Ciwa Griffiths (1 February 1911 – 3 December 2003) was an American speech therapist and pioneer of auditory-verbal therapy and universal neonatal hearing screening.
Life
Griffiths was born in Suva, Fiji. She was the ninth of ten children. Her mother Jennie Scott Wilson, a feminist and pacifist, was born in Texas and her father, Arthur George Griffiths, in Fiji. Her grandfather, George Littleton Griffiths had founded the Fiji Times in Levuka in 1869, where her mother worked as a reporter and wrote the editorials. The family lived in Suva, Sydney, Brisbane, Texas, California and experienced the hard times of the two world wars and the Great Depression.
She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from San Francisco State College in 1932. In the midst of the Depression she found no work until Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
In 1937 she began teaching in a one-room school in Monterey County, California where a deaf child gave the impetus for her to turn to education for the deaf. Previously, she had obtained credential admission to elementary school at San Francisco State College. In 1940-1941, she studied at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts, received a Master of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts and was admitted to teach the deaf at the Clarke School. She trained in pedaudiology with Edith Whetnall at the Audiology Unit of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in London in 1954. There she was able to observe for the first time how deaf children could learn to speak normally with amplification combined with auditory-verbal therapy if one started with it in the first three years.
In 1954 she founded the Hear Foundation in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, California. Later, the Foundation was renamed Hear Center and moved to her home in Pasadena, California.
In 1955, she received her doctorate in education from the University of Southern California.
In the 1950s, she began using bilateral (two hearing aids) full-time amplification for deaf babies and infants. She provided hearing aids to babies as young as one month old. At that time, it was thought that hearing aids could not be given to children under six years of age. However, her observations and experience showed that residual hearing could be optimized to allow integration into the natural environment and mainstream schooling. Improved audiometry in the 1980s found that 97% of the students in schools for the deaf had enough residual hearing to benefit from hearing aids and speech education. It was also in favour of the intensive involvement of parents, that they were informed, committed and consistent in their hearing education. In the 1970s, she organized the world's first two international conferences on the use of hearing technology for deaf children. This resulted in a new organisation, the Auditory-Verbal International (AVI) (today AG Bell Academy).
Griffiths died on 3 December 2003 in Laguna Hills, California, Orange County, California.
Work
Griffith's life's work included the field of hearing and learning to hear and speak. She was a pioneer of hearing tests, hearing training and hearing education. She was one of the first people to realize that regardless of the degree of deafness it was possible to hear with a hearing aid and its use in young children allowed them to grow up as part of the hearing world.
While the use of hearing aids on babies was revolutionary at the time, universal neonatal hearing screening has become routine in some countries today. Back then, Griffiths did everything possible to get the state to pass a law that made hearing screening at birth mandatory. And she also made sure that the law was followed.
She did not focus on individual speech sounds, but developed speed, rhythm and speech. She knew that if a deaf child could learn to hear with the help of hearing aids during the maturation period of speech development up to about 3.5 years, he would then learn speech naturally. She made the experience that early hearing screening, informed, committed and assertive parents, the immediate use of improved hearing aids with strong and adaptable amplification, allowed deaf or hard of hearing children to become part of the hearing world.