Vocal Hazard Zones

All too often, schools are a vocal health hazard zone for teachers, and their voices are paying the price. In fact, a recent study found that teachers are 32 times more likely to be plagued with voice problems compared with non-teachers.

Consider:

• teachers simply need to use their voices heavily each day - with limited recovery time - to do their jobs
  
• teachers are continuously exposed to colds and viruses that impact their voice-making structures
  
• loud heating/cooling systems and other acoustically unfriendly features force teachers to raise their vocal volume
  
• increasing numbers of students are crowded into schools, and more of them have hearing loss as compared to previous generations
  
• many schools cannot afford amplification systems for their teachers, and most teachers have not received training in healthy voice use

A new website, called The Voice Academy (www.voiceacademy.org), is the culmination of efforts to bring state-of-the-art research about voice to U.S. schoolteachers. It was launched on the Internet in Summer 2003.

"Developing the Voice Academy website was like building a bridge between the voice experts and teachers, a professional group that truly needs and appreciates strategies for getting their voices through the day," says Julie Ostrem, the project's director.

The Voice Academy website takes teachers through an imaginary school where they learn about vocal health in ten virtual classrooms. Content is delivered in the form of text, movies, animation, photos and self-testing features—all of which create an interactive learning experience for teachers.

Development of the Voice Academy website was made possible by a health education grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at The University of Iowa, together with the National Center for Voice and Speech, sponsors the website.

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