Inside SLP is a short, weekly podcast about the systems that shape speech-language pathology.
In ten minutes at a time, we explore how training, credentialing, licensure, and professional power came to look the way they do—and why so much of this structure remains unseen in day-to-day practice.
This isn’t a podcast about outrage or quick fixes.
It’s a slower, more reflective look at a complex profession we all work inside.
Each episode offers an idea to sit with. Something that adds context, surfaces tension, or helps the system come into focus.
The episodes build on one another, so if you’re new, I recommend starting with Episode 1.
I’m Megan Berg, and this is Inside SLP.
In 1969, Florida became the first state to license speech-language pathologists and audiologists, which reshaped the entire profession. But the fight for licensure started years earlier, fueled by fraud, unqualified practitioners, and the dawning realization that ASHA had no legal authority to protect the public or the profession. This episode dives into the drama, resistance, and grassroots organizing that led clinicians in Florida to say: “If we don’t regulate ourselves, someone else will.”
Sources:
Malone, R. (1999). The first 75 years: An oral history of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
Every system has an origin story. In Episode 3, we step back in time to examine how the CCC was created, what problems it was meant to solve, and why it once made sense. This episode traces the early structure of certification in speech-language pathology and follows how its meaning and function evolved as the profession expanded, state licensure emerged, and training pathways shifted. Rather than asking whether the CCC is “good” or “bad,” this episode asks a quieter question: What happens when a solution outlives the moment it was built for?
Sources:
Duchan, J. F., & Hewitt, L. E. (2023). How the charter members of ASHA responded to the social and political circumstances of their time. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 32(3), 1037-1049.
Malone, R. (1999). The first 75 years: An oral history of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
In this episode, I talk about the pull of certainty and how reassuring it can feel to believe there are clear answers, fixed structures, and someone who has it all figured out.
We explore how professional cultures reward confidence over curiosity, how uncertainty often gets smoothed over rather than examined, and why so many clinicians sense something doesn’t quite line up but struggle to name it.
In 2015, a paperwork mistake and a failed jurisprudence exam left me living in a tent in Montana and questioning everything I thought I knew about becoming a speech-language pathologist. This episode tells the story of my first encounter with the profession’s hidden architecture and how that experience opened a decade-long journey of trying to understand the system we all work inside of.