Intensive Interaction

Theoretical Perspectives

Dave Hewett

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780857021717, 9780857021700
• eBook ISBN: 9781446292501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Inklusive Bildung

Intensive Interaction is an approach to teaching the fundamentals of communication to children and adults who have severe learning difficulties or autism, and who are still at an early stage of communication development. Its simplicity and effectiveness has been one of the major themes in the widespread practitioner dissemination that has taken place during the last twenty years. Despite the human simplicity of the approach, intensive interaction relates to, or is influenced in practice by, a wide range of interconnecting theories and academic standpoints. With contributions from leading authorities, Dave Hewett provides a comprehensive and detailed description of the theoretical landscape of a now established methodology. The most prominent related theories and issues are reviewed, with Intensive Interaction set within their contexts.

Issues covered include:

- the approach within education and the curriculum

- intensive interaction within adult services

- effects on organisational change and development

- neurology and learning outcomes

- intensive Interaction and the Central Triad of autism

- emotional learning and development outcomes

- adoption of Intensive Interaction

Providing a timely theoretical and academic overview to Intensive Interaction practice, this book marks a substantial theoretical waypoint to future development of interactive approaches generally. It is a vital resource of in-depth knowledge for anyone studying Special Educational Needs and Education.

Dave Hewett is an independent educational consultant and has published widely on Intensive Interaction since his role in its development.

1

Blind frogs: the nature of human communication and Intensive Interaction

Dave Hewett

Chapter overview

This chapter refers to the complexity of interpersonal communications and the often non-conscious cognitions that support them. It emphasises too, the essentially pleasurable, discursive and goal-free nature of most of our interactions. This will be described with reference to communication theory and related to Intensive Interaction and the present nature of communication work in the field of learning difficulty.

Blind frogs

I have a video clip that I use during various courses. I have been using the clip for three or four years as a stimulus for a group discussion about the nature of human communication. I show it with the sound turned off, for good reasons which I will explain. I ask the group to watch it first and foremost with enjoyment. Secondly, I ask them to feel free to have big and analytical thoughts about human communication and to share them as we watch. I will describe what takes place in the video clip. It lasts about 4 minutes.

There are five women sitting or standing in a clearly relaxed social group. They range in age from about 25 to 50 years. It seems obvious that they know each other well. They are in what looks like a classroom or actually a playroom and I think you gradually realise that it is likely they are practitioners in our field who are on a break.

They are socially ‘lit-up’. They are talking in one group, smiling and laughing a lot, referencing to each other quite excitedly both verbally and non-verbally. Gradually it becomes clear that one of them, Ellen, is telling a story. The others slow down somewhat and become more still, though they comment and interject, clearly adding humorously to what Ellen is describing. Ellen obviously has raconteur skills and is enjoying her story, indeed painting a picture with mime and deliberate flourishes of gesture and facial expressions.

Gradually, the interaction between them lifts off again – more smiling and giggling, more interjections from all five followed by pauses for outright belly laughing and much more vivid non-verbals by everybody. It looks like they are all being humorously creative and are completely in tune with each other, exchanging rapid, intense eye contacts, facial expressions, body language and gesture. It also looks like it would be noisy if I turned the sound up.

Gradually, my group will start making observations about the elements of human communication they are observing in the video. Having the sound turned off facilitates their observation of the importance of the non-verbal exchange between the five people. This was one of my original intentions in using the clip. Usually, group members will talk about the eye contacts, how many and various they are, how intently they study each others’ faces and eyes, questing to read each others’ emotional and psychological flows in the visual information they are picking up from each other.

Links

In Chapter 5, Lydia Swinton reviews the difficulties people who have a diagnosis of autism can have in learning and taking part in these ordinary human experiences.

I like to develop these observations into discussion about the deep exchange taking place. I observe the significance, the profundity, the complexity of the non-verbals; the reading of faces, eyes and body language. Each person is demonstrating this profound ability to ‘face and mind read’ the other person, make moment-by-moment assumptions about the other person’s inner state, enhancing the sense of emotional and psychological connection. The greater component of a communication exchange is not the speech, it is the non-verbals, by far.

