Focus on Practice: Oliver Twist: an exploration of interactive storytelling and object use in communication

Abstract

Keith Park invites practitioners to respond to his detailed plans for integrating communication skills, and the use of real object ‘props’, with the teaching of literature to pupils with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties. This article builds on work described in two previous contributions to the pages of the British Journal of Special Education. In the first (Park, 1997), Keith Park reviewed the theory and practice of communicating using ‘objects of reference’. In the second article (Park, 1998), he described an approach to teaching Dickens which used interactive storytelling as a context for promoting communication skills. Keith Park combines these themes in this article, which provides both a theoretical commentary and ideas for a series of practical sessions.