“ Opening windows through the sense”

-Presenter: Prof. Ana María GonzálezGalli. Director Instituto “El Galileo” (A-1219) Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Argentina. ISNA BoardMember. President ISNA Latinoamérica.

Abstract

This study aims to determine the causal interrelatedness of terms sensation, perception, motivation in multi-sensory environments, promoting stimulation of the sensory channels allowing the opening of new channels and exploration through rewarding sensory experiences and enriching for improving the quality of life and development, especially for people with autism.

From multisensory stimulation, the person builds his life project under the principle of non-directivity, the person chooses what action they want to perform from sensory experience. In this way, we can communicate with the other, "open windows" to educate them from their own inner nature, according to their wishes, expectations, needs, opportunities and not impose our vision of any other knowledge.

Reference

1- Paul Pagliano: The Multisensory Handbook

2- Ad Verheul: Snoezeln Home Made

3- Facundo Manes & Mateo NiroUsar el cerebro. Conocer nuestra mente para vivir mejor. Ed. Planeta

4- Paul Pagliano: Using a Multisensory Environment. A practical guide for teachers. Ed. 2001 By David Fulton Publishers

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5- Ana Maria Gonzalez Galli. “The multisensory environments as a tool in the learning of children of different ages”. Journal for disability people EL CISNE 2007.

6- Ana MariaGonzalezGalli. “Autism in multisensoryenvironments”. Journal for disability people EL CISNE 2008.

7- Ana Maria Gonzalez Galli. “Multisensory environments: A new paradigm in eduacion of Latin America”. Scientific journal “Atrapa Sueños”2012.

- Equipment needed: Poryector, computer, music equipment.

“A trip between educatibility and body expression in multisensory environments”

JUSTIFICATION OF WORK

The ontological conception of personhood enables the understanding of the human being in openness to internal and external influences of the inner self and the socio cultural surrounding. Thus, man is viewed as a person with a very rich nature not only with experiences but also the same pop situational context in which it operates.

The person deprived of any sensory and physical function can learn counting with single nature that is born, being essential requirement provide a stimulating environment and motivating significant learning of which, even in its condition of privacy functional, can

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be enriched from multisensory stimuli with options of freedom in elections, under the principle of respecting their needs and interests (as proposed by Snoezelen "principle of non-directivity")

The multisensory environments will: raise awareness, awakening and optimize the functioning of the following areas a) socio-emotional area; b) psychomotor area, c) cognitive area, d) language area, that is the integral development of the person: discovering, knowing and understanding that shapes their reality, especially within the reach of their perception and experience.

Compensatory educational interventions through bodily expressions will be transcendent and authentic alternative systems will configure reception of significant information.

The multisensory environments favour and will enhance the curriculum development as well as compensatory perceptual and sensory abilities.

DEVELOPMENT WORK

The educability

The concept of educability, according to the western philosophical tradition, is seen as "the ability, willingness or ductility of the individual to be influenced." This characterizes the human being as the only being able to educate themselves and thus make viable the educational process.

Educability is personal, it is proper to each person to be, comes from the person and not outside of it. It carries meaning and communication needs. It is necessary because it humanizes and identifies the man.

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Freire said that to be educable is to be ontologically complete. He conceived educability from conceptualization of "educational action as political and emancipator action that enables individual and collective transformation”.

We can say that "Everyone can learn" - "Everybody knows something" - "People is responsible for the construction of knowledge and give new meaning to what they learn" - "You learn when the learner has a Life Project where that knowledge is significant and reaches to express it”. The expression of human nature is given by the plasticity it has and necessarily involves having an educational action.

Already said Narodowski and Ferreyra (2001): "For Comenius, the whole man, both his soul and his body, have as the ultimate goal to know. Man is constituted in a way, understanding and meaning, whose purpose is to understand the visible world. Man has a destiny since their constitutive nature predisposes towards it. Both his understanding like his senses give the man that ability, and desire necessarily appears as the purpose of both orient towards it ".

The Warnock report reveals that "... educability is not limited to a specific population privilege, instead a distinctive and inherent feature of the human species. There is no person without this possibility, while there's life there will be changes. Nor are there any pre-requisites or barriers if the adult strives in communication, especially if the other firmly committed. The human being is an unfinished being, it is formed and enriched by the experiences of its surrounding environment.

