Published on 12, July, 2020
I specialise in teaching non-verbal communication skills with ASD children. I have 10 years of teaching experience but I’m finding that schools don’t put enough emphasis on this and using AAC with ASD (as well as a variety of other disorders). I’d like to hear anyone’s views including parents about this as I would love to be able to use my knowledge to help set these up within the family setting.
I have had great feedback from current and previous parents within the school setting but many didn’t know about the options available until I had their children in my classroom. Is this true of all areas or only schools I have worked in? Is there a demand for such a service?
Thanks
I have great difficulty with non-verbal communication - I see faces but as their expressions change so rapidly, I can't spot the default state which means I can't work out the smaller changes which carry so much information. It's a continually changing set of photos that have no story linking them together. I spend so long analysing each photo that I get backed-up and run out of processing ability.
This is ok for a lot of 'data transfer' conversations like "What have you been doing recently?" or " How was your holiday?" but useless for when people are talking about feelings or personal / relationship things.
Luckily, I've always worked in all-male engineering environments so my limitations were easy to hide - blokes don't tend to do fluffy 'feelings' conversations.
I spot large, obvious body language movements but nothing subtle.
I really don't see that I could be taught to be better at it all because it seems to be a data processing problem - sort of a hardware limitation rather than a set of rules limitation.
I have no experience of teaching kids so I've no idea how effective this training could be.
No, I don’t think we can be taught to be better at reading body language. Well we probably could, but it’s not easy so we would have to have a very big desire to do so. I have tried, on several occasions, but I never got anywhere with it, apart from thinking that everyone who scratches their nose is lying! ~ so I don’t even try now. And I don’t do personal feelings or relationship types of conversations either, I don’t recognise my own emotions so there’s no chance of me spotting them in someone else, and if someone cries in front of me, I don’t have a clue what to do beyond walking away or asking if they can do that at another time or place, one where I’m not there!!!!
I’m not sure this post is about learning to read body language though. But it might be. I just took it as being about different ways of communicating other than using verbal language.