Teaching Personal Space to Children With Disabilities

Teaching Personal Space to Children With Disabilities   Children with disabilities, especially children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, have difficulty understanding and appropriately using personal space.  Its importance is significant since many of these young people when they reach adolescence, become particularly vulnerable to assault or predation because they are unaware of the social and emotional boundaries that are important in the general public.   Deep Pressure Some Children with ASD are what we call deep pressure, and they seek as much sensory input as they can get.  They will throw their arms around not only significant adults in their lives but sometimes to complete strangers.  I worked 5 years ago as a volunteer at a camp at Torino Ranch, maintained by the Torino Foundation.  Ã‚  When my camper came off the bus he threw his arms around me (we had never met,) and I ticked off deep pressure kid, which led to four days of success.  I used that sensory need to keep him calm and appropriate.  Still, these students need to learn appropriate interaction.   The Science of Personal Space Proximics, or the science of personal space, explores how we as humans and as social and ethnic groups use the space around us.  Research has found that in a typical person the amygdala responds negatively to the invasion of personal space.  Research has not been definitive on the effect of population density on the size of personal space, as reported by anthropologists, but this writer has experienced it.  In Paris, in 1985, I attended a concert at the Place de Concord.  There were somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 thousand people there.  Someone started to push at the outside (Word was out that they were thugs [clouchards].)  Amazingly, after several minutes of chanting Assis! Assis! (sit down) we sat down.  Probably a couple of thousand people.  I looked at an American Friend and said: In America, we would have had a fist fight. This, of course, is why its important for special education students to understand personal space.  Students with autism may resist everyone entering their personal space, but all too often their amygdala is not firing when someone comes into their space, and we know they cant understand another persons desire for personal space.   There are three things needed to help them learn this: A metaphor that can help them understand personal space.Modeling to show how we use personal space andExplicit instruction in the use of personal space.   The Metaphor: The Magic Bubble Typical children and typical human beings are able to write their own meta-narrative, the story of their life.  Face it, when a woman gets married she often has a lifetime of plans dancing in her head about the perfect wedding (or her mothers dream.)  Children with disabilities, especially children with autism spectrum disorders, are unable to write those meta-narratives.  That is why Social Stories (TM) or Social Narratives (my name) are so powerful.  They use visual images, a story and often the childs own name.  I will be changing the name in the original document for the children I will use it with. I created the social narrative, Jeffies Magic Bubble, to support students with autism spectrum disorders.  It uses the metaphor a magic bubble to define the invisible space around each of us that is also called personal space.  Children with disabilities love to play with bubbles, so using it as a metaphor will provide a visible understanding of what that space is like.   Modeling Once the model is established by reading the book, make a game of magic bubbles.  Have children spin and identify the edge of their bubbles (arms length is a good compromise between intimate and familiar personal space.) Practice welcoming others into their magic bubbles by putting hands out and greeting others with a handshake. Hi, Im Jeffie.  Nice to meet you.   Make a game of Magical Bubbles by giving students clickers and having others come as close as they can without stepping inside another childs personal bubble.  The student in their Magic Bubble will click when they think the other student or students enter their bubble. Explicit Instruction Read the book Jeffies Magic Bubble aloud as a group.  If students need individual instruction (so they are better at paying attention to personal space) you will want to read it to those students over and over again.   After reading each page, have students practice:  when you get to crossing arms and hands on hips, have them practice.  When you read about Jeffie saying NO!  practice saying NO!  Practice asking friends for a hug.   Be sure that you recognize students who respect each others personal space.  You might want each child to have a magic bubble chart.  Hand out stickers or stars for each time you catch them asking to enter another childs space, or asking another student politely to move outside of their personal space.

