Using Intensive Interaction with a deaf and blind child,

In her presentation Liz Platt used her experiences of working with a deaf and blind child. Below is her summary of her presentation:

I showed a PowerPoint of why intensive interaction is important to help a child with sensory impairments (SI) and additional complex needs to communicate with us and for us to communicate with them.

“Since the 1990s, practitioners have begun to ask whether the difficulty dual SI children have in trying to communicate may really lie with teaching methods and with the inadequacies of the communicative partner”. (Hart 2003) I talked about some of the children in my school who have VI (visual impairment) and HI (hearing impairment) and how we started to implement Intensive Interaction in our school and the progress we’ve seen across the curriculum and (to please Management!) up the P levels. I talked about the baseline assessment I use APEC (Assessing and Promoting Effective Communication).

I talked about how Intensive Interaction can help us find out which sensory channel is the most motivating for a child (e.g. high or low sounds) and showed a sensory profile I do for each child with SI in the school which notes how a child sees/hears/ touches/tastes/smells and the implications of this in the classroom/residential areas, etc. I showed some video footage of a multi sensory impaired girl now swimming more happily since the staff have started using Intensive Interaction in the pool and footage of a VI complex needs young man enjoying sharing space lying next to a member of staff.

I showed me doing some spectacularly bad Intensive Interaction (!) with a 5 year old profoundly deaf and blind child with additional complex needs. He is clearly communicating a lot and I am still learning to read his signs. As a practitioner I need to move away from responding within my comfort zone and believing I am actually communicating, to really observing. As this child cannot hear or see me I have been responding with touch, but on observation and with feedback I realise I have been too random about this and I need to think more about what it feels like to this child when he opens his mouth and vocalises and how I can respond to this action in as more meaningful way for him, rather than for me. This is the beauty of videoing – it allows for constructive criticism and helps me to develop my ability to do Intensive Interaction.

“Deaf blind people have been trying to communicate for years but they have received no clear responses to these communication attempts. Once they get these responses their ability to communicate develops and progresses” (Nafstad & Rodbroe 1999)