Hand-under-Hand

Slide 1

Hi. Welcome everybody. This is Susan Bashinski. Thank you for the opportunity to talk with teachers, families about hand- under-hand strategies for teaching learners who have deaf-blindness.
Slide 2

Start with a general caveat, that I will say to you, more than once today, this is the first clue that, okay, if Susan says something to us more than once, she thinks it's really important. So hopefully I won't bore you, or annoy you, with repeating myself, but I think this first slide at which you're looking right now, is just so critically important. For a child who is deaf blind, that child's hands are comparable to the eyes of a child who can see. And certainly, a child's hands serve more functions than just the functions our eyes do for us who are fortunate enough to be able to use our vision, but that's the most critical piece of the information we're going to talk about today. That the hands of a child who is deaf blind are comparable to the eyes of a child who can see. You might tend to think that, well, hands are hands. Everybody's hands are the same. Some hands are big, some hands are small. But I would challenge you to think about that as we go through the information today. And I'll try to give you some different dimensions to consider as you think about that.
Slide 3
For a learner who has deaf-blindness, her hands really can be used to serve all these functions, and probably more, but these are the ones that I think are most critical. For a learner who has deafblindness, her hands can be used as her eyes for as we-- when we drop something off a table, we look down with our eyes to find it, then we might lean over and pick it up. For a child with extremely low vision or a child who is blind, when she drops something off a table, she feels the edge of the table. She searches with her hand that it's gone so she's going to have to get down on the floor and with her hands search the way we search with our vision to find that object that she dropped. So her hands can be used as her eyes.
Tools. A learner has deafblindness, her hands can be used as tools. This is much more similar to how you and I use our hands. We use our hands to open jars. We use our hands to dial a phone. We use our hands to open doors, to zip up zippers, to do all of those things. And kids with deafblindness do that too. You might say, "So why is it on here then?" Well I think it's important to represent all of the various really important dimensions that hands serve. Our hands do serve as tools primarily. They help use type. They help us dial phones. They help instant message. They help us do all our stuff. But for kids with deafblindness, their hands have to that and so many more things. So dexterity and hand use and fatigue and skin breakdown and all the other different things that might be considerations for a learners hands, we just have to add one more straw to the pile of what kids hands have to do for them if they have label of deafblind.
Stress relievers. You guys can do this, right? How many different things do we do with our hands to relieve stress? We use stress balls. We pick at our clothing. We twist our hair. Whatever we do. We fidget. Some people say, "Oh we self-stimulate. We do stereotypies." But a lot of those kinds of repetitive movements we do are trying to calm ourselves, to relieve stress, to keep our anxiety down. Once again, that's not necessarily in any way, shape, or form a function of hands that is unique to children who are deaf and blind or who have that label, but it's just one more thing their hands have to do for them. So it might be-- again every child is unique, every child is different-- but it might be the case that you see a child with whom you're working, or if you're a parent maybe your own child, does head banging or does weird stims with her feet or her legs or something. You might go, "Why in the world are they doing that? That's so strange. I don't understand." Maybe it's just because they need to do something with some part of their body other than their hands because their hands are so darn busy being eyes and ears and voice and tools and everything else that they have to be. Just possibilities to think about.


Slide 4
 
At this point, I am going to introduce an activity that, when I have the opportunity to present this hand-under-hand information in person, I always stop and do this activity with the folks right on the spot. We don't have that luxury today, but I would like to set the activity up. Once we get it set up, if you are watching the webinar with another person, please stop, pause the recording, and try this for just a few minutes. If you've never done something like this before, I think it will open a whole new window of understanding on some of the challenges that our children, teenagers, young adults with deaf-blindness face. So I want you to take turns. You need to do in twos, so if four of you are watching, get two pair of two. If three of you are watching, you can do a round-robin thing, but only two people play at a time. And one person is going to be a learner who has deaf-blindness. So close your eyes really tightly. I can get you to shut down your visual stimuli. I can't ask you to put your earplugs in your ears because you probably don't have them, but to try to make this as pure a simulation as we can, if the people in the room with you could not talk. Just shut down all conversation so that there's not auditory input, there's not visual input, because the learner's going to keep the eyes closed tightly. The second person is going to be the partner of the learner with deaf-blindness.
As a partner, you might be a parent. You might a mom or a dad. You might be a brother. You might be a teacher. You might be an intervener, someone who's been employed by a school district to help interpret the world in context for a child with deaf-blindness. But the main rule for the partner is no talking. So we want the learner's eyes closed and nobody talk. And the whole purpose of the activity is simply get to know one another's hands. Now, you might say, "Susan, this is really creepy. This is really strange." Of course, if it makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to do it. But then I would challenge you to say, "Okay, if this thought of exploring the hands of a person with whom you're well-enough acquainted to watch this webinar together makes you feel uncomfortable, how does that translate to a learner, young child, elementary-school- age child, teenager, young adult, who is deaf-blind, whom other people are grabbing with their hands, even if it's for instructional purposes, all day long? Even if it's family members are touching that person with hands all evening long, all weekend long. Just think about it. I don't think there's a right thing to say or a wrong thing to say, but I want you to try.
What we're trying to do is put yourself in that learner's shoes.

