Aesthetics and Children with Special Needs

Aesthetics and Children with Special Needs

An Interdisciplinary Approach

Opening

REbelreBEl

Rebelrebelconsists of piano player LarsDybvik, the artistsSamiraJamouchiand JeanetteHellebergDybvik. They are artistsin artperformancethat exploresvariousartistic and musicalcontexts.

The art performanceis specially adapted forchildrenwith special needs. The presentation ofthe artistic expressionispartially installedbeforethe performancestarts,the resthappenshere and now.Visual toolsand objectsexaminesexpressionthat exploresspaceand moods.

Pianoimprovisation andartistictakestime and spaceto use togivethe audience asensualandvisual experience.Audiences willexperience bothairy rooms andphysicallyconfined space, the sensitiveandtheuncontrolled.

Mimesis Heidi Dahlsveen has worked as a storytelling artist nationally and internationally since 1996. She has performed and taught in USA and China. She has performed in a number of European countries (Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Finland, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Wales). Besides performing, Mimesis Heidi is working as associate professor at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Here she is responsible for two studies in storytelling.

Mimesis Heidi has completed a number of artistic projects with public support aimed at children and young people and adults and has written an introductory book in oral storytelling (Universitetsforlaget). Spring 2014 she had a working grant for writing a book about "personal storytelling."

Mimesis Heidi has also initiated and conducted several virtual art installations with focus on narratives, in collaboration with artists from England, Italy, Portugal, Turkey and Germany.

As a storytelling artist, researcher and virtual curator, she focuses on the intersections between tradition, modernity, community and aesthetics. Furthermore, she is concerned with the didactic development of storyteller’s identity at the crossroads between creative and performing arts.

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Polly World – an interactive multi-sensory music installation, by MusicalFieldsForever. See

Ending

Gorgon: “The Disaster”

Kanada og Tiburon live in the same house because neither of them wants to live alone. Here they live with their habits and routines. It´s good to live together when one is afraid. Kanada is afraid, very frightened. She can feel something terrible is going to happen.

A theater production for adults together with children from the age of 6.

Contributors

Direction: Kristin Hestad
Actors: Arturo Tovar og Martha Kjørven
Producers: Gorgon Produksjoner in cooperations with Barracuda and Petra Produksjoner.

For more information:

Keynotes

Katie Gaudion, keynote speaker, with finance from the RHYME research project at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), The RHYME website:

Katie is a designer and research associate at the world's most prominent, aesthetically founded research environment for design with people in need of special support–The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at The Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. We are very happy to be able to share with the conference audience Katie's highly qualified and unique perspectives on aesthetically founded design with people in need of special support. In a world of functionalist and tools oriented development of health technologies for measuring biomedical processes, she and her colleagues offer an alternative where design create tangible, interactive, textile, culturally and socially sustainable health technologies. Design that empowers people to create positive emotions, master their everyday life, create and strengthening relations to others.

Celebrating neurodiversity

Katie's work celebrates neurodiversity and in a long-term partnership with the autism charity the Kingwood Trust. Katie's research explores how design can generate more understanding and improve the everyday experiences of adults with autism, making real-world application of findings. Katie's research with the Kingwood Trust also continues as a PhD by practice with the Innovation Design Engineering department at the RCA, which explores ways in which to involve people with autism into the design process.

Katie's design work was awarded the prestigious Autism Professionals Award (2014), for Best New Technological Innovation. In the motivation for the award the jury writes that the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the Royal College of Art has delivered a:

'... completely new approach to housing design for people with autism. This encompasses buildings, interiors and outdoor spaces, addressing sensation, perception, refuge and empowerment. With practical guidelines now available to all providers of housing and support, we believe that this is an incredibly important new innovation for people with autism.'

Please check out examples and images of Katie Gaudion's and Andy Brand's Five designs for people with autism:

Feel free to download handbooks for designing with people with autism here:

Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art hosts the biannual Include conference on Inclusive Design/Universal Design:

Ingmar Meland

Ingmar Meland (b. 1966) is currently associate professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, teaching future architects and industrial designers about philosophy, in and through a basic course known in Norway as examen philosophicum.

