Building Collaborative Art Creation Environment for People with Intellectual Disabilities through Adaptive Fabric Art Workshops

Socioeducational services, which are provided in day care centres, have a substantial impact on the empowerment of people with an intellectual disability. The article reveals factors, which assist social workers in empowering people with an intellectual disability in day care centres. Qualitative research was chosen for the study while using the method of a semi-structured interview. Eight social workers, who work with people with an intellectual disability in day care centres were chosen for the research. The obtained data were analysed by using the method of a qualitative content analysis while adhering to inductive logic of classifying into categories, which is based on the study data. The study revealed factors assisting in empowering people with an intellectual disability in social care centres: a positive attitude towards a person with an intellectual disability, respect for the opinion of a person when taking decisions related to him/her, the preparation, implementation and assessment of an individual plan when responding to individual personal needs, the creation of physical, informational and communicational environment increasing personal activeness and independence, the creation and maintenance of a favourable psychosocial environment in the community of a day care centre, the involvement of day centre attendees in the institution’s decision-making at various levels, the development, maintenance and expansion of personal competences, which increase their independence. A positive attitude towards a person with an intellectual disability should be associated with non-concentration on a disability, but the perception of a person through the lenses of his abilities, strengths, and not the lenses of his/her inability and weaknesses, the acknowledgement of personal individuality and his/her possibilities and the discernment of opportunities in the arising difficulties, as well as a partnership in relationships between an employee and a recipient of services. Respect for the opinion of a person when taking decisions related to him/her should be associated both with an opportunity for a person to express his opinion when decisions, which are related to him/her, are taken and the obtaining and supply of information from a person through the means empowering him/her to participate while taking decisions and by providing a person with an intellectual disability with adjuster, but not substitutionary assistance. When preparing, implementing and assessing an individual plan of a person it is important to know a person and his/her immediate environment, to identify strengths and resources both in a person, his/her immediate environment and a community and to use them in the empowerment process. In addition, it is important to cooperate with a person with an intellectual disability and his/her close relatives when preparing, implementing and assessing an individual plan. When empowering persons with an intellectual disability the creation of physical, information and communication environment, the use of alternative means, as well as those facilitating communication are important. The creation of a favourable psychoactive environment in the community of a day care centre while developing and maintaining positive relationships both between day care employees and attendees and the attendees of a centre themselves is equally important. The involvement of the attendees of a day care centre in decision-making at various levels of an institution is attributable to the involvement of them in decision-making related to daily activities, tasks in them, the self-government of an institution, as well as the assumption and implementation of responsibilities and obligations and their involvement in the assessment of service quality. The maintenance and expansion of personal competences increasing independence are important empowerment factors to persons with an intellectual disability relatable to the maintenance and expansion of domestic, health friendly, social and work skills and personal involvement in sociocultural activities. Furthermore, when developing and maintaining competences in persons with an intellectual disability, which increase their independence, the social worker has to be patient in order to achieve a result and not to give in to despair, if he/she fails to achieve it. When working with persons with an intellectual disability an empowerment process, but not a result is important.

This study investigates how art workshops using coastal debris – torn buoys, shells, and similar beach materials – affect self-efficacy and participant satisfaction among 18 elementary and middle school students (6 with intellectual disabilities, 4 with learning disabilities, and 8 typically developing). Over three sessions, mixed-ability groups co-created art pieces guided by a “value transformation” framework spanning material perception, tactile engagement, and reflective interpretation. Quantitative pre–post surveys used the General Self-Efficacy Scale for Children – Revised and a 12‐item satisfaction questionnaire. Results showed statistically significant increases in self‐efficacy for learning‐disabled (ΔM = 0.60, t(3) = 3.3, p < 0.05, d = 1.58) and typically developing groups (ΔM = 0.50, t(7) = 3.0, p <0.05, d = 1.14), as well as overall (ΔM = 0.60, t(17) = 15.2, p <0.05, d = 0.85). Satisfaction improved significantly for all participants (ΔM = 0.70, t(17) = 4.5, p <0.05, d = 1.02) and typically developing students (ΔM = 0.75, t(7) = 2.2, p <0.05, d = 1.23), though not for students with intellectual or learning disabilities. Qualitative analysis via constructivist grounded theory identified “collaborative scaffolding” as the core mechanism driving value transformation across all stages. Exemplars of material curiosity, peer mentoring, and shared storytelling illustrated how hands‐on engagement and group reflection fostered shifts from viewing debris as “trash” to recognizing it as “art,” thereby enhancing confidence and satisfaction. These mixed‐methods findings demonstrate that resource-limited, inclusive art workshops can meaningfully boost learners’ psychological outcomes. Future research should test reproducibility with larger, multisite samples and explore digital‐hybrid implementations for broader access.

