Workhop door: Lisanne Haffmans

Resencie door: Annemiek en Romy

 

A disappointing workshop about working with handicapped children

 

It’s Wednesday. Time to go to a workshop about working with handicapped children given by Lisanne Haffmans.

 

And there she was, standing in front of the classroom. She immediately began to talk about her internship at a school for moderated/severely mentally en multiple handicapped children in Australia. You should think that she would do this with a lot of enthusiasm.

But ohhh nooo!! She was looking so bored and could not let her own story go. Blablablabla… we were asking ourselves ‘What are we doing here?!’. She was only talking about how the situation is in Australia. She told this very clearly, but in our eyes this was very negatively.

We as becoming therapist are used to see not only the negative side of a child, but rather the positive side of a child. This is what we want to use to help a child with his problematical behavior. At the school in Australia they punish the children for their negative behavior. In our opinion this works less than focus on the positive side.

After telling about the school, Lisanne told about living, going out, alcohol, drugs, activities and spending money in Australia. It looked like telling about this, was a lot more fun for her then telling about working at the school.

 

Our conclusion:

We thought we would learn more about how to work with handicapped children, but instead of that, we learned more about how life in Australia is. For us this was disappointed!