Helen Beebe

Helen Hulick was born December 27, 1908 in Easton, Northampton County, Pennsylvania where she lived most of her life. She attended Wellesley College from 1927 to 1929 and received her PhD in 1930 from the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton Massachusetts.

She taught in deaf schools in Oregon and California before returning to the East Coast in 1942. In 1938 while living in California she was called as a witness in a burglary trial. The judge disapproved of her wearing trousers instead of a dress and ordered her to return 'properly attired'. When she returned still wearing pants the judge jailed her for contempt.[1]

In 1942 she moved to New York where she studied with the Viennese speech therapist and psychologist Emil Fröschels and got to know the unisensory method. This began a twenty year collaboration with Fröschels. Following his death in 1972 she continued to develop and disseminate his technique, now known as the auditory-verbal approach, while studying speech therapy at Columbia University.

She founded her Easton practice, later the Helen Beebe Speech and Hearing Center, in 1944 and served as its director for forty years. In 1950 she was able to present her philosophy at the congress of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) in Amsterdam.

In 1972 the Larry Jarret Memorial Foundation was established by a small group of parents of their students to promote Helen Beebe's method of unisensory training to make this training available to all hearing impaired children. Helen Beebe donated her private practice to the foundation in 1978. It later became the Helen Beebe Speech and Hearing Center , a not -for- profit, non-profit organization . Nobody was turned away there because they had no money for training. In the early 1980s, they moved into a new building that included the clinic and Larry Jarret House, where parents were taught how to use the method at home. Many families came from Europe and South America for a week of intensive training.

She was active in various specialist groups and was an honorary member of the American Speech and Hearing Association . She was co-founder and first president of Auditory-Verbal International (AVI) ( AG Bell Academy for Listening and Spoken Language since 2005 ), a group that promoted the auditory-verbal approach to listening and speaking and trains teachers worldwide. She was a director of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and the Foundation for Children's Hearing, Education and Research.

With the application and further development of the methods of her mentor Emil Fröschels with deaf children, Beebe became a pioneer of the “unisensory approach”, which is now known as the auditory-verbal approach. She wrote innumerable newspaper articles and spread her knowledge and experiences through lectures and lectures all over the world. From Fröschels she also learned the chewing method for language problems, stuttering , etc. She was firmly convinced that deaf children with their residual hearing - regardless of how little it was - develop a spoken language with natural intonation . Her expectations of the children were very high and she still had hope when no one else had her.

In her 1953 book, A Guide to Help the Severely Hard of Hearing Child , she wrote: Lip reading should be avoided as much as possible at home and in therapy. Otherwise the child would become dependent on lip reading and not use their hearing .

She started her practice for deaf children at home with a single student, Mardie Crannell Younglof who was deaf from birth and one of the first wearable miniature electron tube - hearing aids (vacuum-tube hearing aid), the 1940s in the early years came on the market, wore. Before that, the mother had spoken to her daughter all day through a rubber tube with a funnel attached to one end and earplugs attached to the other.

Beebe kept a diary for each child, in which the parents also made their entries. In this way, she was able to quickly get an idea of what the child needed and what the parents needed to help their child, even from parents who came from all over the world. Each child came to therapy with their diary, from which they could see what the child had learned at home since the last therapy session.[2]

Another pioneering act was that she invited young teachers to her therapy center, where they taught about fifty students from babies to teenagers. The students had individual therapy twice a week, which enabled them to attend mainstream school with their hearing peers. Beebe also developed a method -introduced by Alexander Graham Bell - of equipping a deaf child with two hearing aids. With the maximum use of the hearing aids, he was able to learn speech through the ear before becoming dependent on sign language or lip reading or visual signals.

In a 1983 interview, one of her former Deaf students, David Davis, stated that he could only have graduated from Harvard University because he was able to study at Beebes Center as a young child. She taught him how to distinguish tones and how to respond to them. It was more of a mental process that included logic and rational thinking. He learned the language with one small step at a time.[3]

In 1985, Lafayette College awarded her an honorary doctorate in human sciences for her life's work as a teacher, scientist and pioneer of auditory-verbal therapy.[4]

• A Guide to Help the Severely Hard of Hearing Child, Verlag S.Karger Dezember 1953, ISBN 3-8055-1759-9.
• with Deso A. Weiss: The Chewing Approach in speech and voice therapy Verlag Karger Basel; New York 1951

• The New York Times vom 22. März 1989: Nachruf für Helen H. Beebe
• AG Bell: Helen Beebes Vermächtnis
• Helen Beebe, 80; Hailed For Work With Deaf Children
• Helen Beebe, Nachruf und Biografie
• Alexander Graham Bell Association - Helen Beebe's Legacy
• Alexander Graham Bell Association - David Davis: Remembering Beebe, 2014