Being 'mainstream' but not yet 'established'

(as you can see I have now decided to add a pithy title to each blog - neat eh!)

On Thursday myself and Julia (one of my long-term SLT colleagues) started our most recent run of our 'Interactive Cafe' sessions at a local learning disability service.

These open access Interactive Cafe sessions (and I think that I have now probably done getting on for 200 over the years - i.e. since our first at the very same service 12 years ago) are probably the most rewarding, and also at the same time the most anxiety causing way of doing Intensive Interaction. Everything depends on who turns up - the various service users and staff, and how they respond to the Intensive Interaction being offered. The general idea for these sessions is that me and Julia (and a number of other experienced Intensive Interaction practitioners who regularly come along to help) practically promote the approach by demonstrating its effectiveness 'in the moment' with service users, some of whom we have never met before (although many of our attendees are repeat attenders!).

In these sessions we want not only the recipients of the II, but also their accompanying staff, to enjoy the open, equitable and nurturing social environment. We also want the accompanying staff, some of whom haven't encountered II before, to see the potential benefits of the approach - so no pressure there then! Actually we ultimately want them to adopt II and thus change (and I would obviously say improve) their social practices with the service users they support. We are therefore trying to capture the interest of those staff who haven't as yet properly encountered II via examples of hopefully good II practice, and do so in a way that will make them see the clear reasons to change their current practices: and we hope this happens because they can hopefully see the bl***ing obvious (to us) i.e. that II is evidently the right way to socially 'be with' people who have a social or communication impairment.

But making change happen across individuals, and ultimately whole organisations, from the bottom up isn't always easy or straight forward! For a start, not everyone can see the  bl***ing obvious in the same way that we do. Perhaps they don't always have the same aims that we do in creating or being a part of 'an open and equitable social environment' with people with severe or profound learning disabilities and/or autism. Perhaps they lack confidence, or perhaps they see behavioural control as being more important than genuine social interactivity.

But anyway, some staff (the natural & often intuitive II supporters) do share our equitable and nurturing 'interactive' aims, and some, to varying degrees don't (well not always straight away). This makes me think that, even though II is now an accepted approach, one that might even be said to be the mainstream approach for developing positive and affirming social engagement with people who have a social or communication impairment, it still isn't established as the default approach: but I do think that day will come! Until then we still have plenty of basic II dissemination work to do to continue to capture the interest, and then help define the social practices, of those new and hopefully supportive staff and carers coming into our services.

As Albert Schweitzer (who?) famously one said: "example isn't the main thing in influencing people: it is the only thing" - Actually Albert Schweitzer was a famous humanitarian and philosopher and, according to Wikipedia, an organist! Oh, and he won a Noble Prize as well!

cheers,
Graham Firth
(still) Intensive Interaction Project Leader - LYPFT NHS Trust
Director: Intensive Interaction Institute