EDUCABILITY AND MULTI-SENSORY STIMULATION

Multisensory stimulation takes place in the sensory brain areas from the information that constantly reaches from each of the parts of our body and the environment.

The information comes from the collection of the sense organs must be integrated to be "significant", namely must become into organized and intelligible perceptions. The brain structures are the ones which are located, classify and organize the sensory inflow. Feelings are electric currents stimuli that convert into nerve impulses that transmit from neuron to neuron to form an ascending chain from the sensory organ to different areas of the brain.

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The integration of sensations can produce adaptive and learning behaviours. Allows the proper functioning of the brain and body relative to the surrounding medium.

The sensation is information, an elementary state of knowledge caused by the direct action of the stimulus on the sensory organs.

The information that the person has of his environment comes from contributions from sensory channels.

Through the sense we receive the first information of the environment and the sensations and perceptions are developed, which are the basic processes of knowledge. People incorporate experiences and discover the world around him from exploring it from the sensory perceptual - sensor motor. From sensations and perceptions are formed higher processes of knowledge, intelligence and language. It is therefore important to stimulate and exercise the senses, to improve the cognitive world of the learner.

"We do not perceive the physical world as it is, but perceive what that world is to us.... we perceive our world ... our ecological reality, not all physical reality as is itself ..."

The feeling allows contact with reality, however, does not guarantee its comprehension since thought must organize the information received to obtain significance.

BRAIN – MULTISENSORY STIMULATION - LEARNING

Environmental stimuli that are recorded by the organs of each individual are the most important for structural brain growth stimulation”. (Fröhlich)

Among the various brain nerve cells grow fibers that can bind with the fibers of other cells, form synaptic connections and on these synaptic connections a network of nerve cells is formed. Although when the type and training of this network are biologically determined, the density of the network and thus performance capacity depends significantly on the influence of the environment.

"Learning does not depend on both the child and our ability to design motivating environments, with functional objectives, intrinsically meaningful activities. Education

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is a right that all human beings possess. "A goal of education is to increase awareness that the child has in the world in which he lives, like his imaginative understanding of the possibilities of that world". (Warnock, 1990)

"... Therefore, when we are dealing with a person, regardless of their appearance, over his diagnosis, and although we do not appreciate observable changes, we always think that there is a person who lives, feels, fights, loves, suffers, enjoys ... and although our eyes do not allow us to witness changes to our stimuli, for respect to that person we have to continue motivating, knowing that somehow his brain picks up stimuli, we assume that there is always a possibility to move its neuronal circuits, and we want to be in touch with him. We are all educable, we can all learn. Advances in Science attached to the tireless work of many educators lead us to the concept of educability, extends to every human being regardless of its features, is now an incontestable reality. Education has no limits ...".

Functions to work:

1. Attention

Attention is the mechanism by which the SNC may be alert, attentive, and vigilant, with ability to learn and focus the awareness of stimuli from both inside and outside.

In order to properly address the person has to achieve:

a) Be on alert to perceive different stimuli.

b) Aimed correctly match to the stimulus corresponding at that time.

c) Search selectively and specifically his attention to achieving a goal.

Inside the Multisensory Room, some stimuli that allow us to stimulate attention is its different stages are:

The bubble tube

Reflective Ball

Projector Figures

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Fiber Optics

Aroma diffuser

Background music

With these stimuli can work as follows:

PRACTICE:

1.1 With closed eyes (this helps to focus attention on a single stimulus) to discriminate different sounds: high, low, loud, soft. What I hear; what do I remember? what makes me feel?

Eyes closed: discriminate different fragrances.

1.2 Musical Instruments

With eyes closed, listening to music and move to the beat. We make gentle movements, involving many body parts as possible.

1.3 We hit gently with fingertips, our source, our ears, our pear, the tips of our noses and we see the same patter is felt and perceived in different ways

Observed for a certain amount of time the projections generated by a projected figure. The goal is for the client to achieve rule out other stimuli that interfere with the activity at the time and develop focused attention.

1.4-With eyes closed, discriminate textures, shapes, sizes of different elements.

1.5-With closed ears feel the vibrations produced the music or different sounds.

1.6-In silence, recognize and feel the sounds and movements of the body.

2. Memory:

It is the ability of the SNC to establish, organize and update (recall) and / or acknowledge our psychic past events.