Background In encouraging good health for people with intellectual disabilities, health promotion serves as an effective intervention. However, little is known about health promotion strategies for this sector of the population. The objectives of this study were to describe the current profile of health promotion planning among institutions caring for people with intellectual disabilities in Taiwan, and to examine differences among institutions.Method The study employed a cross‐sectional survey of 157 directors of institutions caring for people with intellectual disabilities in Taiwan. A structured questionnaire was posted to obtain information relating to the planning, budget appropriations, and decision‐making processes concerning health promotion at these institutions.Results A total of 120 directors of institutions completed the posted questionnaire. Health promotion plans were operative at 88.4% of the institutions. Among these institutions, 82 settings (76.6%) set aside funding on an annual basis for health promotion programmes for people with intellectual disabilities. With regard to budget spending, most of the respondents did not know exactly what percentage of the annual budget was spent on the health promotion programmes operating in their institutions. The process of health promotion implementation was multidisciplinary and intersectoral in terms of the staff involved. Those institutions that employed skilled nurses were more likely to run health promotion programmes than those institutions without nursing staff.Conclusions Further research should be focused on the efficacy of health promotion programmes for people with intellectual disabilities, and on the creation of supportive environments in institutions for enabling these people to participate in the process of decision‐making on health promotion issues.

Reviewed by: The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé Ann Fox Bérubé, Michael. 2016. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press. $24.95 hc. xiii + 223 pp. The Secret Life of Stories is a short, elegantly written monograph that gives a reader the feeling of sitting in an engaging seminar with a witty, candid, and empathetic leader. It reviews literary disability studies in a way comprehensible to those new to the field, even as it invigorates and extends that thinking for current disability studies scholars. Readers familiar with disability studies will find the book’s opening contention familiar—that “representations of disability are ubiquitous, far more prevalent and pervasive than (almost) anybody realizes” (1). But Michael Bérubé contends that disability studies has gone somewhat adrift even as it revels in this ubiquity. His book reminds us that the current critical emphases on assessing kind or accuracy of literary depictions of disability can threaten to inhibit the more innovative interpretive possibilities that disability studies offers. As he points out, the field need not be “confined to the representation of human bodies and minds in literary texts” (25). Taking up his own methodological challenge, Bérubé offers in his work a different take on what he calls the “deployments” of disability in narrative, arguing that “they can also be narrative strategies, devices for exploring vast domains of human thought, experience, [End Page 116] and action” (2). Bérubé argues, in particular, that the deployment of intellectual disability provides the opportunity for a more capacious understanding of how narratives work. For example, Benjy’s intellectual disability in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury can invite a re-imagination of how narratives are “supposed” to unfold; Christopher’s hyper-intricate descriptions of the world around him in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time can expose the constructedness of (neuro)typical narration. In building upon similar work of other literary disability studies scholars, Bérubé also offers in this book a thoughtful interrogation of some of their foundational ideas, such as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s “narrative prosthesis” and Ato Quayson’s “aesthetic nervousness.” In their ever-expanding body of work, Bérubé contends, scholars can unwittingly undermine their own political ends and limit an understanding of what disability can do for stories, by diagnosing and cataloguing disabled characters, as well as emphasizing physical but not intellectual disability. Bérubé further asserts that critical interventions must not simply define disability as the literal depiction of an identity always fated to be contained, erased, or dismissed. Instead, Bérubé aligns himself with and builds upon the approaches of scholars such as Tobin Siebers (visual studies) and Joseph Straus (musicology). Like them, he uses this book to claim aesthetic weight and legitimacy for disability in art. His approach eschews supplying an exhaustive (and exhausting) catalogue of examples, instead emphasizing through its case studies disability’s narrative possibilities. In this sense, The Secret Life of Stories is an important addition to other work that has shown disability to be a generative force in artistic, social, and cultural creation. I am thinking here, for example, of H-Dirksen Bauman’s notion of “Deaf gain” and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of “disability gain,” both of which emphasize that there is a collective knowledge all readers (not just those in disability studies) can acquire from disability experiences. Framing his work with engaging stories from his life as a scholar, teacher, and father of an intellectually disabled son, Bérubé moves thoughtfully and purposefully through a wide range of texts, popular and canonical, traditional and experimental. His broad historical scope helps him delineate “a few of the most important and engaging uses of intellectual disability in fiction” through his shorter case studies (31). In particular, he focuses on the ways in which intellectual disability becomes a transformative element in narrative in delineating motive, time, and self-awareness anew. For example, he [End Page...