He is trained as a philosopher in the continental tradition, focusing on topics within existentialism, phenomenology and the philosophy of culture. For 25 years he has been working in interdisciplinary fields of education and research, exploring the historical and systematic interconnections between aesthetics, rhetoric and philosophy.

Since 1995 Meland has been concerned with the topicality of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture for present day concerns. At the general level, he has focused his attention on the interrelationship between symbolic forms, the phenomenology of perception, and material reality. In his key note Meland will address recent changes within philosophical aesthetics that has been spurred by a change of perspective within philosophical discourse itself, due to the tensions within this discourse that in the 1980ies made its way into general culture under the banner and slogan “postmodernism”, and recent developments within cognitive science and neuro science. Tying in with keynote speaker Katie Gaudion’s perspectives on aesthetically founded design for people in need of special support, Meland will discuss the influence of neuro science on pedagogy in light of aesthetic theory and Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms.

Ingmar Meland

Connecting Patterns in Patterns that Connect: Neuro Science, Aesthetic Pedagogy and Philosophical Aesthetics sub specie Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Form

Today, neuro science in general counts as the cutting edge of scientific progress. Its import into pedagogics is not only traceable in scholarship and research but also, and perhaps particularly so, in its impact on general culture, through science journalism and the massive dissemination of it in the old “public” and the “new” social media, so much so that a trained philosopher might be inclined to put to use Thomas S. Kuhn’s age old catch phrase “paradigm shift” in order to characterize what is finding place. Both the old insights of the humanities and the established truths of the social sciences–so it seems–are being not only challenged, but swept away by the new findings of scientific research into genes, cells and brains.

Moreover, themes like: childhood, the progressive development of the individual, moral education, learning and teaching seem to be taken over by teasing statements from the new interdisciplinary field of neuro science, statements that display even higher expectations than both the traditional humanities and the modern social sciences have ever had, regarding the possibility of shaping a better future for what we call “humanity”.

Given this description of the situation within the scientific community at large and the context of public discourse writ large, what are the questions we need to ask? How do we describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate what is going on? My contention is that we need to connect “the connecting patterns” of intellectual discourses with culture writ large, i.e. with the “patterns that connect”. Cassirer’s notions of “symbolic forms” are meant to connect connecting patterns with patterns that connect. In other words, patterns that connect connecting patterns are called symbolic forms, and thus the concept of “symbolic form” might be fruitful in order to clarify what “the patterns that connect” the “connecting patterns” of today are. The lecture will address recent developments within neuro science, aesthetic pedagogy and philosophical aesthetics, arguing that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms can supply us with both a critical and constructive perspective on these developments.

Marte Goksøyr

Marte Goksøyr (b. 1982) is a Norwegian actress, author and intellectual. Her roles in major stage productions has contributed to increased awareness of the role people with Down's syndrome should have in society in general. Through tv documentaries, books, interviews and lectures Goksøyr comments on a society where children with special needs still face discrimination in many ways.

It is my life

I will begin with a monologue from St. Joan by George Bernhard Shaw. The monologue takes place in the courtroom. Joan of Arc is upset, and rages against the people in power, whom she calls hypocrites.

Yes, they told me you were fools and that I was not to listen to your fine words nor trust to your charity. You promised me my life but you lied.

You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction.

But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times.

I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind.

But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.

George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan (1923)

I want to be a Joan of Arc. She is free, even though the furnace awaits her. She tells the authorities what is important to her in life, what makes her aware that she is a living person. If this be taken away from her, she would rather die.

She believes in her dreams, and makes them come true. She believes in what other people deem impossible, and she makes it possible. She defies approved norms. She is a woman, she dresses in men’s clothes, and she gathers a small army to fight for what she believes in. By this she provokes the rulers and makes many people insecure and afraid.

To me this is important. Though the drama is written in another time, I find it relevant in today’s society, and this society I perceive as the courtroom with its people of power.

I don’t want others to run my live. I want the opportunity to say what I think and be taken seriously. I want to believe in what is important to me and realize it as far as I can. I want to contribute to change. I want to speak for us all.

