Blog posts must be 200-400 words, proofread, and void of common grammatical errors.
Your blog posts are due before the start of class next week.
Please email albreaks@ku.edu if you have any questions!
Your blog posts are due before the start of class next week.
Please email albreaks@ku.edu if you have any questions!
The panel I was involved in last Thursday was the one concerning disabilities and the stigmas attached to them. I especially enjoyed hearing from Susan, the woman who has a mental illness and has come back from it in order to live a successful life and help other people in her situation through her part time job. The panel consisted of a diverse group of people, which was very helpful and informative. I'm sure the other groups present were all able to find a person or people they identified with and could learn from.
ReplyDeleteThis panel was applicable to my break specifically because we are going to be working with children who were born with or have acquired physical disabilities and assisting in their therapy. As we have touched on during other weeks of class, I was reminded of how important it is to treat the children and their parents as individuals, not as broken people or people that are in need of pity or sympathy, because that will not help these individuals healing process and recovery. My goal for the week is to surround these children and their families in a safe and enjoyable environment, in which they can be themselves and hopefully find a love of horses and riding, as well as the emotional and health benefits attached with the work that we'll be executing.
Last week’s meeting included a panel of members both environmental and educational groups, companies, or previous Alternative Breaks. I found it to be a really interesting discussion. First of all, one of the panel members had previously been on the same Alt Break I will be on this upcoming weekend at Zion National Park. Personally, I have very interested in environmental issues and working towards solving issues with the environment. So, this panel offered good insight into a possible future of environmental planning. One member of the panel works for an environmental planning company in Kansas City and Omaha. I really enjoyed hearing about the work with flood areas and bringing together different city councils. He showed how difficult it is to get members of separate, yet adjacent, cities to work cohesively.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the educational panel member did not apply to my own Alt Break, I thought that his contribution was very interesting. As a child and sibling of educators in KCK, I often hear about the educational difficulties and problems they face. To hear about all of the work and strategies put into these schools was refreshing.
I also thought that the panel was a great device to incorporate our more specific Alt Break into real life issues. My group is working outdoors and with nature, and seeing how people do the same in everyday life or are studying to do so shed light on the work we will be doing. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the stories and problems the panel members had faced in their own personal journeys to helping the community.
For the last alternative breaks meeting, we listened to three people discuss their employment. All three speakers had the common theme of working and assisting the needs of people who are different from our society’s norms. Those different people included people with disabilities, people with mental health problems, and people from the low socioeconomic class. Each speaker discussed how those people with differences wish to be represented and treated with the same respect as anyone else. Things that stuck out for me were when the male speaker discussed that when you come from a position of privilege and you are working with those in need, do not expect to change those people. He claimed that it is disrespectful to try to change people into what you think is right because your way probably is not the right thing for them. It is best to just support and encourage those people and give them guidance when they ask for it. Another thing I learned was how going out of your way for someone who is disabled may be very insulting to that person. The woman who worked for people who are physically disabled asked us how we would feel if we were disabled in some way and an able person went out of their way to open the door for us; we would feel inferior to that person. This teaches me that there is a fine line between helping someone with disabilities and shaming someone with disabilities. Both these things I learned are going to be very helpful to me when I go on alternative breaks. I will be working with children with special needs, so I know that the best thing I can do is to not try to change their ways, but to support them and their families by helping them see that there are alternative ways to be happy in this society. Also I need to remember that I myself have problems, therefore it would be wrong for me to ever treat those children like they are inferior to me just because their problems are more noticeable.
ReplyDeleteLast week’s meeting was really interesting because of the three speakers that came to talk to us: Susan, the former teacher who became an advocate for mental health awareness, the AbleHawks and Allies representative, and Cody Charles from the Office of Multicultural Affairs. I was really impressed by the levels of advocacy from all three of the representatives, especially the one from AbleHawks and Allies. Despite not having a disability of her own, she found herself drawn to the organization because of the relationships that she had with other people with disabilities, and that really stood out to me.
ReplyDeleteI feel that the representative from AbleHawks communicated the greatest message to my Alternative Breaks group. While none of us, to my knowledge, have experienced homelessness firsthand, we still have the ability, and possibly the duty, to become advocates for the homeless. By listening to the advice of her, as well as Cody Charles, I feel like I’m well prepared to go to my Alternative Breaks site with an open mind, not trying to diagnose their problems and solve them in a way that I’m familiar with, but rather try and gain their insight into the problem, having experienced it themselves.
Last class, I attended the panel on disabilities and stigmas attached to them. I will be traveling to Memphis to assist Alzheimer’s Day Services, so learning to rethink stigmas about the elderly and those with Alzheimer’s disease is critical. Many people who may be unfamiliar with the disease may think it boils down to forgetting where you placed your car keys or being a little confused sometimes. Pop culture has romanticized Alzheimer’s in the movie The Notebook, and TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy offer one viewpoint of the disease, but the reality is that Alzheimer’s affects patients extremely differently. There is still a lot of shame and stigma attached to Alzheimer’s, although that veil is finally starting to lift. When dealing with the friends we’ll meet in Memphis, it will be important to understand them as individuals, rather than seeing them as patients with Alzheimer’s first. This disease ends up characterizing every aspect of the lives of the patients and their families, but when connecting with them, it is necessary to remember that they are people first. An example of this is that at Alzheimer’s Day Services, they refer to the patients as “friends,” a more humanizing term than resident or patient. People with Alzheimer’s are mainly reduced to statistics or viewed as burden on society, so there should be more emphasis placed on the value of their individual stories.
ReplyDeleteThe panel that I was a part of at last week’s meeting discussed their current and past work in both environmental and educational issues. I thoroughly enjoyed the panel that we had last class and thought that they gave a lot of great insight on a lot of the issues we will be dealing with on our break. The panel member that I found the most resourceful and interesting was the senior, fellow KU student, who spoke about his work with educational reform.
ReplyDeleteAlthough my alternative break trip is more focused on environmental education, he gave all around good advice for how we should consider our actions in the eyes of others at our sites and brought up great points I hadn’t even considered. One that stuck with me the most was the idea that certain things I might consider normal or a necessity, in my lifestyle, could be perceived as a social status to others. So by doing something as simple as using my iphone in front of others, that might not have that same privilege, could be unintentionally creating an uncomfortable barrier between myself and those that I am trying to aid. All in all the panelist gave excellent advice and equally gave me even more excitement about our upcoming trip.