Greetings

I have been having a break over the Christmas period and won't be back at work until next week, when I will resume regular blogs. Just before I broke up I posted a Christmas message which went a bit pear shaped and there were problems, which I hope are now resolved.

In the meantime I wish you all a Happy New Year and hope that 2009 will be a 'good' year for Conductive Education everywhere. Considering the global economic problem, it certainly should be an interesting one!

How does your garden grow?

It is amazing what is in the library here and though I can no longer remember everything held, it only takes a question to make me call to mind material available. The item on the Conductive Community Discussion Forum re gardens made me think that there was something relevant and I was right.

Earlier this year Magdi Kovacs wrote an article about the new garden at the Rainbow Centre, Fareham (UK) and how it was being used conductively. This was published with photos in Special Children, no.180, Dec/Jan, 2008, pp.37-39.

If anyone would like a photocopy please contact me.

A truly 'conductive' library in New Zealand

I have just received the latest issue of the New Zealand Foundation for Conductive Education Newsletter which contains items, amongst other things, on the 2009 AGM and Conductors' seminar, the Awareness Week 2009 at the end of May, production of a new DVD and a mini report from the New Zealand Conductors Association (NZCA). They seem to be very organised and working together well, so there is quite a lot happening.

One section particularly caught my attention in the NZCA report:

The conductors are gradually building up an array of resources for NZCA members. The 'library database' is now available to conductors. This lists books, journals, CD-ROMs, DVDs and other teaching resources which are relevant to our profession and practice and which conductors can borrow from each other. This database will be an ever growing list of literature and will be updated once a year.

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What a wonderful arrangement: making items acccessible to all, no central storage, flexibility and above all, sharing information and costs. I would like to know more about this and have asked if they would keep me in their loop.

Are there any other co-operative schemes like this in Conductive Education? I do not know of any, but if you do, please let me know.

Why is it 'conductive'? Because it takes things that are separate and brings them together in a single whole.

Conductive Education back in the news

There have been no news stories about Conductive Education for quite awhile which led to the removal of the news section from this blog, so it was great to read a CE news item with a positive story to tell - at some length too. Yesterday The Independent Florida Alligator published such a story about 29 year old Rafal Strzalkowski who has cerebral palsy and experienced Conductive Education in Hungary. He left Poland in 2003 to study law in America and has volunteered at the Gainsville Conductive Education Academy.

For the full story see :

http://www.alligator.org/articles/2008/12/11/news/features/081209_profile.txt

World Congress 2010

It was great to find out via Andrew's blog that the VII World Congress in 2010 is now in the serious planning stage with its website under construction. Two years seems a long way away but it will soon be here. No doubt a call for papers will follow in the New Year.

The first six congresses have resulted in a mixed bag of materials including programmes, a magazine, books of abstracts and some of the presentations included in issues of Conductive Education Occasional Papers (these incidentally appear to have ceased publication), which are held by the library here. But no full proceedings. The last congress in 2007 did have a website but only produced a brief report and evaluation.

I hope that SAHK will put this on the list of things to do and produce proceedings as there are bound to be some people who don't/can't go to the congress but will still be interested in what the presenters have to say. This international congress offers an opportunity for disseminating what is going on in Conductive Education all over the world and reporting what conductors are actually doing. Publishing the proceedings would also add to the literature as I have mentioned before in a previous blog.

I don't think I can over emphasise that there is a great need for people to write things down in detail for others to read, share and learn from as happens in other professions , so please forgive me if you think I am repeating myself.

http://www.ce-congress2010.com/

http://www.ce-congress2007.com/v1/main.html?lang=en

http://ce-library.blogspot.com/2008/08/please-write-as-well-as-speak_22.html

Conductive Education Classics: no.1.

This is the first item to be highlighted in the way I mentioned yesterday. I would like to stress there is no particular reason for this choice and the same will go for future selections, it will be serendipity. Perhaps I will do a poll after a reasonable number to see what is known, what is considered 'a good read' or 'useful'. We may end up with a top ten! Suggestions for inclusion will be very welcome.

