A new Intensive Interaction book & a new Intensive Interaction thought …

I am currently reading the new Intensive Interaction book recently published by Routledge:

Integrating Intensive Interaction

(edited by Intensive Interaction coordinators Amandine Mourière & Jules McKim).

Generally, as I read books that I feel I should fully understand, I take brief notes of any noteworthy points, statements or passages that I think illustrate something of particular significance or that are particularly insightful or thought provoking (and also that I think I might quote at some point later to make myself appear intelligent and well-read).

So here I will share just one statement from this book that stopped me a bit in my tracks, and set me musing for a while. This was from the chapter ‘Building an emotional connection through Intensive Interaction’ by Lucy Hankin. Working with Vincent, a 7 year-old boy who was ‘difficult to reach’ and ‘socially isolated’, Lucy relates how her Intensive Interaction practice developed hand in hand with the progress of Vincent’s abilities to connect with her.

At one point Lucy writes about watching some video of her Intensive Interaction with Vincent and noticing that ‘as Vincent was walking past he would gently touch his hand on my arm in an affectionate way: it was his way of keeping in contact with me as he moved around the room’.

And that observation led her on to make her next statement: and the bit I have underlined is what struck me as an extremely simple but also a profoundly insightful concept:

‘As this emotional connection [between herself and Vincent] continued to grow, the way he used touch also developed a further fluency as Vincent developed it alongside other fundamentals of communication…’

That bit about Vincent gaining ‘fluency’ (i.e. the ability to express himself more easily and more articulately) with touch … or more specifically gaining ‘fluency’ in the communicative and social significance of sharing touch with someone else … well I thought, what does that really mean for Vincent, and more broadly, for us?

I am still musing on this, because if we can help develop someone’s fluency in a pre-verbal means of fundamental communication, does that then directly equate touch as a means of sharing some form of inter-subjective meaning, and therefore it being an identifiable ‘language’? And does that idea of fluency also pertain to exchanges of eye contact and facial expression?

Well yes, I think it does, if we conceptualise the intentional sharing of touch, or eye contact or facial signalling, in a ‘language’ kind of way… and I’m still musing on the further issues of what does conceptualising touch (or eye contact or facial signalling) as a meaningful ‘language’ in which we can become more fluent mean for us, for children like Vincent, and for many other people who are ‘difficult to reach’ and ‘socially isolated’?

We teach foreign languages as specific ‘compulsory’ subjects in schools, but not fundamental communication for those who aren’t yet fluent [unless the school ‘voluntarily’ uses Intensive Interaction]: why is that?