Forecasting the Future: Challenges and Opportunities in Developmental Communication Disorders

When I am not reading Seminars in Speech and Language to keep up with the ever widening and deepening research that supports our practice as speech-language pathologists, my favorite reading genre is science fiction. Not the postapocalyptic or World War Z kind, but the kinder, gentler, hopeful kind that made many of us older people Star Trek fans in the 1960s—the notion that although problems would always confront us, new, exciting, and hopeful solutions would emerge to guarantee a good outcome. Perhaps fittingly, given our profession, some solutions were not even high tech.

This issue, then, seems to be a fairly fitting way for me to end my coeditorship of Seminars with my valued and wonderful friend and colleague, Audrey Holland. The contributors to this farewell issue were selected for their outstanding leadership and numerous contributions to an area of our profession, such as fluency, phonological disorders, and child language disorders. As was the case in the last Seminars adult track issue, which examined future needs and opportunities in working with adult patients, the authors were charged with the task of selecting probable upcoming challenges to work with their specific population of interest. They were then asked to comment on possible advances that might address these challenges. Essentially, to boldly go into the future to prognosticate and set the stage for the new editorial team to consider as they take Seminars forward into the next decade of its life. It will be fascinating and undoubtedly instructive not only to read the authors' very educated opinions, but also to see how well their projections fare as our profession continues to mature.

I would like to thank the readers of Seminars for their support of the journal during the past two decades of my work with it. Readers have suggested important topics to cover and provided sometimes heartfelt thanks for the role we have helped to play in their continuing education, especially those speech-language pathologists working abroad or in areas of the country where finding quality continuing education unit activities is a real and constant problem.

I feel it important to acknowledge the contributions of the late Dick Curlee, who initially recruited me to work with Seminars, first as a guest editor, and then as co-Editor-in-Chief. In that role, I was honored and lucky to work first with Nancy Helm-Estabrooks and then Audrey Holland as a partner in helping students to learn and practitioners to continue their learning through Seminars reading. The home office staff, particularly Joycelyn Reid, and the immensely supportive efforts of Daniel Schiff, our publisher, have made working with Seminars in Speech and Language and with Thieme the most pleasurable editorial process that I have ever encountered in my many years of experience in professional publishing. To all these wonderful people and Seminars readers, I say—it has been a huge pleasure. And I know you are in good hands with Alex Johnson, Heather Harris-Wright, and Stacy Wagovich, who will bring their own unique mix of talents to this important journal. And so off we all go, toward our next 5-year mission…