Tambourines and Toddlers: an exciting new collaboration for the Music Therapy Department
The newly reinstated UND Music Therapy Department has an exciting collaboration in the works: a partnership with the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department through the “Toddler Language Circle” (TLC) program. This unique opportunity blends speech and music therapy while giving students valuable practicum hours and early exposure to interdisciplinary work.
Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) is an undergraduate program that prepares students for a master’s in Speech-Language Pathology (SLP). SLPs provide therapy for many aspects of communication, including speech and language delays, dyslexia, autism, rehabilitation after stroke or injury, neurodegenerative diseases, and various syndromes. They work across medical and educational settings with clients of all ages. For example, Professor Jessica Foley, director of the SLP division of the Northern Prairie Community Clinic, spends many of her mornings running TLC, a therapy group that serves 12 toddlers in the community who have speech and language delays.
“In the group, they learn language skills through peer modeling and targeted language stimulation, and SLP graduate students work with kids on individual goals to improve communication skills,” Foley said.
Therapists supervise child-directed play to encourage communication between the toddlers. Each week has a new theme, and the children learn relevant vocabulary, complete crafts, and participate in a story. This approach helps them build early-developing words and practice key skills such as requesting, commenting, and labeling, all in a playful environment. In addition to the community benefits of this group, Foley emphasized its importance for students.
“TLC gives students an opportunity to apply their skills and earn practicum hours. Additionally, we enjoy having students from other departments join us so that we can practice interprofessional practice,” Foley added.
Foley strongly supports collaboration between departments, especially in the medical field, where professionals regularly work alongside specialists from related disciplines. To model this, she invited Professor Carly Flaagan, director of the UND Music Therapy Department, to attend weekly TLC sessions and demonstrate what music therapy entails. This is especially exciting, given that the music therapy major was only recently reinstated after its 2016 hiatus. Flaagan has enjoyed her visits, and she and Foley agree on the value of multidisciplinary training. Collaborations like this allow different healthcare fields to introduce their practices, challenges, and goals to one another.
“You combine advanced musical training with communication, speech, and language; it’s just really beautiful,” Flaagan remarked. Flaagan also appreciates the chance to explain what music therapy is. She finds that public misunderstanding is one of the biggest barriers her field faces. When asked for a broad definition, she said “It’s complicated. If you ask me specifically how I perceive music therapy, I say that it is an evidence-based practice, an allied healthcare profession, where a music therapist uses music as an agent of change to improve healthcare outcomes or quality of life within an established therapeutic relationship.”
Essentially, she views music as a tool for addressing practical goals, calling it “…a tool with which to work on nonmusical goals, to work on functional ones.”
A typical music therapy session resembles other therapeutic approaches but incorporates instruments, recordings, pitch, and rhythm. The therapist and client set goals together, and the therapist designs musical experiences to support progress. A client may listen to music, sing, play instruments, improvise, or engage in several of these activities at once.
“In a session, we begin to work on a targeted communication goal. Maybe it’s practicing the sequencing of sentence structures or a story, maybe it’s practicing the ability to communicate a choice. So we’re really working on all those nonmusical skills of setting goals, of planning long-term and short-term, all the stuff that’s happening in our prefrontal cortex,” Flaagan explained. “We create experiences that support their specific nonmusical objectives, but we’re targeting them through music.”
Giving clients something tangible, like an instrument, helps keep them engaged. Completing a task—such as learning a song—can also be rewarding, building self-confidence and resilience. This hands-on approach ties directly to how music activates the brain. Musical experiences are processed across nearly every region of the brain and involve visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive components, making music a powerful tool for engagement and stimulation.
In their article, “Habilitation: Music Therapy Research and Evidence-Based Practice Support,” researchers at the American Music Therapy Association explain how music therapy connects to neuroscience and language, noting, “Research supports connections between speech and singing, rhythm and motor behavior, memory for song and memory for academic (functional support) material, and overall ability of preferred music to enhance mood, attention, and behavior to enable the client to maintain or optimize function.”
Research like this suggests that music therapy stimulates neurons by activating multiple brain systems at once. This releases neurochemicals that support motivation, mood, and cognitive flexibility. Together, these effects make music therapy an effective evidence-based tool for rehabilitation, emotional regulation, and cognitive improvement.
Experts emphasize that music therapy is a tool rather than a solution. As their statement of purpose describes it, “In serving persons with a variety of chronic conditions, and particularly conditions with no known cure or with permanent disabilities, music therapists shift their therapeutic focus from rehabilitation to habilitation and quality of life.” The aim is to build coping skills rather than “fix” the condition. This concept is also central to many other therapeutic fields, including Speech-Language Pathology.
This shared philosophy is just one of the reasons the two departments work so well together. Both disciplines support diverse populations but often focus on individuals with developmental delays or disabilities. Just as SLPs use storytelling and structured participation to build communication skills in TLC, music therapists use sensory-based techniques to activate the brain and reinforce neural pathways. TLC provides an ideal space to show the benefits of collaboration in a warm, playful setting.
“We know that the spoken word has prosody and rhythm in our sentences, just as music does in singing and recreation,” as Flaagan put it. “There are just so many direct parallels to the developmental process of learning language that music presents…”
This collaboration between the Music Therapy and Communication Sciences and Disorders departments embodies UND’s spirit of innovation, cooperation, and care. By combining sound with speech and rhythm with language, students and clients experience the power of shared learning. Both Foley and Flaagan hope this partnership continues to strengthen clinical training and spark curiosity about how music and communication work together in the brain to promote connection and growth.
“Having a music therapist come in has really enhanced our TLC,” as Foley stated. “The students have been making so much progress in taking turns and verbal participation, so it’s been a great addition to our program. We are thrilled to revive our partnership!”
