'Creating a clearing for live activity' by Ditte Rose Andersen

‘Creating a clearing for live activity: exploration, decisions and steps in implementing Intensive Interaction in Denmark’ – a chapter by Danish psychologist Ditte Rose Andersen from the book Delivering Intensive Interaction Across Settings (Barber & Firth, Eds, 2019) now available from Amazon - £4.43 in paperback or £0.99p Kindle version.

Below are some insightful and profound quotes selected from Ditte’s chapter covering her thoughts on different aspects of her Intensive Interaction dissemination work in Denmark:

‘Face to face-interaction, and its sense of live activity, is likely to be as important at a strategy meeting or a conference presentation as in the sandbox in an Intensive Interaction session’.

‘We come to understand both ourselves and others through our shared activities, not through abstract reasoning. The act of understanding another is bound up with the quality of our engagement with them’.

‘The [Intensive Interaction] approach is immediately socially inclusive and reciprocal in a way that lets you know the other person in a meaningful way. What you learn from participation is qualitatively different from the knowledge gained from distant observation, standardized testing, or clever experiments’.

‘In no way was I prepared for the profound and dramatic development it supports. It has been almost shocking to realize how attuned, responsive communication provides perfectly pitched conditions for the development of people’s potential’.

Ditte's chapter includes a narrative about her initial 'live activity' project when introducing Intensive Interaction into a Danish special school by directly working with an autistic boy called Mads.

‘At a face to face-level, I would describe the project period as one and a half years of living with, rather than overcoming, the challenge of different views and practices: living with that challenge in a way that allowed for time to practise’.

‘Although questions may be conceptual, theoretical and general, we need practice combined with reflection to be able to respond in meaningful, useful and precise ways’.

‘…if materials and symbols are used in ways that excessively controls the behaviour and activities of people with communication disabilities, they can be a hindrance to creating and nurturing developmentally relevant activities for children, students, service users’.

‘When faced with ideas, theories, values and concepts that we see as counterproductive to implementing Intensive Interaction, I think it is important to remember, that we don’t need to “...save the whole world or do anything grandiose” as the poem [‘Clearing’ by Martha Postlewaite, quoted at the start of Ditte’s chapter] reads. “Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently until the song that is yours alone to sing life falls into your own cupped hands…”’

After qualifying as an Intensive Interaction Coordinator in 2013, Ditte then went on to found Intensive Interaction Denmark in 2014. In 2015 she translated The Intensive Interaction Handbook into Danish, and in 2016 she received the Demetrious Haracopos grant, acknowledging her work in the spirit of Haracopos i.e. that ‘Every person has the right to be seen and heard’. 

For anyone even remotely interested in Intensive Interaction, I thoroughly recommend that you read Ditte's chapter in its entirety!