The Moundbuilder Myth Debunked

The Moundbuilder Myth Debunked The Moundbuilder myth is a story believed, wholeheartedly, by Euroamericans in North America well into the last decades of the 19th and even into the 20th century. The central myth was that indigenous people who lived in what is today the United States were incapable of engineering of the thousands of prehistoric earthworks found by the newcomers and must have been built by some other race of people. That myth served as justification for the plan to exterminate Native Americans and take their property. It was debunked in the late 19th century. Key Takeaways: Moundbuilder Myth The Moundbuilder Myth was created in the mid-19th century to explain a disconnect within the thought processes of Euroamerican settlers.  The settlers appreciated the thousands of mounds on their new properties, but could not bear to credit mound construction to the Native American people they were displacing.  The myth credited the mounds to a fictional race of beings which had been driven out by the Native American residents.  The Moundbuilder Myth was disproven in the late 1880s.  Many thousands of earthen mounds were purposefully destroyed after the myth was dispelled. Early Explorations and the Mound Builders The earliest expeditions of Europeans into the Americas were by the Spanish who found living, vigorous and advanced civilizations- the Inca, the Aztecs, the Maya all had versions of state societies. The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto even found the true mound builders, when he visited the chiefdoms of the Mississippians running their sophisticated communities from Florida to the Mississippi River between 1539–1546. Circa 1540, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (c.1500–1542) and his men journey across America on one of their expeditions in search of treasure. Original Artwork: Painting by Frederic Remington. MPI / Stringer / Getty Images But the English who came to North America convinced themselves first that the people already inhabiting the land they were settling were literally descended from the Canaanites from Israel. As the European colonization moved westward, the newcomers continued to meet Native people some of whom were already devastated by diseases, and they began to find thousands of examples of massive earthworks- very tall mounds like Cahokias Monks Mound in Illinois, as well as mound groups, and mounds in various geometric shapes, spiral mounds, and bird and other animal effigies. The Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, built and used by the Adena people between 800 BCE and 400 CE. This protected historical earthworks is nearly a quarter of a mile long and represents a giant snake holding an egg in its jaws. Photo by MPI/Getty Images A Myth is Born The earthworks encountered by the Europeans were a source of great fascination to the new settlers- but only after they convinced themselves that the mounds had to have been built by a superior race, and that couldnt be the Native Americans. Because the new Euroamerican settlers could not, or did not want to, believe that the mounds had been built by the Native American peoples they were displacing as fast as they could, some of them- including the scholarly community- began to formulate a theory of the lost race of mound builders. The moundbuilders were said to be a race of superior beings, perhaps one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, or ancestors of Mexicans, who were killed off by later people. Some amateur excavators of the mounds claimed that the skeletal remains in them were of very tall individuals, who certainly could not be Native Americans. Or so they thought. Restored Mississippian palisaded mound group at Aztalan State Park in Wisconsin, fancifully named for the ancient home town of the Aztecs. MattGush / iStock / Getty Images Plus It was never an official government policy that the engineering feats were made by someone other than the indigenous residents, but the theory did bolster arguments supporting the manifest destiny of European desires. Many of the earliest settlers of the midwest were at least initially proud of the earthworks on their properties and did much to preserve them. Debunking the Myth By the late 1870s, however, scholarly research led by Cyrus Thomas (1825–1910) of the Smithsonian Institution and Frederick Ward Putnam (1839–1915) of the Peabody Museum reported conclusive evidence that there was no physical difference between the people buried in the mounds and modern Native Americans. Subsequent DNA research has proven that time and again.  Scholars then and today recognized that the ancestors of modern Native Americans were responsible for all of the prehistoric mound constructions in North America. Unintended Consequences Members of the public were harder to convince, and if you read county histories into the 1950s, you will still see stories about the Lost Race of Moundbuilders. Scholars did their best to convince people that the Native Americans were the architects of the mounds, by giving lecture tours and publishing newspaper stories. That effort backfired. Unfortunately, once the myth of a Lost Race was dispelled, the settlers lost interest in the mounds, and many if not most of the thousands of mounds in the American midwest were destroyed as settlers simply plowed away the evidence that a civilized, intelligent and capable people had been driven from their rightful lands. Selected Sources Clark, Mallam. R. The Mound Builders:  An American Myth. Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society 23 (1976): 145–75. Print.Denevan, William M. The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82.3 (1992): 369–85. Print.Mann, Rob. Intruding on the Past: The Reuse of Ancient Earthen Mounds by Native Americans. Southeastern Archaeology 24.1 (2005): 1–10. Print.McGuire, Randall H. Archeology and the First Americans. American Anthropologist 94.4 (1992): 816–36. Print.Peet, Stephen D. Comparison of the Effigy Builders with the Modern Indians. American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 17 (1895): 19–43. Print.Trigger, Bruce G. Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian. American Antiquity 45.4 (1980): 662–76. Print.Watkins, Joe. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2000. Print.Wymer, Dee Anne. On the Edge of the Secular and the Sacred: Hopewell Mound-Builder Archaeology in Context. Antiquity 90.350 (2016): 532–34. Print.