Books : Communication Unbound: How Facilitated Communication Is Challenging Traditional Views of Autism and Ability/Disability (Special Education Series, No)
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.898206516
EAN num: 9780807732212
ISBN number: 0807732214
Label: Teachers College Press
Manufacturer: Teachers College Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 221
Printing Date: 1993-01
Publishing house: Teachers College Press
Sale Popularity Level: 1952737
Studio: Teachers College Press
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Product Description:
Facilitated communication is the means by which thousands of people who cannot speak or whose speech is highly disordered, and who were previously believed to be severely retarded, are revealing unexpected literacy abilities. This book describes how it works.
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Rated by buyers 
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FC, as it is known, burst on the scene a few decades ago and was hailed as a new tool for the treatment of autism. Money was spent, and parents of severely autistic children becasme vocal proponants of FC as their children were newly discovered to be warm, creative individuals limited by some unknown neuromuscular problem. Hundreds of "facilitators" appeared on the scene to translate for these children and adults.
But there was a dark side, too. Allegations of sexual abuse were made. FC facilitators were being used in custody cases and in suppoort of criminal charges, even though no on ehad ever actually established a scientific criteria for certifying facilitators, or even evaluating what they were doing.
Once science did look at FC, a very different picture appeard, and it looked less like science and a lot like pseduo-psychic phenomena. Facilitators were unable to reveal any information from subjects that they, the facilitators, didn't already know. Different facilitators delivered different stories. Under controlled conditions facilitators couldn't produced- and invoked excuses not unlike those of alleged psychics. The practice was looking less and less clinical and more metaphysical.
Still, FC had, and continues to have, its supporters, mostly parents clinging on to the idea that their severley autistic child is "normal" and those makingh money in the field. But the overwhleming scientific opinion, supported by every controlled study done, is that there's nothing there.
Rated by buyers 
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This book documents the author's discovery and subsequent study of facilitated communication, a technique that allows some disabled people to communicate by providing varying degrees of physical, cognitive, and emotional support to use some form of communication device during the communication process. This particular book mainly explores the communication aspect of facilitation, although any action can be facilitated.
During the time period when this book was being researched and written, there were a number of stereotypes about autism and intellectual disability, some of which persist to this day. These stereotypes center on what the person knows and does not know, rather than what the person is and is not capable of showing. Some of these stereotypes, for some people, are shattered by facilitated communication, which allows people to show more depth to their thoughts than their speech and movement skills normally allow them to be capable of, at least to observers with the assumptions most non-autistic observers have.
Biklen explores these stereotypes, but like many who work in facilitated communication, takes disagreement with them to the other extreme. At one point, he suggests that there are *no* cognitive aspects to autism, and that these are all illusions based on a faulty input-output system. While many autistic people, including those of us who speak or type without facilitation, know more and are capable of more than other people assume we know and are capable of, the suggestion that these cognitive theories have no merit is too far-fetched. Autism is not purely motor and sensory; it also involves thought, although to what degree and in what manner depends on the person. The book sometimes makes it sound as if autism is something along the lines of a very complex form of cerebral palsy, and this is not a good analogy for it.
The author questions many of the things that facilitated communicators say, wondering if they are being too pessimistic about things like inclusion based on bad experiences. But he leaves curiously unquestioned the idea that a hatred of being autistic is a natural part of our emotional reality, rather than learned as surely as "inclusion will never work" is learned. The chapter title "I am not autistic on the typewriter" makes me wonder precisely what the person has been taught autism is -- the inability to communicate, some other stereotype? These questions go unanswered, and even unasked. An expression of deep depression is uncritically printed in a section marked "freedom of expression". Something is wrong here, if this is assumed to be what we should feel about ourselves.
There are a number of important stories in here, stories of parents independently discovering facilitated communication, and stories of autistic people working painstakingly for years to develop a communication system of our own, only to have it ignored or even openly ridiculed by professionals. These stories need to be heard.
Descriptions of how facilitated communication is similar to aspects of everyday life for neurologically typical people are important. They demystify the often-misunderstood aspects of facilitation that lead people to believe it is simply a Ouija board effect. One facilitator who has manipulated the hand of an autistic person is ferreted out before he admits it himself -- he is the only facilitator to use hand-over-hand support rather than the touch on the elbow everyone else uses. Techniques to reduce this kind of influence are discussed, although not in as much detail as techniques to validate communication are discussed.
Overall this is an easy-to-read and informative book, reflecting with thoroughness the knowledge of the time period when it came to facilitated communication, with a particular focus on autism. The main drawbacks involve some of the prejudices and preferences that seep through into the work (questioning some things and not others), and the fact that this was the knowledge available during that time period, not the much greater sum of knowledge available today. Much of it, however, stands the test of time.
Rated by buyers -
Dr. Biklen is arguably the most informed promoter of facilitated communication in North America. However, lurking in his book is evidence that FC is generally useless, except for a small percentage of persons diagnosed with autism -- those with normal or above average intelligence who have a profound communication disability.
Unfortunately, the excessive claims made by this book have helped raise the hopes of countless parents of autistic children, only to have them cruely dashed.
Rated by buyers -
While Bliken is a talented writer, his subject matter leaves much to be desired. He attempts to prove a topic that he has not fully researched, nor does he seem inclined to believe that he needs to fully research it. Since Bliken's findings, scientific research has been done, and it has proven Bliken and Facilitated Communication to be well-intended, but terribly misused and virtually, wrong.
Rated by buyers -
Biklen's book is a wonderful and fascinating account of an endeavor to put on one side forty years of accumulated prejudice on the topic of autism and ask what the actual, observable problem that these people have is. For most of the more severe cases, the problem involves communication difficulties. Other researchers had assumed that the communication problems were inseperable from the condition: Biklen asked "If we try and fix the communication problems, what would we find?" Using facilitated communication, a means of steadying a person's pointing to enable them to point to pictures, words or letters, Biklen was able to show that the abilities of these people existed but had been buried. This is not a cure for autism - all you have at the end of it is a person with autism who can communicate rather than a person with autism who can't - but anyone who has an interest in the contested territory of autism must read this book.
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