Caldwell, P. (2008) Intensive Interaction: Getting in Touch with a Child with Severe Autism’ in Zeedyk, S. Ed. ‘Promoting Social Integration for Individuals with Communicative Impairments’ Jessica Kingsley Publishers Water voles are fully protected under Section 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 (as amended). This legal protection means that due care must be paid to the presence of water voles. [7] Past records stated that Susan liked drawing, so we took paper and crayons to our sessions. Susan immediately engaged with us, requesting that we draw particular objects such as flowers, faces and cars. Susan also made attempts to involve the direct care staff in interaction: she would hold up the pictures to them and invite them to ‘look at that’ with a beaming smile (she also interacted with us in this way). The activity expanded into sharing songs when Susan started to sing ‘Round and round the garden’ as we drew flowers, and her expressed vocabulary expanded as the sessions progressed. For example, she requested ‘more petals’ on a ‘sunflower’. Grove, N., & Walker, M. (1990). The Makaton Vocabulary: using manual signs and graphic symbols to develop interpersonal communication. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 6 (1),15-28. So success is dependent on maintenance. But even here we have a problem in matching outcomes to our expectations. For example, there is the question of getting our partners to conform to what society considers to be ‘normal’, without taking in to account the sensory distortions stemming from processing difficulties, the overloading input into the autonomic nervous system and the anxiety this induces. A classic example is that of taking people with autism shopping in a supermarket, where the sensory overload of high pitched hums, the lighting, the ‘pings’ and moving patterns of people, are for some a sensory nightmare. (Williams, D 1995).However, even here it is sometimes possible to guide a partner through this kaleidoscope by constantly supplying sounds or movements or gestures that are part of their repertoire. These act as landmarks that the brain can focus on and exclude the avalanche of stimuli that threaten to overwhelm them.

During the three hours I am with Pranve, apart from the one time that I startle him, he shows no aggressive intent and is clearly delighted with our interactions. But also, after about twenty minutes, he is no longer reacting to the scream of the planes passing over the house, so close their wheels are down for landing. His interest in our conversation is overriding his hypersensitivity to the high frequency whines of the jet engines. (Caldwell 2006a) The potential benefits associated with intensive interaction are thrilling to many who use the approach, including a large body of unheralded individuals who work directly with the clients. This is especially so if you consider that there are very few alternative approaches that can be used with people with severe or profound and multiple learning disabilities, sensory impairments and ‘challenging behaviours’. While II is by no means a ‘magic wand’, its reflective nature, relative simplicity, and evidence-based philosophy and methods are very interesting. I?believe the approach deserves more interest from psychology. This is increasingly true as intensive interaction is being used on an ever widening number of people with different communication problems. Psychology can assist the debate on what intensive interaction is and how it works, and so further its potential use as an educational, therapeutic and social approach. This article introduces an approach that allows us to engage with children and adults with whom we find it hard to get in touch. Many are on the autistic spectrum. We find it hard to communicate with them and they with us. Many are very distressed.In the context of autism, I use the term ‘distressed behaviour’ in preference to ‘challenging behaviour’, since outbursts in autism are triggered by sensory overload and the word ‘challenging’ sets up oppositional expectations.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

The Berkeley Vale Project report indicates the main reasons for the decline in water vole populations. These are given as loss of habitat, isolation of populations, predation by an introduced species ( American mink), inappropriate river management, draining of wetlands, building development and intensification in agricultural practices. Appendix E of the report summarises the work done on surveying, mink control and habitat restoration and creation schemes. [3] Restoration [ edit ] Iacoboni, M., Woods, R.P., Brass, M. et al. (1999). Cortical mechanisms of human imitation. Science, 286, 5449.

Intensive interaction (II) was an approach originally conceived at Harperbury Hospital School during the 1980s by teachers Dave Hewett and Melanie Nind. The school was for young people with profound learning disabilities, sensory or physical disability and ‘challenging behaviour’. Their curriculum was traditionally based around rewards, rewards withdrawal, periods in ‘time out’ and exclusion (Nind & Hewett, 1994). At the time it was becoming increasingly clear to the staff at the school that the traditional approach of teaching simply was not working for their learners. Influenced in part by psychologist Geraint Ephraim’s (1979) theories on ‘augmented mothering’ they moved towards a more flexible, interactive and reflective approach. We start with ‘observation’ - but need to think of observation not so much as a period ofshadowingbut rather as the development of an ongoing picture of what our conversation partner is doing now, this minute. Particularly, we want to avoid the pitfall of drawing up a list of activities we ‘do’ with them, since it is absolutely essential that our responses are contingent, not only to their initiative but also as to how this initiative is made, since it is the ‘how’ that will allow us to tune into their affective state. I have to empty myself of any behavioural expectations and learn to ‘be with’ this person as they are at present, using their initiatives, gestures, rhythms and sounds to respond in a way that has meaning for them. In the 1980s, Geraint Ephraim,Consultant Psychologist at Harperbury Hospital, introduced the idea of using body language to communicate with people whose ability to communicate was impaired by severe intellectual disabilities. This approach was so successful that it was taken up by Nind and Hewett who named it Intensive Interaction. (Nind and Hewett 1994). I worked for four years under the supervision of Ephraim during tenure of a Joseph Rowntree Foundation Fellowship and subsequently (although not exclusively), specialised in using it with children and adults on the severe end of the autistic spectrum. My experience as a Practitioner using Intensive Interaction extends over twenty years and I have worked with literally hundreds of adults and children, many of whose behaviour was extremely distressed. Zeedyk, S. ed. (2008) ‘Promoting Social Interaction for Individuals with Communicative Impairments’. Jessica Kingsley Publishers Melanie Nind, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, is Professor of Education at the University of Southampton. Melanie is Deputy Director of the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership and one of the co-directors of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods where she leads research on the pedagogy of research methods learning.Hewett and Nind put the learner and communication at the centre of their teaching practice and, using communication techniques developed from ‘infant-caregiver’ interactional models, the staff endeavoured to join their learners in ‘their own world’. They did this by responding to what the young people were already doing, creating jointly focused activities, and by developing interactions with a mixture of blended repetitions and imitations of the learners’ physical behaviours. Melanie began her teaching career in special schools as a teacher of students with severe and complex learning difficulties. It is here that she developed and evaluated the teaching approach of Intensive Interaction for which she is best known. She has also taught in further education colleges where she has coordinated support for students with learning difficulties and disabilities. In higher education she has worked as an associate research fellow in the Centre for Autism Studies at the University of Hertfordshire, as a senior lecturer in special education at Oxford Brookes University and at The Open University developing and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate distance learning courses in inclusive education. She joined University of Southampton as a Reader in 2004 and gained her personal chair in 2007. Prizes The radical edge of Bob’s character was not left in Brixton. In 1989, he was a founder member of the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility which promoted shareholder engagement with church investors and corporations and researched their impact on communities internationally. This brought a long engagement with Shell, which continued well into his retirement. She has been conferred with gold membership of the Asian Qualitative Research Association, for support of qualitative research development, and with an honorary doctorate from VID, Norway, for her contribution to science. She editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Learning Disabilities, past editor of International Journal of Research & Method in Education and on the editorial boards of Teaching in Higher Education, European Journal of Special Needs Education and Disability and Society. Her recent research projects have focused on pedagogy and innovation in research methods, changing research practices in response to Covid-19, and on quality and belonging in inclusive research. Melanie edits the Bloomsbury Research Methods for Education book series.