Facilitated Communication Analysis

This article talks about facilitated communication and the discussion around the validity of it. Facilitated communication is a form of help given to people with mental disabilities and difficulty communicating with a person who acts almost like the medium to help disabled person to type and etc by holding their hand. In other words, the facilitator provides physical support to people who has trouble communicating so they can convey or express themselves by typing it out or by pointing at letter display. The origins of facilitated communication stems back to the 1970s with Rosemary Crossley. Her theory and logic behind the use of facilitated communication, like many others, was that people with disabilities did not automatically mean their intelligence was lower than people without disabilities, but that people with disabilities just have more trouble expressing themselves and just need support to help them communicate. Thus, Crossley began to test out her theory by lifting their arms so they can point at pictures or letters. Her conclusion was that even though some children did not have prior knowledge of certain subjects, they still were able to understand it. With any theory comes

Reading this article about facilitated communication reminded me of the time I tutored kids. Whenever I would check homework and my students made a mistake, I found myself hunting the answer to them. For example, if they answered a question wrong for reading, I would go over the whole excerpt with them. For most of the article, I would look at the reading but when the sentence containing for the answer came up I would just look at them to see if they were paying attention. Then, they would get the hint that that was probably the answer. I was thinking that maybe the facilitators were like me and unconsciously didn’t want their person or students,in my case, to get anything wrong so you would change up your tone or movement to have the other person get the hint to what is