Prispevek predstavlja ugotovitve raziskave, ki se je osredotočala na vlogo mentorja pri umetniškem ustvarjanju v skupini odraslih z motnjo v duševnem razvoju. Podatki so bili zbrani v obdobju 2014–2016 z metodo opazovanja z udeležbo ter s pomočjo polstrukturiranih intervjujev z mentorji. Raziskava izhaja iz predpostavke, da je umetniško ustvarjanje pomemben del življenja in izobraževanja oseb z motnjo v duševnem razvoju. Vloga mentorja, ki vodi skupino oseb z motnjo v duševnem razvoju, se razlikuje od vloge mentorja v skupinah oseb brez motnje v duševnem razvoju. Rezultati raziskave so predstavljeni po sklopih, ki zajemajo ugotovitve o izbranih področjih delovanja mentorja: motiviranje skupine, vodenje, spodbujanje samostojnosti udeležencev, individualizacija in prilagajanje procesa udeležencem, prilagajanje aktivnosti dejanski starosti oseb z motnjo v duševnem razvoju, vključevanje udeležencev v nastajanje procesa, kombiniranje različnih aktivnosti.

In the current context of educational content renewal, there are increasing demands on the competence of future teachers. Reforms in secondary education also require changes in the vocational education of future teachers. The relevance of improving the professional competencies of future teachers is also conditioned by the integration of national education into the global educational space. In this article the essence of such definition as “collaboration”, some features of organization of collaborative learning environment in the integral pedagogical process of the university are considered. The efficiency of creation of collaborative educational environment for revealing potential possibilities and professional competences of future teachers is revealed. The main emphasis is made on the importance of the facilitator's position in the organization of students’ collaborative activities. The influence of collaborative environment on the success of future teachers is justified.In the age of rapid development of knowledge-intensive technologies and comprehensive expansion of the information space, there is an urgent need to develop the spiritual and moral qualities of the individual, because in the realities of modernity there is a separation and isolation of a person from society, a crisis of spiritual development, the problem of lack of humanity is raised acutely, there is an alienation of young people from national and cultural values. In this connection, the society faces urgent tasks of development and preservation of human capital on the basis of renewal of the content of education, rethinking of its new humanitarian paradigm.

In the current context of educational content renewal, there are increasing demands on the competence of future teachers. Reforms in secondary education also require changes in the vocational education of future teachers. The relevance of improving the professional competencies of future teachers is also conditioned by the integration of national education into the global educational space. In this article the essence of such definition as “collaboration”, some features of organization of collaborative learning environment in the integral pedagogical process of the university are considered. The efficiency of creation of collaborative educational environment for revealing potential possibilities and professional competences of future teachers is revealed. The main emphasis is made on the importance of the facilitator's position in the organization of students’ collaborative activities. The influence of collaborative environment on the success of future teachers is justified.In the age of rapid development of knowledge-intensive technologies and comprehensive expansion of the information space, there is an urgent need to develop the spiritual and moral qualities of the individual, because in the realities of modernity there is a separation and isolation of a person from society, a crisis of spiritual development, the problem of lack of humanity is raised acutely, there is an alienation of young people from national and cultural values. In this connection, the society faces urgent tasks of development and preservation of human capital on the basis of renewal of the content of education, rethinking of its new humanitarian paradigm.

In the UK there are more than 1.5 million people with an intellectual disability. Many experience health inequalities, have a lower life expectancy, and die avoidable deaths (Emerson, Baines, Allerton,...

The given article presents the results of a study of artistic perception of junior pupils with intellectual disabilities. Today special school faces the task of increasing the efficiency of educational process. The results of involvement of works of fine art in education show that in special school the reserves of productive achievement of correctional, developmental and educational tasks are not used fully. The issues of perception of junior schoolchildren with intellectual underdevelopment of artistic images and paintings, their understanding and experience, methods of conducting lessons-conversations in fine arts and relating extracurricular activities intended to form and correct the artistic perception of schoolchildren remain topical. The main purpose of a special school is to prepare a child with intellectual disabilities for community service. It is known that a child with special needs can be prepared for socially useful work on condition that school and family are able to correct, to some extent, the shortcomings of child’s intellectual and physical development, form the right attitude to work and point out the minimum of necessary general and vocational skills. Children’s esthetic education as an integral part of the general system of harmonious development has an important corrective value in achieving this goal. Children’s esthetic education in special school, of course, is polluted due to their general intellectual underdevelopment and weak opportunities in independent artistic creativity. Therefore, the leading role in the development of such pupils belongs to the correctional teacher, as well as parents. Intellectual underdevelopment, low level of cognitive activity, disorders of the emotional and volitional sphere make such work complicated. The esthetic perception presupposes the presence of judgments, evaluations, emotional attitude to the world around. Of course, this does not deal with the development of full aesthetic perception in junior pupils with intellectual disabilities. However, under the influence of correctional and educational work it is possible to reach a certain level of correct judgments and develop a certain aesthetic sensitivity with some elements of aesthetic perception. Thus, insufficient coverage of the problem of perception of fine arts by younger pupils with intellectual disabilities in special literature and the necessity to create pedagogical conditions contributing to tackling the problems of special schools in this sphere, the small use of the potential of fine arts in practice with junior pupils with intellectual disabilities, all that conditioned the relevance of the chosen research topic

