In Spring 2025, a dozen graduate students in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will travel to Kosovo, Iowa's sister state, to improve the lives of children with communication disorders. They will spend 10 days working with kids in public schools alongside local speech-therapy students as part of a newly launched course called CSD:5309:0001 Practicum: Speech-Language Pathology International. 

“Most children in Kosovo never have access to a speech therapist, which is not publicly available there the way it is in the U.S.," said Charlotte Hilker a lab manager and lecturer in the department, who created the course after spending nine months in Kosovo on Fulbright Grant. "The lack of services can take a significant toll on kids' well-being and educational outcomes.” 

CSD faculty and staff members Philip Combiths, Anu Subramanian, Beth Walker, and Stephanie Fleckenstein will join Hilker and the graduate students on the trip. Along with treating school children, the team will offer free hearing screenings to the wider community. 

Hilker, who received an M.A. in speech-language pathology (SLP) from the University of Iowa in 2023, lived in Kosovo's capital, Pristina—a sister city to Des Moines. The Iowa National Guard has been deployed to Kosovo for peacekeeping missions since the Kosovo War in 1998-1999. Kosovo maintains a consulate in Des Moines, and President Vjosa Osmani visited Camp Dodge during a trip to Iowa in October 2023.  

During her Fulbright, Hilker collaborated with The Kosovo Institute of Speech Therapy (Instituti Kosovar për Logopedi) to increase free services for children by producing a video and fundraising campaign that raised approximately $3,800. She also lectured at the institute's educational events for speech therapists in Kosovo to help improve their practice. 

"[University of] Iowa students are looking for opportunities to serve multilingual populations in the U.S. and abroad, and Kosovo is looking for new ideas in intervention formats and treatment administration," Hilker said. "This collaboration is intended to build sustainable solutions beyond what we were able to accomplish together in my time as a Fulbright."  

U.S. News and World Report ranked Iowa’s audiology graduate program second in the nation, and its speech-language pathology graduate program third amongst public universities in 2024. Iowa's leadership in the discipline dates to 1897, when the university, led by Carl Seashore’s pioneering work, developed speech pathology as an area of study.  

Students will spend 16 weeks covering multilingual language treatment before embarking on the trip, which offers a case study in how context—such as history and culture—need to be considered when designing treatment plans.  

“The Serbian occupation during the 1990s created barriers to education for ethnic Albanians, leading to illiteracy or low literacy for some in Kosovo, especially for women," Hilker explained. "That has had downstream effects for Kosovo’s children today and their educational outcomes.”  

Hilker also partnered with CSD assistant professor Philip Combiths, Director of Iowa’s Clinical Linguistics and Disparities Lab, on a research project to better understand unique school-age language norms in Kosovo. The paper will be published later this year. 

"I'm excited for the opportunity for our students and Kosovo students to learn from each other, and work together in service of the community," she said.