These abilities we remind ourselves, are among the most complicated learning that human beings do. It is also part of the first learning, commenced from day one. The group discussion can then range to the challenge of Intensive Interaction. Our approach focuses on teaching these things, and all other incredibly complex fundamentals, including all the vocal attainments up to and including speech, to the people who have the most severe learning difficulties.

With the video clip set on slow motion to aid observation, we can start to perceive and talk about an aspect of being a communicator that it is literally difficult to bring into one’s awareness. This is the prospect that these intricate non-verbal exchanges are not fully conscious to the participants and fall within the realm of what Lakin (2006) terms, ‘automatic cognitive processes’.

In the literature on these things, there is a developing focus on the likely reality that large aspects of intricate communicative interplay are dealt with by one’s non-consciousness.¹ In large part it is a non-conscious operation that deals with the reception and processing of information from the incredible array of minute signals, for instance, from another person’s face. If I understand Lakin and also Dijksterhuis and Nordgren (2006) correctly, they propose that consciousness has a limited capacity for processing that sort of information – one might say the consciousness does not have sufficient random access memory (RAM). Rather, in non-verbal processing, the non-conscious mind deals with these complexities at high speed and then feeds the results back into conscious thought as an array of sort, of intuitive awarenesses that assist with your understanding of and sense of connection with, the other person. (If this brief account tickles your curiosity, I do recommend reading the already cited Jessica Lakin. I propose that this is an area of our work to which we should and will, in future, be paying much more attention.)

‘Of course,’ we in the group all then cry, that is why Intensive Interaction is a free-flowing process-central approach! It has to be like that in order to allow for the teaching and learning of all the non-conscious components of communication performance! You cannot task-analyse these components, you cannot even comprehend them within your own mind.

Link

For further discussion of these issues, see Chapter 9, ‘What is Intensive Interaction? Curriculum, process and approach’, by Dave Hewett.

Goleman (2006: 16) refers to this neural circuitry ‘that operates beneath our awareness’ as the ‘low road’. We are consciously aware of the ‘high road’ that ‘runs through neural systems which work more methodically, step-by-step and with more deliberate effort’. He takes the computer analogy even further than I by referring to people indulging ‘neural wi-fi’ in their non-conscious communicative connections. He also describes the neuroscience term, ‘empathic resonance’ – the parallel triggering of neural circuitry, particularly mirror neurons, in two people communicating and relating.

Link

M. Suzanne Zeedyk overviews neural development and communication in Chapter 4.

So, I think we can observe Ellen and the others indulging in face and mind-reading, neural wi-fi and empathic resonance via the low road. They also seem to be having a wonderful, enjoyable time doing it. In fact, somewhere during the discussion, a group member will usually observe that we should not forget what simple human joy Ellen and her friends are visibly experiencing.

Next, I ask, can anyone make a guess at what these people are talking about? There are many amusing suggestions, but I assure them that (a) they will never guess it and (b) if it is not already obvious, they are definitely not talking about anything sensible.

I explain. At the weekend, Ellen and her husband at long last found an afternoon for cleaning out their long-murky garden pond. At the bottom of the pond they found a great deal of filthy ooze. In the ooze they astonishingly found many, pale-skinned, blind-seeming frogs, piled up on and coiled around one another. As Ellen is relating this, the others have their imaginations fired up and start making all sorts of fanciful suggestions for how they got there. They start trying to imagine the blind frog exodus that arrived one summer evening in Ellen’s garden when they were evicted from elsewhere. Someone suggests perhaps they come out of the pond for moonlit frog country-dancing. Another group member suggests that perhaps they are alien frogs occupying all the ponds in Surrey – they will rise up one dank evening and take over the world, and so on.

I allowed a hundred words or so to describe their discussion for a reason. I know these people very well; they are intelligent, capable, cultured people. But they were quite happy to spend 4 minutes with their imaginations taking flight and talking absolute rubbish to each other in a happy sharing. As you might guess, this was not the first time.

The functions and content of human communications

Think about it. Think about all of your conversations every day with the people around you in all circumstances. It might be useful, first, to think about a day when you are not at work, though it is very interesting to consider work circumstances too.