What I think you will find as you just hold each other's hands, explore each other's hands, hands are all different sizes. If you're an adult and you're working with toddlers, the most obvious thing you're going to encounter is your hands are one heck of a lot bigger than your learner's hands are. It's size of the hands. It's how much mobility, how weathered they are. For a family who runs a farming operation, their hands are likely to be calloused. The skin will be of a different texture than those of us-- or those folks who work in a massage parlor and have soft things, soft lotions and things on their hands all day long. And people have short fingernails and long fingernails and they wear a lot of rings or they don't wear rings or just all those kinds of things that those of us who can see typically don't think about. So I just to explore and get to know one another's hands. It shouldn't take very long. And after you do that, come back and join us and move to the next slide.


Slide 5

I hope you tried that activity because I would love to hear some thoughts about what she felt. Was it strange? Was it fun? Was it interesting? If nothing else, I hope it was at least interesting and possibly eye-opening for you.
So now, we want to talk about a couple of different phrases that are connected to strategy and that upon first blush you might say, "Oh, that's the same" or "Those are the same." And what I'm challenging you to think about today is, no, they're really not. I'm referring to hand-under-hand strategies, which is what we're focused on in this webinar, and hand-over-hand strategies, which I'm guessing some of you, if you've worked in the field of deaf-blindness - worked with a learner, been a parent of a child, a teenager with deaf-blindness - you've heard that term before. I hope that at the conclusion of our discussion today, you will have a clear understanding of the differences between hand-under-hand strategies and hand- over-hand strategies, and we'll start with a definition.
The strategy involves positioning your hands - you as the parent, you as the teacher, you as the intervener, you as the partner of a learner with deaf-blindness - you position your hands under the learner's palms. So when you're going to do
 
signing, you're going to do an assist to help pick something up, move something away, sign finished, gesture to come for help - whatever you're going to do, you're going to support the leaner's hands from underneath the learner's palm. But you're going to support the child, the teenager's hands from underneath. And if your hands are much, much larger than the learner's hands, you especially want to come from the outside of the learner's hands and support the child's hands underneath the fourth and fifth fingers - the ring finger and the pinky - because you need to leave the child some little bit of control if your hands are so much larger than the other hands. Hand-under-hand strategy involves gently guiding the learner's hands through an action or a manual sign. Let's do some contrasts.
Slide 6
We're going to consider hand over hand. This strategy involves holding the learner's hand by positioning your hand over the back of the learner's hand. Okay, we've got a lot of pronouns going on in there. So let me say, this strategy of hand over hand involves a parent, a teacher, an intervener, a peer that's going to be communicating manually with the learner. That partner puts his or her hands over the back of the learner's hands, and the adult, the partner, the peer physically manipulates the learner's hands through an action or through a manual sign by putting hands over the top or over the back of the learner's hands. So when you're going to try to pick up a pen with your hands over the back of the learner's hands, you're going to squeeze the child's hands to pick it up or to move an object or to put cubes into a bucket or pass out papers or do whatever it is. Pull the reins on a horse, whatever it is that you're going to do.
Hand under hand, your hands are under the learner's palms. Hand over hand, your hands are over the back of the learner's hands.


Slide 7
So once again, I'm hoping, hoping, hoping that you're watching this webinar with another person. This will be the last activity to which I try to direct you today. We will continue on. But if you are watching with someone else, I'd like to explain this activity, I'd like you to pause your recording, and give this a shot. Once again, as with the last activity, I want you to take turns, one of you be the learner who has deaf-blindness, and one of you be the partner. And I want you to experiment-- in those same roles, I want you to experiment with both hand-over-hand and hand-under-hand and just see how they feel.
What I'm suggesting to you, and what I kind of would like you to watch out for, is that I think when you are playing the role of the learner with deaf-blindness, you will feel a much greater sense of control when your partner uses hand-under-hand because when another person's hands are under yours, if you want to get away from that person, it's really a simple thing to do. You just lift your hands up and off of the partner's hands. They don't have a grip on you. They don't have a grasp over the back of your hand. I think when you're being the learner in this interaction, you will see that it feels more secure, or you feel more trusting because you feel more in control.
Bottom-line, that's what this is all about, right? To teach the kids who have deaf-blindness that they have power in the world, they have ability to influence the world, to influence other people. They are not being solely manipulated by the other people in the world. So this notion of control and freedom and even the ability to escape, if you will, is really, really important. It goes a very long way. I think we really can't accurately estimate what it does in helping to establish a trusting relationship between a learner with deaf-blindness and an intervener or a teacher. So after you try that, one being a learner, one being an interaction partner, trying both over hand and under hand, then switch roles. Please switch roles and then again, try hand-over-hand and hand-under-hand. Making a sign, picking up something, giving a gesture. And just in your mind and with one another as long as you want to talk about how those two felt. Did they feel the same? Did you feel freer? Did you feel more secure? What felt better to you? Which would you choose? To those of you who tried the activity thank you very much. To those of you who have not yet been able to try the activity because you're watching alone, I hope you made a couple of notes, or you'll backup and make a couple of notes, and as soon as you can wrangle somebody to try these things with you, maybe another person who's on the learners’ team at your school, I really hope that you will try to do that.
 
