Discard role: 3 May 2010 cover of the New Yorker
The May 3 2010 cover of the New Yorker illustrates the discard role: it’s an image of a man in a rocking chair put out at the curb with other trash. His wife (presumably) looks on from the door of a their house.
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Day 1 of personalism workshop
Today was day 1 of the 3 day workshop on the philosophy of personalism, taught by Dr. Wolfensberger, Susan Thomas, Tom Doody, Jo Massarelli and myself. Today we discussed some of the leading figures of personalism, a history of the developments which the early personalist thinkers were reacting against, and a description of what person means. A good start to our workshop. More to follow.
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Blog posting about April 2010 Wolfensberger article
This recent blog posting by Judy Horton comments on Wolfensberger’s April 2010 American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities article entitled “How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources.”
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online resource: Southern Ontario Training Group
The Southern Ontario Training Group hosts SRV and related workshops across Ontario.
Tweet“Keeping Nan at the centre of her life”
Jane Sherwin wrote this insightful article telling a story about her grandmother, and what a difference thinking about valued roles makes in terms of how we perceive others and what good things of life we make available to others. (By the way, the June 2010 issue of the SRV Journal will have a column on the power of storytelling and SRV.)
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Language/imagery: ‘homeless bums’
In a debate about adding attacks against homeless people under existing hate crime legislation, Rep. Paige Kreegle, R-Punta Gorda (Florida, US) referred to homeless people as ‘bums.’ From the article:
Kreegle then noted that he liked to read the police blotter in his newspaper, where he noticed crimes committed against “homeless bums.”
“They tend to be perpetrated not by members of the Legislature or women and children but mainly by other homeless bums,” Kreegle said.
By comparison, another representative (Ari Porth) said about the homeless that
“Nobody is more vulnerable … They have no place to retreat to. They don’t have a home to retreat to and be safe in.”
As we teach in Social Role Valorization, such language reflects individual and societal mind sets, as well as communicates role expectancies and images.
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Alliance for the Mentally Ill
Social Role Valorization teaches us to consider the image messages sent by certain practices, including how we name our services and programs. We should consider for example: Do service names send messages that the people served are more like socially valued people or more unlike? Do program names send messages that the people served are competent or are incompetent? Do service names send messages that the people served are in valued roles or in devalued roles? And so on.
One PASSING rating (R1432 Serving entity, program, setting, and location names) explicitly covers this issue (Wolfensberger, W. and Thomas, S. (2007). PASSING: A tool for analyzing service quality according to Social Role Valorization criteria (3rd rev. ed.) Syracuse, NY: Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership and Change Agentry (Syracuse University)).
SRV and PASSING also help train us to look for the presence or the lack of consciousness behind any particular service practice, including how we name our services.
A recent example: I read an obituary a few weeks ago for Mrs. Harriet Shetler, 92 years old. The obituary reported that Mrs. Shetler helped
start a national organization to address mental health needs.
The obituary went on to report that
Mrs. Shetler suggested a name, Alliance for the Mentally Ill, partly because its acronym meant ‘friend’ in French.
Acronyms are one element, though not the only element, to consider when looking at service and program names from an SRV perspective.
According to the obituary, Mrs. Shetler died on March 30, and her husband died on March 21.
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What about George?
Thanks to Bill Forman for bringing this article to my attention. This NY Times article would be a good basis for an instructive exercise on valued and devalued roles, imagery, language, competency or heightened vulnerability, for example. It could be used as an exercise in an SRV workshop, an agency staff meeting, a college class, and so on.
In my experience, it is good to separate (as we do in a PASSING workshop) information gathering from information analysis. You might ask people to read the article, circle or highlight relevant words and phrases (i.e., information gathering) and then analyze what the article says in light of valued and devalued roles, or in light of valued and devalued images, etc. (i.e., information analysis).
A few excerpts from the article:
Mr. Kramer — George to me — is my second cousin, and he has worked at Kramer’s Hardware, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for 58 years. He has a developmental disability, which is obvious to people who meet him, but he also has a rare and less apparent ability: Like the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for the film “Rain Man,” George, 71, has a powerful memory for dates and numbers and facts. If you tell him your birthday, he can tell you what day it will fall on two years in the future. He studies phone directories and atlases in his spare time. As one relative recently put it to me, “If you drop him in Oshkosh or anywhere, he’ll find his way home.”
On the surface, a run-down hardware shop in Flatbush might seem an odd place for a person like George to thrive. But if you set aside the sheets of pegboard and the metal cabinets and the key-making machine, what is left are hundreds and hundreds of small, obscure utilitarian objects, many almost identical to the casual observer. George can identify each nut and bolt and screw on sight, as Mr. Abraham’s test was intended to show, and he knows where, exactly, in the store it is kept. He can tell you its cost. And he can tell you the name — and often the phone number — of the company that made it.
His command of the inventory is such that Mr. Abraham has never had to invest in a computer to track it. “My reliance on him is mind-boggling,” Mr. Abraham said.
————–
“I saw that George was an asset,” Mr. Abraham said. “In the medical terminology they might call him autistic, but I immediately called him a genius.”
Mr. Abraham promised David that he would never need to worry about his son, and he says he repeated the promise 12 years later, when David, on his deathbed, asked about George one last time.
“If I shine shoes on Broadway,” Mr. Abraham said he told him, “he’ll be shining shoes next to me.”
——————–
When I brought up the prospect of retirement with George, he told me that he, too, had been giving it some thought. But when I asked what he might do with his time, all he said was, “I don’t know yet.”
He was facing away as he spoke, toward the store window, with its charmless view of Coney Island Avenue and the auto-body shops and apartment buildings beyond. As usual, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Nevertheless, it seems likely that, someday soon, he will wake in the morning and have no gates to open, no customers to greet, no shovels or wrenches or Gerber faucets to sell. All of it will be gone.
But not forgotten.
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Online resource: website for Alberta Safeguards Foundation
Occasionally I will post regarding an online resource relevant to Social Role Valorization. Here is a link to the Alberta Safeguards Foundation, a group that sponsors SRV workshops as well as workshops by Dr. Wolfensberger.
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Reflect on roles: access to the good things of life
Occasionally, we will post a question/reflection on social roles. Roles are obviously a fulcrum point for understanding, teaching and applying Social Role Valorization. It can be helpful to think about one’s own roles as a way of better understanding the power of roles (valued and devalued) in the lives of vulnerable and socially devalued people. We recommend reflecting on, writing about and discussing these ‘reflections on roles’ posts rather than just reading them once. We encourage you to post your reflections and suggestions for future role reflections.
On to the first reflection: A key point in SRV is that valued roles bring greater access to the good things of life. What good things of life do your valued roles bring to you?
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