Helen Beebe

1908-1988

Helen Louise Hulick Beebe was an American educator and disseminator of auditory-verbal therapy for deaf children. She was born December 27, 1908 in Easton, Northampton County, Pennsylvania where she lived most of her life. She attended Wellesley College from 1927 to 1929 and received her PhD in 1930 from the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton Massachusetts. She taught in deaf schools in Oregon and California. In 1942 she moved to New York where she studied with Emil Fröeschels. Froeschels had studied with Victor Urbanitschitsch, who developed what has been variously called the unisensory or the auditory verbal therapy approach to teaching severely hearing impaired children to make the best use of their residual hearing.

Beebe collaborated over the next 30 years with Froeschels, Following his death in 1972 she continued to develop and disseminate the unisensory technique. The auditory verbal therapy approach is based on the theory that even minimal amounts of residual hearing in a hearing-impaired infant, if stimulated in a unisensory fashion, could lead to the development of spontaneous speech and oral communication.

In 1944, Helen Beebe founded a private practice in Eaton, Pennsylvania that specialized teaching listening to severely hearing impaired children. She served as the director of her center for 40 years.

References

Froeschels, E. & Beebe, H. (1946). Testing the hearing of young children. Archives of Otolaryngology, 43, 93-98.

Froeschels, E. & Beebe, H. (1946). Testing the hearing of newborn infants. AMA Archives of Otolaryngology, 44, 710-714.

Froeschels, E. (1951). The origin of the chewing method. In D. Weiss & H. Beebe (Eds.) The chewing approach in speech and voice therapy. NY: S. Karger.

Beebe (1953) A guide to help the severely hard of hearing child, Verlag S.Karger.

Froeschels, E. & Beebe, H. (1960). Symptomology in stuttering: An aid to the case history. Current problems in Phoniatrics and Logopedics, 1, 179-183.

Beebe, H. (1964). Selected papers of Emil Froeschels (1940-1964).

Beebe, H. (1978). Deaf children can learn to hear. Journal of Communication Disorders, 11, 2-3, 193-200. DOI: 10.1016/0021-9924(78)90011-4

The Helen Beebe Legacy (2021) Retrieved from: http://www.listeningandspokenlanguage.org/Document_id_557.html

Davis, D. (nd) Breaking the sound barrier. Retrieved from: http://www.listeningandspokenlanguage.org/Document_id_651.html