Changing perceptions

When my son was still quite young, he was diagnosed with semantic pragmatic disorder, on the autistic spectrum. It took many years before he was able to express himself effectively, and he would become extremely agitated when he couldn't make himself understood. If this happened in the school, many of the teachers were understanding, and intervention was usually taken sensitively to ensure he didn't hurt himself or other children, and that disruption and emotional upset was minimised for the entire class. The other children got used to him, and over time, he learnt to control his impulses, and to express himself more clearly and effectively. While some teachers were absolute stars, others were less than understanding, even though they were aware of my son's statement of educational needs, and there were occasions when his behaviour was very poorly managed. This, I believe, was possibly down to the fact that the teachers concerned didn't fully understand or appreciate his difficulties. We fought many long battles with his school over this lack of understanding. Similar scenarios still play out regularly in schools around the world, where SEN children are placed into mainstream education, but teachers are ill prepared to understand and effectively manage their behaviour.

At Plymouth Institute of Education's SEN and Inclusion conference for student teachers today, I asked how we could get teachers who had no personal experience of autistic spectrum disorder to better understand what ASD children and their parents go through. My thesis was that if certain teachers can experience for themselves what it is like to have a child who is on the autistic spectrum, then they might be a more sympathetic and offer more reasonable solutions. The answer may be to implement some sort of CPD around experiential learning. Not just learning by doing or making, but learning by 'being'. Might this alter teachers' perceptions?

Situated learning - learning within the context in which the knowledge or skills will later be applied - is a very powerful approach. But I wish to go beyond situated contexts, where learning is not just about doing, but by actually being immersed in the position to experience for yourself what you need to learn, effectively through altering your perceptions.

There are still many things that are impossible to learn solely through reading books, or by being told or shown.  How for example, could you convey to someone what it's really like to be blind? How would you get someone to experience what it's really like to suffer from schizophrenia? Just telling them would not be enough. Giving them a book to read on what it's like would come nowhere near to enabling them to really, fully understand all of the issues. This is where experiential forms of learning can be used.

I worked in nurse education between 1981-1995, and got to see some good learning through altered perception. Some of our student psychiatric nurses came into regular contact with patients suffering from schizophrenia. All they witnessed was the bizarre behaviour. This was disturbing for them. They couldn't get to see what was going on inside the heads of their patients, so it was extremely difficult for them to understand them, or appreciate the complex issues and experiences these patients had to deal with. How could we prepare our students to cope with such situations?

Some of my colleagues devised a method for allowing our student nurses to 'experience' schizophrenia at a personal level. They devised a system where one student would sit in a room talking to another student, in an interview situation. A small earpiece was worn by the first student. During the interview (unheard by the second student) our tutors, seated behind a one-way mirror, would whisper absurd, bizarre ideas - auditory hallucinations - creating 'voices in the head' of the first student. I tried this myself several times, and ended up either giggling uncontrollably or inadvertently repeating some of the weird comments I was hearing through my earpiece. The person I was attempting to hold a conversation with would look bemused and uncomfortable. All they could see was the strange behaviour. The situation was then reversed, so that students got to experience both perspectives. This form of experiential learning was very powerful and effective in preparing student nurses to interact with schizophrenic patients. It gave them a different perspective that they could never have gained through reading books, watching videos, or being told about. Their learning was deeper, because it was personalised and situated.

We set up similar experiential learning situations for our general nurses. Some were blindfolded and led around by their peers for long periods. They were fed food without knowing what it was, and taken to parts of the hospital without any idea of where they were headed. Others were strapped into wheelchairs and pushed around for hours, to experience what it would be like to be totally dependent on someone else. Experiences this altered perception where they were suddenly helpless and unable to make decisions for themselves really gave them a sense of empathy for high dependency patients who would eventually be in their care.

Being at the SEN and Inclusion event today got me thinking - how might we leverage these principles for teachers who will encounter SEN children and their families? If you know of any experiential learning methods being used to support this kind of learning, please let me know in the comments box below.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Changing perceptions by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.