[Source:  Bilingusitics]

I realized last night that I have never had a teacher who looked like me. With 19.5 years of education, there was not one single teacher with eyes and dark hair like mine. Did this impact my academic performance? I don’t know. Did it contribute to my narrative? Absolutely.  Let’s talk about diversity in speech-language pathology.

There is a term in the world of psychology, mirroring. It means that there are those of us who had the privilege of seeing ourselves in our role models in books, movies, TV shows and everyday activities.  Then, there are those of us who do not have this benefit.  In other words, when a student or a client resembles the person teaching him, there are benefits (Lindsay, 2017; Wright, Gottfried, & Le, 2017).  I acknowledge that I fall into the latter camp.  For example, as a kid, I was a voracious reader—Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time, Ramona. It was not until I met Claudia Kishi in The Babysitter’s Club that I finally got a glimpse of myself. She was an Asian-American teenager. Then, I saw The Joy Luck Club.  Like, whoa!  Imagine a movie that aligned with my own experiences as a person living in a bi-cultural world as an Asian-American.

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