ispeek

On Friday 28^th November 2003 my life turned upside down.

My father, who I was extremely close to, was knocked down by a car which resulted in him passing away nine days later. I was working as a speech and language therapy assistant at a school specialising in the autistic spectrum. Two years earlier I had gone part-time when my father had a stroke and I needed to spend more time with him. I had started back full-time when he had made a good recovery after twelve months.

As a child I was always drawing and as I went through school it naturally followed that I would choose a career in Art but the arrival of my niece and nephew changed this when I discovered the joys of small children. That was it, I wanted to work with children so I trained as a nursery nurse. I remember my father being disappointed that I had not followed the art path but he could not argue with my other choice as he adored children so much himself.

I got a job in an LEA nursery working alongside a teacher. I spent five years there and became especially interested in special needs education because quite a number of our pupils had very individual needs and were at different stages of development. I embarked on a course in SEN where I met who was to be my next employer. She delivered a training session on autism to us and she had come from the school specialising in ASDs. I had also discovered that

I started working class based at the school and would often move throughout the age groups which gradually gave me a good experience and understanding of the complexities of autism.

The school had standards of excellence throughout the curriculum and the pupil’s all round well-being was the starter point for all strategies and planning. I learned such a lot from the people I worked with and their dedication was inspirational.

During my time at the school I worked closely with people whose ages ranged from four to nineteen years. The pupils were very individual and had very different needs. I learned so much from them all and grew to have tremendous respect, for each and everyone of them. The work was sometimes very challenging but totally rewarding and a great leveller.

The training was second to none and was very intensive; every week we would have a training evening. My boss encouraged me to do a part-time, eighteen month course at Birmingham University where I met parents, carers and most of the well-known professionals in autism. This resulted in me moving into the speech therapy department.

We used communication visuals throughout the school in schedules, personal communication books, worksheets and in the differing approaches to autism.

One year I worked with a person on a one to one basis who was a

teenager and non-verbal. Attempts to teach the person Makaton sign language had been used in the early years, but this particular individual did not have the physical coordination or cognition to apply it effectively.

Their receptive language proved to be excellent but on the whole, pictures and symbols were far more useful for this person. I found the drawn symbols more effective than photographs, both for this person and many other pupils. I think this is perhaps because they are clear, have a neutral background, do not contain real people ( the character of which sometimes distracts from the point in hand ), can be made generically and I think cartoon type pictures just appeal to people in general, especially young people.

Photographs are difficult to get clear, sharp and bright. I remember when I was a child I did not like stories with photographs in, and I always preferred colourful illustrations.

At one time a pupil would not go to the toilet so I drew the routine for them in detail. I think the way these pictures worked involved so many processes. A mixture of the focus on visual thinking and learning mixed with autosuggestion that triggered something for the person. I have met many people with ASD who can just use the toilet on cue. I also began to create worksheets for differentiation and pictorial social stories for the differing abilities and levels of comprehension.

I did quite a lot of work at home in the evenings, so I purchased a CD of symbols to place into my work. We

could not use the school symbols at home because of licence and copyrights from the manufacturer. My thoughts were that if you had a person in your care who needed symbols, why should they be so hard to get and use. This made me wonder whether I could make some myself. My son also bought me a graphic art publishing program so that I could develop appropriate worksheets for the pupils: I did not want them to have amateur looking resources and still think ‘would a mainstream 16 year old like this?’ when I make anything.

I wanted to find a way of getting my own pictures into the work but they looked awful drawn in with felt tips so I started to dabble with the graphic design part of my computer program. My first attempts were very amusing to say the least! It was very hard to draw a smile with teeth; everyone ended up looking like Dracula! Not a good start, I thought!  

I became determined so I worked and worked at it. As the images got better I began to file them on the computer and gather together a personal library. I needed to have consistency and a style to the pictures and they needed to suit a wide age range in the user so I decided to create six main characters; three male and three females. I also gave them different identities to roughly represent a cross section of our society.

loved my job, but it did require a lot emotional involvement. It was a job you went home with, no matter how much you tried to switch off. To do the job properly drew on everything you had, and following my father’s accident I just didn’t feel I had enough to give. My husband persuaded me to have a complete break from work and my boss very kindly agreed. The plan was to go back but I never did.

Whilst I was going through all the emotional turmoil I turned to my art and craft as a focus and it gave me comfort knowing my father always encouraged me in this area. My family also loved coming home to a tidy house and homemade meals!

I also started to do one day a week as a Red Cross volunteer and trained as a skin camouflage practitioner for them. After two months off, I handed in my notice at work.

I started making some resources with my symbol bank and my son said “why don’t you make a proper CD and sell it?” He helped and encouraged me and ISPEEK 1 CD-ROM was made. He made me a website and it all took off from there. I sent review copies out to the people I had met at Birmingham University and one of them suggested I send the CDs to Jessica Kingsley Publishers to see what they thought of them: they decided to publish them as ISPEEK at Home and ISPEEK at School.

At the present an Italian company have bought the rights to produce

their own edition and I have made two craft books. I also work in a college two days a week with students who have supported learning.

I made the ISPEEK CDs for anyone touched by autism and other communication difficulties.

Janet Dixon