Intensive Interaction ‘DownUnder’ 2


Sharing this information…
Intensive Interaction ‘DownUnder’ 2
Friday 4 & Saturday 5 March 2011
Adelaide, South Australia

Our first conference in Brisbane 2008 heard presentations about a broad range of practice and celebrated the many interesting journeys which had led to excellent beginnings and practices in schools and other settings.
However all practitioners know that following the initial surge of response and interactive exploration that is associated with their learners’ early encounters with Intensive Interaction, at some time reaches a plateau. The plateau often begins to open up as the learner begins to explore the familiar structure of established interactions. A similar plateau occurs in the practitioners’ certainty about the direction they are travelling and their own confidence While we are sure many delegates will still be interested to hear accounts of how your interactive seeds have sprouted and your cultures are growing, the theme for the conference in 2011
Australasian Conference on Intensive Interaction in Adelaide is “Exploring the Plateau”
We welcome your contributions about the interactive paths your learners have explored and how you have accompanied them the measures you have taken to embed Intensive Interaction into the ethos of your workplace the good practices and organisational structures you have identified as the most useful to give you the freedom to practice Intensive Interaction in your context. We welcome submissions and contributions from special educators, therapists, administrators, carers
and parents using the approach with learners who experience profound intellectual and multiple disabilities, or those learners whose severe-profound intellectual disabilities are augmented by autistic spectrum disorders.
Building on the momentum that is accumulating in Australia and New Zealand, our conference will again present a forum to reflect on and refine the uses of evidence based practice in a variety of settings, including schools, home and workplaces and provide an opportunity to develop the professional networks which are emerging across the region.
For more information go to http://www.ammp.com.au/iid2/

PIMD IASSID Cape Town

My apologies for no blogs recently. The problem has been that I’ve not known where to start and I’m also experiencing some post culture shock from being in South Africa. Two weeks ago I was at the IASSID (International Association for the Scientific Study for Intellectual DIsability). At the conference the PIMD special interest research group managed to pull together a pre-conference workshop and numerous symposiums specifically looking at people with profound intellectual disabilities. Now selecting what to share is difficult, so I thought I’d side-step and instead share some quotes from Nelson Mandela that are relevent to people with PIMD.
“We accord a person dignitiy by assuming that they are good, that they share human qualitites we ascribe to ourselves”
“People are human beings, produced by the society in which they live. You encourage people by seeing good in them”
“It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another”
“I am what I am both as a result of people who respected me and helped me, and those who did not respect me and treated me badly”

sheri