Thursday 13 August 2009

Lists of Conductive Education literature

The discussion about prescribed and proscribed lists (see note at the bottom of this posting) has set me thinking, and I would like to make the following comments.
  • As you know the CE literature is very small compared to other subjects and this makes it very difficult to produce lists of any substance at any level. Servicing a degree course should have helped with this, by identifying for further discussion and analysis which items are worthy of study for essential reading and which are not. This has not happened as pressure to have 'up-to-date' references has influenced the compilation of such lists.

  • Not very much has been written or published recently of real significance that I am aware of, except Susie's and Andrew's blogs which offer practical and theoretical information respectively.

  • As Susie said, it depends who the list is for. Thus parents may need a list with a different emphasis than say, psychologists.

I think people, particularly students need to read and decide for themselves what is good and what is not so good - with a little guidance for those who know nothing at all about Conductive Education.

Libraries can help with this as they collect all the material on a given subject and hold it in one place offering easy access. As I have said before it is not a librarian's job to evaluate the material but up to lecturers and tutors, who, surely, must know the literature, to make sure the students know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Librarians can help by finding material and making suggestions based on feed-back and usage when possible.

Note: In a nutshell, prescribed tells what is good, and a proscribed list what is bad. Please see Andrew's comment on the Conductive Education Classic no.7 posting for further explanation.

2 comments:

Rony Schenker, OTR, PhD, Tsad Kadima, Israel said...

Dear Gill,
I'm afraid you are under estimating the knowledge and experience you have in CE materials. Being not only a Libririan but a co editor of books on CE I think you have an opinion regarding pre/pro, and that does not contradict tutors reccmendation as well as students judgment.
I would be very happy to receive YOUR preffered list (as others as well). It will be very interesting to compare lists of several professionals in the field, probably will get a variety of opinions

Gillian Maguire said...

I appreciate your confidence in my abilities, Rony, thank you.

In the past, when I compiled lists on specific areas in Conductive Education material held by the National Library of Conductive Education, I did 'select' material that I though was most useful and left out any short uninformative pieces. But in some cases this was not really possible as there was so little material to choose from, particularly with some specific areas of practice. These lists were called 'select lists' because it was necessary to convey that they might not include everything on that topic, that the Library might not hold everything relevant. Some of these lists are still available on the Library pages of the Foundation's website at
www.conductive-education.org.uk and material should still be available as far as I know.