As I see it, one of the benefits of arts is indeed to question adopted norms and help people think again. I have Down’s syndrome and have performed in Torshovteatret, Riksteatret , Nationalteatret and Dramatikkens hus, so I have made some of my visions come true, and I think I contribute to creating a more inclusive and diverse society.

Cinderella, a version for adults was also a political play. Cinderella didn’t get to come to the ball. She was told she was no good, and excluded.

In my documentary movie Bare Marte (Just Marte) I wanted to find out where the problem was. I wanted to do this by addressing people’s attitudes towards the disabled, by interviewing them. Why do I not have the same rights as my friends?

Norway has taken on to be the most including society in the World. The way I see it, we live in an excluding society. There is us, and there are those who are different. Isn’t everyone different?

When I started in kindergarten, I was integrated, the others just started. Integrated from what? Does this mean that I didn’t belong? Does there exist people who from the moment they are born don’t have a self-evident place, with the same rights as others?

In our society we try to eradicate people with Down’s syndrome. During WWII Germany wanted to purify its population base. All children with disabilities must be removed, and later also adults. They were killed, exterminated!

Now, in today’s society, we have the technology to detect Down’s syndrome before the child is born. The result is that close to 90% of Norwegian women in this situation have an abortion carried out.

In Denmark it rarely happens that children with Down’s syndrome are born. People with Down’s syndrome are not welcome in that country. When the introduction of ultra sound examinations was evaluated, the project was deemed successful because the number of Down’s abortions had increased dramatically.

In Norway there are plans to give all pregnant women the opportunity to find out if the child has Down’s syndrome. If so, the “treatment” will be a late pregnancy abortion.

Abortion after the twelfth week of pregnancy is subject to application, except when the child has Down’s syndrome, or a different disability labelled as serious. In that case there is free abortion. In this case we talk about late pregnancy abortions, as late as in week 20-22. In week 24 the fetus is considered viable. So some fetuses do not have the same protection, not the same value.

Again I have to ask: Do we not belong?

Today’s Norway doesn’t accept Nazi Germany’s ideas about a pure population base. However, is our policy to prevent children with Down’s syndrome being born akin? Are some people more wanted and more valuable than others? Do we want a classification society where we venerate the perfect, whatever it is, and remove those we think are unwanted?

I do not want such a society! All people should be included. All people must be believed in, that they can. All people are different, and all people have equally great value.

The way things are now, people with disabilities are placed in separate groups, and thereby obscured from society. In schools and kindergartens there are special groups. If all children were allowed to learn in their own pace, this would not be necessary. People with what one calls disabilities don’t have the right to an education exceeding upper secondary school. In this way one may not develop one’s talents and potential, like others do. Does someone believe that I stop learning after turning 19, just because I have Down’s syndrome?

In working life one is expected to resort to disability benefits, and one is lucky to have a job in a permanently facilitated workplace with a symbolic income. It is very unusual to choose otherwise. Even though many people with disabilities can work, people don’t believe that we can do anything.

This system is abuse of people’s ability to work. Everybody ought to get a proper pay for the work they do, or else it is discriminating.

When it comes to housing, collective dwellings for people with disabilities are offered. These housings have hired staff. In this way it becomes an institution, where the staff turn into the people who rule. I don’t call that a home.

If you need help, you should get to hire someone or some people for this.

The Norwegian Year of Cultural Diversity was in 2008, but without minorities like people with disabilities being included. It was only for ethnic minorities. Are we excluded from the diversity?

Mongo og Downs are derogatory words that are accepted today. If you curse in school, you are disciplined. If you use mongo or Downs, no one cares.

For Norway to become an including society, we need to mix, not be classified. In Norway people with disabilities have been hidden away in institutions in remote areas, so that people should not have to see us. Is society still doing this, excluding people?

We have lived through 22 July, and we respond with rose marches and the reassurance that we want a diverse and including society. At the same time a law is put forward that wishes to remove fetuses with Down’s syndrome. People with Down’s syndrome are regarded a problem.