Sheila Wirz memorial symposium: A celebration of her work
Remembering Sheila
Eileen Francis.
February 2014
I will remember Sheila for her generosity of spirit, her abilities as a gifted therapist and
teacher and as a social entrepreneur.
I was privileged to meet Sheila at the beginning of her academic career in 1971,
following her appointment as a lecturer in the Speech Unit at Moray House College of
Education(now the school of education, Edinburgh University).
The Speech Unit began with three staff members, two phoneticians and a speech and
language therapist. It provided an advisory service for student teachers and
international students and contributions to TEFL and TESL courses. Sheila began to
develop post qualifying courses for teachers in special education. As this programme
of work developed there was a need for more staff support and I was invited on Sheila’s
recommendation to work sessionally with the student advisory service. I had recently
moved to Edinburgh from Gloucestershire and had no professional networks in Scotland
and it was as a result of Sheila’s typical warmth that I began my 23 year association
with the Institution.
We were both innovators in that we believed that the disciplines of phonetics and
linguistics coupled with practitioner experience in speech and language therapy had
much to offer the caring professions. Our initial collaboration would enable us to
develop courses on language and communication for the professional development of
teachers, social workers and community workers during the next few years.
We shared a very tiny office, a converted loo, I think, and developed complementary
specialisms.
Sheila’s specialism at that time became deaf education where she challenged existing
assumptions on the way deaf and hearing impaired children learned to communicate. It
was at Moray House and then through her Churchill fellowship in the USA that she
developed her ideas for her doctoral study.
As we worked together our mission became the study of total communication with
speech and language theory and practice becoming a part process of a developing
communication philosophy. We became particularly interested in the study of voice.
Inspired and supported by John Laver’s work on communication in face-to-face
interaction we applied new understandings on voice quality and indexical information to
Sheila’s specialism, deaf communication and my own work on communication anxiety in
student teachers.
The Moray House experience would set the frame for two careers which took different
directions but which grew from a shared philosophy of functional communication. We
became interdisciplinary thinkers working with psychologists, sociologists, educational
philosophers and practitioners. This grounding in continuing professional development
would serve Sheila well in the many different contexts in which she would work. In her
future career she would become an impressive, flexible thinker, comfortable in her
own academic specialism which she would combine with a capacity to work across
disciplinary boundaries. In her own enterprising way she was able to coordinate the
work of others for the benefit of a variety of practitioners across the world. She was
what the French would call an ‘animatrice’ who would animate and inspire all those who
worked with her. Our friendship lasted for 40 years and the memory of Sheila’s
personality and influence will remain with me forever.