Michelle F. Morgan

Broadening the conceptualization of literacy in the lives of adults with intellectual disability

Current pedagogical approaches recognize literacy as a social practice and yet school-based conceptualizations continue to dominate understandings of literacy learning of individuals with intellectual disability. Such understandings lead to local or everyday literacy practices being devalued and overlooked. Thus, for adults with intellectual disability who might not possess a high level of proficiency in school-based literacy, it is important to develop understandings about their everyday literacy uses for such practices to be recognized as being socially and culturally significant. Approaches to research are needed, which enable collection of rich, detailed information about literacy use by adults with intellectual disability that go beyond standardized scores and rankings and outside of the classroom. This paper presents a view of methodologies that can be used to conduct future research in this area that will broaden the conceptualization of literacy for adults with intellectual disability.

Unanticipated ethical issues in a participatory research project with individuals with intellectual disability

The conduct of a participatory research investigation into the everyday literacy of adults with intellectual disability within the context of a PhD thesis highlighted issues related to the ethics of participatory research and the need to revisit and reconsider ethical guidelines around working with individuals with intellectual disability. Tensions were identified between participatory research ideology and the reality of research experiences, with additional issues arising due to disability in the first author.

Social Inclusion at Work

for confidence and motivation is re-enforced. Praise needs to be task-specific, both verbally and non-verbally, and carefully targeted. The author suggests that it is important to think ahead and imagine the input the praise will have to future responses. What kinds of questions will they raise? It is suggested that challenges that frequently accompany motor tasks need to be scaled to permit achievement, and activities need to have positive orientations and lead to improvement. Often in a book like this a chapter (Chapter Seven) on age-related milestones and movement sequences is front and centre, but in my opinion it is good to discover it later as it gives the reader a chance to understand children and their movement difficulties before trying to fit them into neat developmental milestone-based categories and charts. The reader is reminded that there is an interplay between numerous factors, as have been outlined earlier, that can produce the individual variations and differences observed within and across children. Patterns of movement sequences, such as running, can become descriptively complicated but in the chapter they are outlined in three stages (immature, elementary, and mature), which makes them user-friendly in assessments and observations for parents and others. The activity chapter (Chapter Eight) is full of clear outlines and diagrams of a range of possible activities. The appendices add to this chapter with a suggested movement observation sheet, an age-related movement patterns chart, and an action words chart. No single book can provide all the information and activities a teacher may need to help them with the variety of children with movement problems they may see over their years of teaching. However, this book provides an excellent set of teaching and learning strategies that would guide teachers for many years. For all teachers of physical education and/or physical activity programmes for young children, this is a book for you.

The Development of Research Skills in Young Adults with Intellectual Disability in Participatory Research

There is limited information about specific research constructs developed by adults with intellectual disability in undertaking research despite increasing involvement in research with rather than on these individuals. Participatory research was used with three young adults with intellectual disability to collaboratively develop a training programme and investigate the skills used and developed when undertaking the research project. Three research domains—Knowledge, Conceptual understandings and Skills, were identified, within which 18 subsets were categorised. Development in all domains and subsets occurred for all young adults, with variations in gains across subsets and participants. These young adults attained research knowledge, understanding and skills that enabled them to become collaborative researchers within this project.