Importance. The problem of creative self-development of adolescents with disabilities is very relevant, since the social adaptation of such adolescents implies the complexity of interaction with others, is characterized by an unformed skills of self-knowledge, self-organization, self-regulation, and other mechanisms of self-development. In particular, the creative self-development of adolescents with intellectual disabilities is associated with the development of thinking, motor skills, and communicative functions. This is possible through amateur theater as a form of social and pedagogical work with young people with disabilities. The purpose of the study is to determine the role and pedagogical possibilities of amateur theatrical art as a means of creative self–development of adolescents with disabilities, taking into account the specifics of adolescents with intellectual disability (mental retardation).Research Methods. In the course of the research, such theoretical methods as generalization, comparison, etc. were used, domestic psychological and pedagogical works in the field of theater pedagogy were studied, empirical methods were used – understanding the experience of working with participants of the psychotherapeutic theater “We”.Results and Discussion. It is revealed and substantiated that amateur theater is a means of creative development and self-development of a personality, that is, an environment where activities aimed at the personal development of adolescents with disabilities can be fully realized on the basis of the existing personal potential in accordance with the norms of morality and cultural context accepted in society. The pedagogical possibilities of theatrical art, realized in specific forms of work (trainings, sketches, effective analysis of a play, staged work, etc.) and used at various stages of organizational and creative activity of an amateur theater group, contribute to the development of appropriate skills of self-knowledge and self-organization, thinking, and communicative abilities of adolescents with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation).Conclusions. The application of the research results contributes to the development of new methods and means of pedagogical work with young people with disabilities, the formation of an effective creative environment for their creative self-development and social adaptation.

Creative Arts and Mental Disability: The Role of the Creative Arts in the Development of Young People and Adults with Mental Handicaps and Severe Profound or Multiple Disabilities. Edited by Stanley S. Segal Bicester, Oxon: A.B. Academic Publishers. 1990. 115 pp. £15.95. - Volume 158 Issue 5

In this paper, we propose an approach for the creation of collaborative e-learning environments. The approach provides suitable visual languages allowing the instruction designer to specify e-learning courses in a simple way. The defined courses are based on synchronous and asynchronous activities. Moreover, we describe a system prototype based on the presented approach, which provides automated support for the generation of e-learning courses starting from their visual specification. Another distinctive characteristic of our approach is the possibility to specify and generate full collaborative environments. This learning paradigm let us augment the effectiveness of the e-learning courses allowing learners to share experiences and knowledge.

In this paper, a collaborative creation environment for learning activities in a classroom is proposed. It becomes more and more important to think on how learners can collaboratively learn in a classroom, as personal computers are introduced to schools. This learning environment incorporates a typical setting of personal computer classrooms and enables learners to create their own project on their personal computer and share it with others by publishing it to a shared computer. The Squeak eToy tile programming feature is adopted to make scripts for a project and a sharing mechanism of the project is built on the 3D peer-to-peer collaboration environment. Some project examples for this environment are also presented.

Co-design of technology encourages participation and decision-making input of end-users. In the case of technologies for individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), the end-users are historically left out of the design process. Further deepening the disconnect between this group and technology, they are also excluded from formal technology design knowledge sharing, such as college courses. To address this, our study investigates the efficacy of a formal classroom adaptation of co-design activities to encourage learning and participation. Through collaboration between educators and designers, we adopted user-centered co-design activities to facilitate knowledge and application of technological design methods within a class of 13 students with IDD. Findings uncovered factors contributing to co-teaching collaboration planning and reflection between educators and designers, and ways that activities can provide accessible collaborative learning environments for students with IDD by supporting collaboration, cognitive engagement, and meta-cognition. We discuss how these factors can support successful co-teacher collaborations that promote student empowerment. Finally, we contribute collaborative co-teaching strategies for educational co-design activities for individuals with IDD.

The aim of this text is to present a slice of pilot research on the knowledge of special educators about the artistic creativity of artists with intellectual disabilities. The research problem was to determine the level of theoretical and practical knowledge of special educators on the artistic activity of their charges. A diagnostic survey method was used on a group of 91 respondents – professionally active special educators. The results indicate a small amount of theoretical knowledge, but at the same time indicate the willingness of special educators to get involved in promoting and supporting creativity. The results may serve as a hint on how to deepen the knowledge of the issue and use the talent of a person with intellectual disabilities to increase their self-esteem, build a sense of agency and self-determination.