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Dr. Amy Szarkowski

Dr. Amy Szarkowski

Dr. Amy Szarkowski is a psychologist who specializes in working with children who are deaf or hard of hearing and their families. Dr. Szarkowski serves as the Clinical Director for the Children’s Center for Communication/Beverly School for the Deaf. At Gallaudet University, she teaches in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Infants, Toddlers and their Families: Collaboration and Leadership Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate program, commonly referred to as ITF. Dr. Szarkowski is Core Faculty for LEND (Leadership and Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities), through the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Boston Children’s Hospital. As LEND faculty, she has the opportunity to engage with, teach, and foster advocacy related to caring for and supporting individuals with disabilities among emerging health care professionals. At Boston Children’s, she is also Staff Psychologist in the Department of Developmental Medicine. Dr. Szarkowski holds an academic appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Szarkowski has received funding from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University to conduct three separate workshops that have explored topics related to social-emotional functioning, emotional regulation, and pragmatic skills among children who are deaf or hard of hearing. She has published several manuscripts and book chapters. For one of her presentations at the MWCDE, she will be highlighting work from a recent chapter Language Development in Children with Cochlear Implants: Possibilities and Challenges in the book Language Deprivation & Deaf Mental Health (2018) edited by N. Glickman & W.Hall and published by Routledge.


Presentation(s)

Keynote - Educating and Caring for the Whole Child: Understanding and Attending to the Social-Emotional Needs of Children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

You are ready to teach, but are your students ready to learn? This presentation will describe the social-emotional needs of children who are deaf or hard of hearing. It will also offer insights into the implications of students’ social-emotional functioning on school behavior and academic achievement. It will explore the role of school personnel in fostering social-emotional abilities and will offer insights into how we might, collectively, provide better care of students and attend to the “whole child".

Objectives

Participants will:

  1. Describe a minimum of three ways that students’ social-emotional functioning can impact academic performance and behaviors in school.
  2. List at least two implications of students’ reduced social-emotional functioning on their ability to learn.
  3. Identify a minimum of two facts about the social-emotional functioning of children who are deaf or hard of hearing that were previously not known to the participant

Workshop - Cochlear implants can be amazing…. and they are not perfect: A review of language-based outcomes in children who have CIs

The information and rhetoric in the field has largely been informed and influenced by extreme positions, typically those either for or against cochlear implants. Moving away from opinions and strongly held personal beliefs that have long influenced the discourse on this topic, this presentation will serve as a deep dive into the current literature and evidence on language-based outcomes in children who have cochlear implants. In the presentation, Dr. Szarkowski will explore and discuss the relevance of the current research as it pertains to real-life implications for both living with a CI and for educating and supporting students who utilize CIs.

Objectives

Participants will:

  1. Identify a minimum of two areas in which children with cochlear implants seem to do well, according to the literature presented.
  2. Identify a minimum of two areas in which children with cochlear implants seem to not do well, according to the literature presented.
  3. Describe at least three strategies that teachers and other school personnel can employ to improve and promote positive outcomes for children who use cochlear implants.