Slide 8


For the rest of our time together today, we are just going to talk about hand-under-hand strategies, what those are all about, how you might try implementing them. There are a couple of things that are pretty standard, and they are what you see on your screen right now. If a partner's hands are positioned palms up - if you're sitting across from a child, and you as a partner have your palms up, even if your hands are resting on the child's legs or resting on the child's wheelchair tray or lap desk - the partner is actually telling the learner, "I'm ready to listen to you." And you can even show the child, you can put your hands under the child's if you want, with your palms up, if they can't see you, they can't feel from your hands on their leg. If you as the partner have your hands positioned palms up, you're sending the message, "I'm ready to listen to you.
Whatever it is you want to say, you want to do, I'm all ears." If you, as a partner, are positioned palms down - either palms down, again, on the learner's leg, on the learner's forearms, on the learner's desk, you might have to "show" by touch, the learner, which way your hands are positioned.
If your hands are positioned palms down, you, as a partner, are saying to the learner, "I'm ready to talk to you. I need to tell you something. I'm ready to sign to you. Get ready." And then with your hands positioned palms down, then you can slide your hands under the learner's hand and begin the sign. So palms up, palms down. Very simple, but very strategic cueing system. Now, some of you might be saying, "Well, my learner, or my daughter, my son, doesn't know that. I don't know that." Absolutely not. I agree with you. These two skills that are on your screen right now, those are skills that have to be taught. If you've never tried hand-under-hand with a learner, or a learner hasn't had any purposeful, plan-full instruction, these are skills that have to be learned. They have to be practiced and demonstrated and reinforced. But through repetitive practice, the kids will get the idea. Once again, in going back to one of the first slides, because the child's hands - the child has blindness - the child's hands are eyes, ears, tools, voice, everything. It won't take all that long and all that many opportunities, in most cases, to help them get the idea, "Palms up means I'm ready to listen to you. Palms down means I need to talk to you. I need to give you a direction. I need to tell you what to do.
Slide 9
This is a quote that when Barbara Miles talks about hand-under-hand strategy. I heard her say one time, "Would you ever put your fingers into the eyes of a child who has vision to direct her attention to something?" And of course, you're saying, "No [laughter]." Of course, we would never do that. Again, I think a lot of what contributes to making hand-under-hand strategies successful is the respectfulness, the honoring the child's dignity, the honoring on the child's personal space, that this kind of an approach communicates not only to that learner but to the people around who watch you interacting with that learner. And I think that in a very dramatic way this quote just puts into words that notion of being respectful and honoring the dignity and the life space of the child with deaf-blindness, the teenager with deaf-blindness. When you are incorporating hand-under-hand strategy, it frees up the learner's hands. Your hands might be right there, palms up or palms down, palms up if you're listening, so that learner could get your hands, or even if you put your hands, palms down so you need to talk, we've already said the learner can escape that. The learner has control. The learner can lift her hands off of your hands.
And that's really what the last part of this slide is all about. It frees up the learner's hands, so they may be used at the learner's discretion for safety, for self-stim, for communication, for protection, to perform some skill. If you had a hold of a kid's hand, hand-over-hand, and that child felt unsafe, even if she's in a sitting position, she's standing, feels her balance is going out of control, she's losing her balance, you all know kids with significant vision loss struggle with balance, that child wants to be able to put her hands out to feel safe, to catch herself, to balance herself. Well, if you're hanging onto her hand, hand-over-hand, she can't get free possibly to do that. So for safety purposes, if she feels like she's losing her balance, bang, she just slips her hand off the back of your hand, puts it on the floor, puts it on the table, puts it on the side of the chair.
If when you're asking the child-- you're doing manual signing with the child, tactile signing, and you're trying to do a math lesson, or a literacy lesson, a braille lesson, and it's just challenging, it's just too hard, and the kid's anxiety level is climbing,
 
maybe you're doing an end of grade assessment or a state assessment, and the kid's starting to freak out because it's hard and she wants a break, and if you've got her hands hand-over-hand she can't get away from you to flap a little bit, or push at her forehead, or do whatever she needs to do to do a little self-stim to get that anxiety out. Because we've said, hands are stress revilers. And you get the notion of this. The learner's hands are her hands, and she needs to maintain the greatest degree of control of them to perform any of these functions on your screen or any others that you can imagine.


END OF KS 7