How many of the things said to each other, when you really consider it, actually needed to be said? Lots of course, but many, maybe most of your utterances or conversations, will have no tangible outcome or purpose – nothing concrete happens because of them. I am not claiming that these sorts of communications are in any way unimportant, far from it, but nearly all of them are a sort of rubbish that does not need to be aired: ‘Brightened up again hasn’t it?’ ‘Did you see it last night?’ ‘No, I didn’t vote for him, didn’t like his Tango.’ ‘I’m just off to the loo.’ ‘Have you heard what Irene did?’ ‘We went to the Safari Park at the weekend.’ ‘How’s it going?’

As stated, these conversations are apparently trivial, but that does not mean they are unimportant. In fact, as I will explore, they fulfil a very deep and rich function for all of us, maybe the deepest and most meaningful function there is. I think about them as the hot air of human companionship. I think my five friends talking about blind frogs for four hilarious minutes was a good example of the hot air of companionship. The examples I listed above are ‘blind frogs’ types of communications.

Blind frogs communications (let us call them BFs from now on for brevity) in my conceptualisation, would include all conversations, or indeed other interactions such as non-verbal banter, that do not have some sort of extrinsic, instrumental, concrete aim or outcome; conversations that are therefore apparently purposeless. I estimate I would include everything we categorise, for instance, as:

• small talk
• chit-chat
• gossiping
• banter
• chewing the cud
• chewing the fat
• doing the craic.

Let us call communications that do have a concrete aim or outcome CCAOs for brevity. Examples of CCAOs would be: ‘Would it be possible to extend my overdraft?’ ‘Have you got it in a 16?’ ‘Just put it over there please.’ ‘Not today thank you.’ ‘You wash, I’ll dry.’ We would also include all of the complicated and necessarily goal-directed meetings, discussions and other interactions that are needed during our work. Goal-orientated, outcomes-orientated communications are necessary, too, for constructing the education system, the World Bank, the European monetary system, politics, sending spaceships to the moon, running factories, organising society, technology and culture. Then there are communications familiar to us in our field, our work communications where we are helping people. The communications where we attempt to encourage someone to complete a table-top task, to wash their own face, to respond to questions or do things: ‘Would you like orange juice?’ ‘What colour is this?’ ‘Up you get … up.’ ‘Say hello to … Aaron.’

Texts on communication theories provide many other ways of categorising human communication and conversation. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use only these two categories: BF and CCAO. Actually, I think that often, even when we are doing CCAOs, we have as many BFs as possible in there as part of the process. How many of us simmer during meetings as people indulge too many BFs when the meeting should be getting on with the CCAO that is the purpose?

I will describe some BFs. The following is nearly the most enjoyable thing in my life. It is not my work. I like to cook, I like to entertain, I like to drink wine and I like to talk, converse. I love dinner parties and I have them as frequently as I can. I had five friends over – these are intelligent, sophisticated people, I judge. I cooked far too much food. We all brought to the table a shameful quantity of wine. We sat in my conservatory at the dining table for 5 to 6 hours. We had wonderful music. We ate all of the food, gradually. We drank most of the wine. We talked and laughed hilariously and I believe, intelligently for all of that time, though most of it probably falls into the category of humorous rubbish – actually, the craic. I do not think any of us said anything that brought about a concrete outcome of any sort, other than ‘pass the salt please’, or something similar. There was, however, I believe, the reinforcing sense of human connection and fulfilling relationship we all took away from the table.

Try to think deeply about all your BFs. What are they for? What do they do? Why are we so committed to having them? Try to imagine your life without them happening. I cannot conceive of what my life would be like if I could not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the editor and contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Blind frogs: the nature of human communication and Intensive Interaction
• 2 Intensive Interaction, emotional development and 22 emotional well-being
• 3 Interactive approaches to teaching and learning
• 4 Wired for communication: how the neuroscience of infancy 55 helps in understanding the effectiveness of Intensive Interaction
• 5 Intensive Interaction and its relationship with the triad of 72 impairments in ASD
• 6 Promoting communication rather than generating data
• 7 Intensive Interaction for inclusion and development
• 8 Intensive Interaction within models of organisational change
• 9 What is Intensive Interaction? Curriculum, process and approach
• Author index
• Subject index