The «tailored» model for the creation of ad hoc workshops based on users’ needs
Simonetta Lumachi
The «tailored» model comes from the need to put referred individuals at the centre of the education programme creation process, first by obtaining precise «measurements» regarding their areas of competence and only after that identifying the workshops and groups they can be placed in. Tailored projects depart from the actual, real needs children or adolescents have in a determined moment in their life. The subject’s wellbeing, in their world, in that precise moment of their existence, usually conditions the aims and methodologies of the intervention, offering «ecological» activities which can be spent daily with their family or peers. Amongst the various workshops the association currently runs, this article highlights the importance that the family’s request for «adaptation» to normal everyday activities had in their creation, design and running. Like, for example Preparing for First Communion, a workshop which, while seeming unimaginative at first, turns out to be extremely useful for participating in similar or better still «shared» experiences with peers.
Keywords
Autism, Augmentative and Alternative Communication, inclusion, «tailored» workshop model, First Communion.