Dina was published jointly by the Foundation for Conductive Education and Alabanda Verlag in 1991, the only account of its kind, and since then it has enjoyed modest sales.
I have taken the synopsis on the back of the book as the best explanation of its contents.
This book is an argument for trusting the personal responsibility and initiative of parents of babies and young children with cerebral palsy.
Frau Seiffer, the mother of Dina, who is twenty months old and severely brain damaged, takes her life and the life of her little daughter into her own hands. With the help of Conductive Education she succeeds in discovering her own abilities, submerged and unrecognised by specialists, and uses them to set her child’s personality development in motion and significantly reduce the symptoms of her child’s cerebral palsy.
Conductive Education means practising a way of living based upon intense co-operation between the mother (or a person to whom the child relates very closely) and the child, co-operation which gives the child’s motivation a central role.
From the correspondence between Frau Seiffer and Frau Gross, who also has a little daughter with cerebral palsy, and the authors, the reader comes to understand not only how the children’s personalities develop but also how their mothers’ insight into the unfamiliar Conductive Educational way of thinking grows.
The ‘Booklet for Mothers’ is directed towards mothers of infants and young children with cerebral palsy and intended as a practical manual for living.
DINA appeals to parents and specialists alike. It also has something to offer the academic and the researcher. One chapter deals with the theoretical basis of Conductive Education. The book gives insight into the way of thinking of the Pető System and also shows how it can be used in everyday life. With this system success can be achieved in a way which is thought impossible in the world of therapy, determined and fragmented as it is by different specialists.
Publisher: Foundation for Conductive Education and Alabanda-Verlag
Date: 1991
ISBN: 0 9515507 7 2
Price: £11.95
This available to buy from me for £11.95 plus postage and packing - email me for details gill@nice.ac.uk - or via Amazon. Photocopies are not possible.

Highlighting Conductive Education material

Whenever a new Conductive Education publication appears I always check the references to see if there is anything I don't have in the library, which I am pleased to say is rarely the case. Frequently these references are 'old', that is pre 2000, and some even from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later publications are either unknown or possibly just ignored. Why is this? Journal databases (which cannot and do not include every journal title published) such as Medline, are not the only source of information for items in Conductive Education, e.g. we have the Internet, the most accessible, which offers all sorts of information about journals, books etc., and some academic libraries do have Conductive Education books and papers in their collections. Perhaps a factor is the fact that lot of Conductive Education material is unpublished or produced in small quantities limiting their circulation, so the usual sources may not be enough.

The library here has a wealth of information just waiting to be read, evaluated and discussed so I thought that if I profile items regularly it might spread knowledge of their existence, content and possible use.

I hope to select an item in the library - book, article, conference paper, unpublished document - and profile it on this blog by giving some basic bibliographic details and a little precis of its contents. Included will be details for purchase (if thats possible) or the procedure and cost for photocopying.

Watch this space.

Blogging: it's a start!

I've just read the comment on Andrew's blog by Becky about her reasons for starting a blog, stopping and starting again. For her it rested on the question whether someone, anyone would want to read it rather than on the writing itself. Could it be interesting to others? This I imagine is quite a common feeling as going public can leave you open to all sorts of things, some good and some not so good. It certainly was a factor in my decision to start this blog and Andrew convinced me to give it a go. Despite the paucity of comments, I don't regret it - yet!

Perhaps this feeling of not producing something 'readable' or 'interesting' could be the reason why the literature of CE is not more extensive. Why should you write what everyone knows? I'm not doing anything new or amazing so there is no need for me to write it down, is there? These are probably some of the words that flit through a lot of people's minds. Blogs are a good way of getting thoughts, ideas, events and developments down in an informal way, which hopefully may lead on to more formal reporting, discussion and analysis and encourage others to join in with comments or even start their own blog.

As I am always saying - it would be a start!