Agency and facilitated communication: A videographic study of the congruences between the text produced by and behaviors observed in a deaf and autistic adolescent
Type de matériel :
54
Facilitated communication (FC) is a communication method designed to help people with disabilities affecting verbal communication and expression to point to images/words/letters with the help of a communication partner, known as a “facilitator,” who supports the person’s hand or arm. The question of who is really communicating, the patient and/or the facilitator, is crucial to judging the validity of this controversial method. To answer this question, we filmed five FC sessions between a seventeen-year-old congenitally deaf and autistic adolescent (BL) and his facilitator over a five-month period, and extracted twelve representative sequences. A detailed analysis of these twelve sequences revealed numerous congruences between the content of the co-written texts, on the one hand, and the wide array of facial expressions/sounds/gestures/emotional and intentional behaviors observable in BL, on the other. These congruences between the text and the clinical observations seem to demonstrate the patient’s agency in the co-production of written messages.
Réseaux sociaux