To work this feature you can: (PRACTICE)

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2.1-Observe and try to memorize the sequence of colours of different elements that show in colour sequence, and then sequentially changing the figures.

Working with closed eyes and feeling with the hands and / or feet different elements and textures. Then try to remember that elements touched.

2.2 We get in front of a person and created our own mirror.

a) Establish sequences of moves, then we come back and create the same sequence without looking.

b) Establish sequences of sounds with various parts of our body according to the sound used is the movement that our body responds.

c) Play a sequence of sounds while doing a move. Then, while hearing a sound, you have to say what movement to do.

3. Language and understanding

Upon exposure to different stimuli promote dialogue and sharing experience: What do I see? What do I hear? How do I feel? Is there music? How is the music? What makes me remember?

The notions that may work are:

PRACTICE

3.1-UP-DOWN: I lie on the floor and stand up. Take my arms up when I hear a sound of nature; down when I do not listen.

Perceiving a before and after: observe and remember colours sequence. Which comes first? What comes next? After work in the room we remember what we did when we enter? Then what happened? What happened first?

Notions of time, space, quantity.

Exploration of space: I travel as I can / want the space of the room. ¿ Is it big or small? ¿What spaces do I know as big as this? ¿Would enter here a bike, a car, a train?

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3.2- Inside- outside: an imaginary circle, game in and out. I take out balls and put them back. What part of my body is in and what out?

Notions of quantity, order.

3.3Practice: Put an element next to another in horizontal line.

3.4 For the vertical space: I stand by my partner and compare my height. I am taller? I am lower? ¿ How much I lack to attain it? What other things do I know as high as him? Who is highest and lowest in the room?

3.5- Handling in two directions: when music sounds I walk forward. When music goes away I walk backwards.

3.6- My partner walks forward and I walk in the opposite direction.

It is important to anticipate the time remaining in the work of the room so they can go incorporating and understanding the use of time.

4. Motor

PRACTICE

4.1-Walk across the room to the beat of the music. When it stops I stand still in place.

4.2- Walk. When the music stops I touch my nose; when the music continues I touch my ears and sit in the place of a fellow, greet a fellow ... view setpoint change.

4.3- With eyes closed, go pointing different parts of the body, or discover where a stimulus perches. (example; a ball in hand).

Imitation of gestures and poses in front of the mirror.

These activities promote self-knowledge and thus develop greater self-esteem and greater self-reliance.

Overall conclusions

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“A TRIP BETWEEN EDUCATIBILITY AND BODY EXPRESSION IN MULTISENSORY ENVIRONMENTS”

Speaking of educability necessarily speak of human beings capable of learning, the educability is conceived as a tool that allows you to receive influences and act accordingly. The Educability is inherent to human nature.

For this human condition is that man can learn. But learning has to be meaningful of experiences that allow building knowledge from the choice and discovery. The learner becomes the protagonist of their learning.

Coinciding with Paulo Freire, "the human being is fundamentally subject and object of education: men and women are educable to the extent that they are recognized as unfinished, in need of a transformative praxis". "Education, freed from all the alienating features, should be a force enabler of change and momentum is freedom."

In Multisensory Stimulation, the person builds his Life Project under the principle of non-directivity, i.e., the person choose what actions want to perform from sensory experience. In this way, we can communicate with the other, "to educate the other," from his inner self-nature, according to their desires, expectations, needs, and not from our vision of imposing knowledge no other choice. "To deny this possibility so obvious leads unfortunately to restrict environmental stimuli."

Since the pedagogue of liberation, Paulo Freire, expressed about education: "The claim that things are so because they cannot be otherwise is hideously fatalistic"; "The question is how to transform difficulties into opportunities," Education needs both technical, scientific and professional dreams and utopia".

In Multisensorials or Snoezelen rooms, seeks to create an enabling environment for people participation, autonomy, independence, their capacity of choosing. "An environment that allows them through the sensory experience itself establishes communication with the environment." "It seeks to strengthen the development favouring the integration of sensory information they receive, thereby assisting their learning and their relationship to the environment because the way the discovery is working in an atmosphere of encouragement, where exploration is provided, and enjoy

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different sensory experiences. Wanted a sensory awakening itself through sensory experience ..."

Prof. Ana María Gonzalez Galli