Month: August 2008
Cerebral palsy and walking
This was first published in 2006 by Iona Novak, a researcher and reports the responses of adults with cerebral palsy to efforts made in their childhood to help them walk. It is suggested that the time would have been better spent helping them to have independent mobility rather than concentrating on walking:
While it is natural for parents to want to do all they can to assist their child to walk independently, with the benefit of hindsight in years to come, independent mobility, not walking per se, is likely to be seen as more important. What all parents want most for their children is a happy and fulfilled life. Walking independently is not the only way to achieve this
It would be interesting to have conductors’ comments on this, but as I see it the last two sentences sum up what every conductor aims to do!
Anyone for blogging?
Blogging has certainly taken off now as more and more people take the plunge and talk about their lives online, sometimes in great detail. Look at the number of hits you can get for Conductive Education (which increases daily), just do a search on Google.
>http://www.google.co.uk/blogsearch?hl=en
These informal sources can provide a wealth of information for all those interested in CE , quite often of a different sort to that found in formally published articles and books, whilst giving an opportunity to respond with comments or questions. Many of these are written by parents via cerebral palsy websites
e.g. http://www.cpblogs.org.au/
covering life with a cerebral palsied child and some include details of their experiences of CE with their children on short summer camps or longer sessions, amongst other family matters and activities.
e.g. http://lieck3.blogspot.com/2007/11/conductive-education.html http://blog.autismaspergersandmoreohmy.com/2008/07/29/conductive-education–little-things-mean-a-lot.aspx http://biscuitlife.blogspot.com/2008/07/its-been-so-long.html
The amount of support and responses they get from strangers is quite amazing.
Conductors are beginning to record their daily experiences with groups or individuals providing insight into their work in a personal way, giving examples which help to make CE and ‘how it works’ somehow more real. They are talking about what they actually do rather than discussing theory and principles etc. Look at
http://www.konduktorin.blogspot.com/
http://geekconductor.blogspot.com/
and a new site written by Hungarian conductor, Laszlo
http://www.szogeczki.blogspot.com/
– soon to be in English too.
Norman Perrin has set up a conductive web via pageflakes with the aim of linking all such postings together – a mighty big task in the circumstances and is a good starting point.
http://www.pageflakes.com/PacesCEO/22370788/
Andrew Sutton is also keeping us up to date on his blog
http://www.andrew-sutton.blogspot.com/
by finding even more, encouraging the start of new ones and continuation of those already going.