East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. Rudyard Kipling
I once stayed in a hotel in Bangkok with my then twelve-year-old daughter. It was a very comfortable hotel, with courteous and welcoming Thai staff; uncomfortable, in that we found ourselves to be in the same hotel with quite a few demanding Australians. Years later, she worked and lived in a village in the South of India with young Australian volunteers. Yes, there are loudmouth Australian tourists – and generous and culturally sensitive Australians working in the Third World.
Being overwhelmed by a foreign culture is often called culture shock. Less studied is its twin, reverse culture shock. One example is that my daughter was shocked to see Australians behaving rudely to their hosts in a foreign country. Another instance is that many expats find it challenging to readjust to their home culture, that is the psychological, emotional and cultural aspects of re-entry.
One of the after-effects of a traumatic acquired brain injury is in part a severe reverse culture shock. There is no way to prepare for it. The home-grown routine is what we want and what we need, it can provide structure to your day. I used to wonder if I would ever return to my routines, including the way I approached things.
Here is the reality: you won’t. We are forever expats to our own former life.
Maybe there are some good things about it – I have heard it all, facing challenges blah blah – but in my experience, without our usual routines, we have to tip-toe through a dangerous minefield.
Perhaps I am sensitive to this, though in truth, I am sensitive to a lot of things. But in my former life, daily in courts I was a lawyer representing adults with intellectual disabilities, so I had some familiarity with that world. I thought I was culturally-sensitive to people with an intellectual disability. Not so. In fact, after a couple of years in that job, when faced with the truth and challenges of living with an intellectual disability, I realised I was never going to me more than a sightseer into that world – at best, an interpreter to that foreign legal world. It knocked me out of my arrogant belief in my virtue, so much so, that I realised that pride in virtue is often unhealthy. Ironically, twenty years after I started that job, I became an unwilling permanent resident of that world.
It is a very strange feeling to be lost in a place that is so familiar. I use the word feeling because I cannot otherwise describe it. Whatever it is, it is with me all the time. One of the good things about the Feuerstein Method is that it acts as an intermediary guide to an indescribable world for people with any acquired brain injury. It sets the mechanics to progress your way through an unfamiliar world. And I really needed it.
I know Professor Feuerstein’s Method is a cognitive enhancement program available for everyone. But for me, he created a mental representation as an interpreter for people with a cognitive dysfunction: the lay of the land, a road map, to find our way in an unfamiliar world.
After every session with my teacher Josie, we looked at the below Cognitive Functions and how it related to what we had covered in that session:
The Feuerstein Method is a practical process to find your way with a damaged brain, and helps to predict the roadblocks along the way and find strategies to overcome them. Or as it is described by Independent Schools Victoria in teaching the Method in schools, “Each task prompts discussion and develops a particular skill, which can then be transferred to other aspects of life and learning.”
After a few of years of doing that, I started to use it to analyse tasks, especially applying those lessons to real-life problems. I learnt to be organised, observant, and worked on my social skills. At the end of every session, my mediator would ask me which of those cognitive functions applied. Eventually I found myself looking at it by myself which I guess is the point of having a teacher as a guide to learn to learn by ourselves. Creating insights (or meta-cognition), the mediator helps you to transfer those strategies to real life.
Here using the Feuerstein Method I offer a few examples of strategies:
By far the most challenging task – and the most rewarding – is the Organisation of Dots, which progressively gets more difficult. For a long time, I found it almost impossible and constantly frustrating. In fact, I could not see how to make these shapes. I knew that some pilots become disoriented when flying into clouds and, without the normal sensory inputs, they get lost in the clouds. For me, it was a “cloud of dots”.
Try this simple task:
Below an example from a Syllogisms Feuerstein task:
Analytic Perception is another task that enhances students’ ability to differentiate a whole into its parts. Given a wide variety of abstract shapes, the student has to choose which combination fits together like a jigsaw. To do this you must learn to make comparisons to the model:
Temporal Relations develops students’ ability to use concepts of time to describe and order (or reorder) experiences and create a narrative:
Categorisation helps students with an acquired brain injury to recategorise the same objects into a new set of principles and objectives:
Instructions focuses on students’ verbal and written information to interpret and transmit complex instructions:
Transitive Relations requires students to understand the terms “greater than,” “less than,” and “equal to”, which was for a long time meaningless. This is a simple task, that of course gets harder as you progress:
There are fourteen tasks in that basic Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment Program, so it can take years, but this is enough to get the concept of the Feuerstein Method. Again, it needs a trained mediator.
Next time, I want to talk more about the sort-of philosophical aspects of the Feuerstein Method.