DEAL Newsletter 2008 (1) - Contents

DEAL COMMUNICATION CENTRE
NEWSLETTER
1/2008

DEAL Communication Centre, based in Melbourne, provides services for people with severe expressive communication impairments – people who can neither talk or write effectively. 

Whatever our strengths or weaknesses as therapists, the particular advantage DEAL staff bring to their work is the presumption of competence.   We believe that virtually everybody has the capacity to communicate effectively in language, and if we can’t enable them to do so then it’s our fault.  Starting from this base, we find that in practice almost everybody who comes to DEAL for help does find a way to communicate.

However hard DEAL staff work, though, we’re only nibbling at the edges of the problem, which is that there are millions of people around the world who have no access to, or have never been offered, communication therapy.  To allow all those people to find the resources they need to express themselves we will need to change the assumptions of teachers, professionals, parents and governments.  Much of DEAL’s efforts are thus directed at getting the message out.

For many years – from 1983 to 2004 – DEAL circulated a quarterly newsletter to its members.  It included cartoons, news, announcements, helpsheets, conference papers, and book reviews. That was back in the old days of glue and whiteout and photocopying and stamps, and we eventually ran out of puff. 

We’re now in the new Internet era, and it’s time to start off again on a different footing.  The new DEAL newsletter will go out electronically to everybody who wants it, not just to DEAL members.   It will go out irregularly when enough material’s piled up to make a decent read.

The new newsletter will contain articles on AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication, for non-speech people), and on facilitated communication training in particular, its users, and their achievements. It’ll include news and comments and have room for replies and contributions. It will provide an exchange point for things we want to circulate around the field. This issue, for example, includes

• Buried alive - an article by Anne McDonald on an English case of denial of communication
• Scepticism gone septic - a report by Chris Borthwick of the online debate about a young autistic girl who uses typing to communicate
• That'll teach you - a report of an Australian case where a young woman with disabilities won a damages case from the educational authority that hadn't given her appropriate support at school.
• AAC for CP - an introductory piece by Rosemary Crossley about strategies for improving the communication of children with cerebral palsy who do not speak clearly or fluently.  This article is geared to carers, teachers or aides who are unfamiliar with the options available.

To look at an article, click on its title above.

If you want to get on (or off) the e-mailing list, please drop a line to

editor@annemcdonaldcentre.org.au.

April, 2008