Identify Some Of The Key Texts/Articles Within Your Proposed Area And Identify Some Of The Epistemological And Ontological Assumptions The Authors Are Making.
...educating children with autism/Asd. There is a large amount of literature about the condition of autism and its defining characteristics from when it was first written about by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. Since then various research has been undertaken to find out the cause of Autism and to find a cure. More recently the condition has developed a high profile because of the media attention given to the MMR jab and a possible link. However, as yet, no single cause has been identified and thus no cure. Therefore the method adopted to give people with this condition a better standard of life is through education. There are a number of educational interventions being used with the most common being SPELL, Lovas, TEAACH and Daily life therapy. All have different methodologies and varying teaching styles. I am involved in teaching using the latter of these interventions.
Daily Life Therapy (DLT) is the name given to an educational model that Dr Kiyo Kitahara developed over a twenty-year history of teaching children with autism alongside typical children at a private school in Tokyo (Kitahara, 1983). The key elements to this methodology as described by Kitahara are: establishing a ‘rhythm of life’ and ‘stabilizing the child’s weak emotions’ through regular physical exercise; removal the child’s ‘spirit of dependence’ through group education; and fostering the child’s intellectual development through continuous repetitions of the same actions (Kitahara, 1983).
After being involved with the set up of the first school in the United Kingdom to offer this intervention it became apparent that it had very positive effects on the children that attended the school. There is a great deal of research in autism that supports and challenges the principles of DLT, but very little focusing on DLT as a complete system. My own observations as a qualified P.E. teacher...
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