Intensive Interaction: its place in my personal and professional history

A couple of weeks ago I attended a 40th anniversary 'get together' of old (well some of us) teaching staff who had worked at various incarnations of a special education unit for adult students with severe or profound learning disabilities.

It was great to meet up again with many old colleagues and friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years. It was a wonderful night, with lots of catching up, and a fair bit of reminiscing about 'better times' - and for me, it also prompted some reflection about the difficult time I had when I started rejecting some of the then current (and sometimes still current) teaching strategies used by some of my colleagues, all of them highly committed and well-meaning staff members, and really nice colleagues to work with. However, the night also brought back to me a few difficult conversions I had when I started to develop some contrasting philosophical views about our role as teachers or facilitators of learning for our adult students.

It was during my time at this educational service that I intellectually and philosophically moved away from the teacher-directed and externally defined curriculum and pedagogical style that they were using (and previously I had also used as well), to incorporate more learner-centred and interactive classroom practices. I then went quite quickly on to fully embracing Intensive Interaction as both the content of my teaching (i.e. the curriculum content) and as my teaching style i.e. how the curriculum content was actually delivered to the learner. That in itself was, and still is interesting to me, that Intensive Interaction can be the knowledge and skills content of a lesson and the teaching method used to teach it, both at the same time i.e. it is what we are teaching, and it is how we are teaching it. Also it gives a process-central framework that helps shape the broad (but not SMART) learning goals! 

But also there was something about the values both embedded in Intensive Interaction, and enacted by it, that attracted me. There was something vital in how we value the learner as a legitimate adult student whose views, capabilities and motivational factors are fully accounted for in the classroom (i.e. they are fully involved in deciding, like all adults should, what they want to learn and how they want to learn it) ... and by responding to them (like adults) and following their lead, we show them their status as legitimate and equal actors in an inclusive social world.

When I was starting to use Intensive Interaction there was virtually no published research evidencing its effectiveness as a teaching and/or care approach (as there is now), but it was those values of equitable social inclusiveness that stood out. There was also the coherency of its theoretical underpinning i.e. its basis in the naturalistic infant-caregiver model of social communication development, and also how it fitted beautifully with my then growing understanding of social constructivist and socio-cultural views of the teaching/learning process.

The change in my teaching, and it seemed very radical then (in the 1990’s), seems quite distant and historic to me now ... yet the reasons I changed to Intensive Interaction, it's  values and its theoretical coherence, are still as powerfully convincing to me now as they were then (even if Intensive Interaction now seems less radical - it isn't).

It was great to see so many old colleagues ... some, but not all of whom came on a similar journey as I did with Intensive Interaction (i.e. learning with and learning from our truly memorable student body); nonetheless it was lovely to find so much mutual pleasure in sociably interacting and talking about our shared interests and experiences (did you see what I did then!).