Antonio Roberts

From 23rd until 23th I was on a training scheme run by Martin Goodwin. It was organised by ATHAC (Access to Heritage Arts and Culture) and held at Centre of The Earth. It didn’t really have a title, so here’s a list of each section that was covered:

• Disability, Equality and Law
• You and Community Education
• Working with People
• Advocacy, Participation and Self-Determination

What I really liked about the course is that it was very practical. Sure, when you’re discussing the law you’ll have to quote long pieces of text and that can be a bit boring, but then there’s not really anyway of getting around it. The other activities were great and a lot of the information was very useful.

One thing I’ve always been interested in is how to communicate with people who don’t communicate verbally. As I found out on the course there isn’t one strict way in which to do it but what you can do is try a variety of ways and see which method generates the most response. Even if you don’t get the desired response as long as there is a response it can be worked on to generate a better way of communicating with them.

On another day we explored a range of play activities, which was lead by Helen Blackemore. Even though each activity wasn’t suited to every ability what was useful was that we discussed different ways to accommodate each ability.

From the course I’ve been thinking about different ways to deliver workshops. One of the things I’ve done is to explore smell and creating work responding to different smells. It’s hard to separate lots of smells in a small room but I have found that some of the children really identify with a certain smell. I also have explored some different ways of mark making. One of them was drawing with cars, which was great as it added something a usual play activity.