with comprehension—answering questions like “What is this story about?” and “Who is this story about?”—and with articulating different speech sounds, like replacing a “k” sound with a “t” sound, so that they say “tat” instead of “cat.” If left unaddressed, those difficulties can have a negative impact on students’ ability to read and write.

Byrd also recently served as the chair of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA) Government and Public Policy Board, in which role she helped set priorities for ASHA’s public policy agenda. Her time as chair ended in December 2024, but she continues to look for opportunities to volunteer and take action in her field, for the betterment of the professionals in it, and the people they serve. 

“I am a firm believer that the group that continues to be the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I think there are a lot of policy initiatives that ASHA members need that would help them better serve their communities” she said. 

Published on Fri, Mar 21, 2025 - 2:05PM