1st Edition

Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties Seeing the Opportunities and Challenges of Risk

Edited By Jane Seale, Melanie Nind Copyright 2010
    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    The issue of access is at the forefront of the practical challenges facing people with learning difficulties and people working with or supporting them. This engaging text brings together evidence, narratives and discussions that question and advance our understanding of the concept of access for people with learning difficulties. Seale and Nind draw on their expertise to analyse a wide range of situations, including access to public spaces, citizenship education, community participation, and employment.

     

    Through a series of related chapters, key researchers in the field of inclusion and learning difficulties enrich the access debate by:

      • considering what kind of access people with learning difficulties want;
      • identifying effective practice in relation to facilitating and promoting access;
      • revealing the capability of people with learning difficulties to seek and achieve access to potentially exclusionary communities;
      • providing a space for a wide range of people to share access stories.

     

    With contributions from a variety of stakeholders including people with learning difficulties, Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties clarifies the concept of access without over-simplifying what is involved. Through rigorous critique, this book provides a unique rationale for a new multi-dimensional model of access and ways of promoting it.

     

    Proposing a reconceptualisation of the risk associated with promoting access for people with learning difficulties, this book will be of immense interest to students, researchers and professionals involved in inclusion and disability issues.

    Selected Contents:1. Why the interest in access and learning disability? (Melanie Nind and Jane Seale)  ACCESS TOOLS AND PROCESSES  2. Access in mind: a review of approaches to making ideas and information accessible (Jan Walmsley)  3. Creativity, Control and Communication: the use of life-story work as a tool to facilitate access (Ann Aspinall and Kate Gascoyne)  4. Access all areas: The use of symbols in public spaces (Chris Abbott and Cate Detheridge)  ACCESS ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES  5. Building bridges and bonds: Promoting social inclusion (Roy McConkey)  6. It’s my heritage too: Developing participatory methods for promoting access to heritage sites (Jonathan Rix)  7. No Looking back (Gary Butler)  ACCESS EXPERIENCES  8. Taking a leap of faith (Mary Waight and members of the Bracknell advocacy group)  9. We don’t need protecting (Darren Grant, Wayne Taylor and Drew Bradley from Choice Advocacy, supported by Judith Clayton and Claire Royall)  QUESTIONS OF ACCESS  10. Promoting access to community and participation: What role can citizenship education play? (Hazel Lawson)

    Biography

    Jane Seale and Melanie Nind both work in the School of Education at the University of Southampton. Both Jane and Melanie have a strong track record of publishing in the area of inclusion and learning disabilities and of publishing edited works with Routledge and other publishers.