ATI & A Terrific Insight!

This morning I had to get up early but I didn’t really mind as I had something exciting to do – this helped inspire me to get ready quickly (or as quickly as I am able to – I am definitely becoming more laid back which means I don’t do much in a hurry nowadays!), into my special ‘school visiting outfit’ which was having its debut today. I put it with some fishnets, which instantly gave me an overwhelming longing for putting on a pair of boots (sigh – I miss my boots!) like I would do if I was going to work. Instead, at first I put on my red ‘Dorothy’ shoes (from Basvegas) but then changed my mind as I wasn’t sure the world was ready for me in my red shoes yet, so switched for the black ones.

All set to go, I left the house, crossed the road and promptly arrived on the doorstep of the Autism Teaching Institute (it’s that close it made me wonder if they’d seen me getting ready!). From the front, with its little white picket fence, the building itself looks like a house, which I guess it probably once was, it must be quite an old building as it has the old metal work on the front and looks quite pretty. I was met by Mary Thomson, the Director of Teacher Training and she invited me in. Despite the office furniture, notice boards, shelves full of books and general teaching paraphernalia, it was still possible to see how this was once a house, with stunning wooden floors and big windows – certainly a nice environment to work in.

We had a cup of coffee and sat, chatting about the ATI and how it fits in the bigger picture of the Western Autistic School. She explained about the ATI’s role in teacher training; with many people coming from across Victoria to attend their programmes. It was the first registered training organisation in Victoria to offer accredited courses specific to Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The courses they run are the Vocational Graduate Certificate and Diploma in Teaching Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Their students are practicing teachers from both mainstream and special schools and will spend two years working towards the Diploma, part time. Mary described how they are building their alumni of graduates into a network, so that they can share good practice and continue their professional development. Once they have graduated, they become the specialist for their school and can then use their expertise to advise and develop other teachers in their school.

Mary then took me to the classrooms out the back of the house – they have several fair sized portacabins for teaching. They have a selection of small groups come in each day, in order to offer those Diploma students the chance to work with young people with ASD (of secondary school age), in case they don’t have much in the way of access to such students in their own schools. Also, it works to benefit the students with ASD as they are given the opportunity to come away from their own schools and into a specialist setting, to work on an individualised programme.

We first went to see a group who come in for an IT related programme. There were only two students; Dylan and Trystan, with one teacher. The students are only about 12 years old and attend mainstream school, coming to the ATI for one day per week, where they study a variety of things, but the main focus is IT. Dylan was quite animated and told me about what he was doing – playing a game called ‘Spore’. Apparently he has a massive fascination about the concept of evolution and this game links with that. As they work on individualised programmes, based around communication, he had chosen to make a video instruction guide to Spore and was going to start shooting the video in the afternoon. His teacher suggested he practice his explanation on me, so I was then lucky enough to be given a lengthy description of the game and a blow by blow account of how to play it! I was very impressed with his communication skills and his ability to use appropriate facial expressions and hand gestures, along with pretty good eye contact. This was in total contrast to Trystan, who was incredibly quiet and very difficult to engage with – even for his teacher. I managed to glean from some appropriate questioning and guesswork that his project was to create a webpage using html and he was developing a PowerPoint presentation about html.

Having visited them, Mary took me to another class, where there were three students; Callum, Dylan and Sallie and two staff. These students were older, 15-17 years old and again, each goes to a different mainstream school, coming to the ATI for one day per week. From observing and engaging with these students even briefly and listening to how the teachers described the schools they’re from, I can imagine that coming to the ATI must be a very welcome experience indeed – away from massive schools full of thousands of students, to a quiet place with people who understand them. Their teacher asked them to guess where I was from by listening to my accent, this took a fairly long time and several clues, but in the end Callum guessed that I was from England and I then told them where in England I live. In this group Dylan was the most talkative and told me about some of the things they have been doing – they focus on arts as a means of expression. I saw some of the work they have done and a lot of it was fantastic. Sallie was incredibly quiet but is very talented and has created lots of artwork with a manga theme, which she showed me. Dylan told me he prefers drama and hopes to be a professional actor and tennis player when he is older, as he has just started taking tennis lessons and wants to go on Masterchef too! Callum said very little, only ever giving a one or two word response to any question, so I only learned that he likes rugby.

Mary showed me a really interesting project one of the other groups has been working on – a stop motion animation of the story of Titanic; they’ve made and painted scale models of Titanic out of ceramic, there are several different sized ships, plus ‘bits’ of the ships for making it appear to ‘sink’ and a background with different sized ceramic waves. This project links with the Titanic exhibition that has just opened in Melbourne, which they will be visiting soon.

We then went back into the main house and I was introduced to some of the other staff. We chatted to them for a little while, about my background and some of the things I had seen which had interested me. One of the teachers, Gabi, asked if I would be interested in going to see her at the actual Western Autistic School next week and I very much jumped at the class. She is one of the teacher trainers, so mostly deals with teaching those people studying for the Diploma, but still goes into the classroom one day per week at the school.

Having chatted a bit more, I said my thank yous and goodbyes and headed back across the road to the house. By the time I got back, Tom was up; I hadn’t seen the girls before I had left as Becs had already gone to school and Sarah had just for uni. I chatted to him for a bit, then got changed out of my ‘school visiting outfit’ and settled down in the lounge with tv and tea.

A few episodes of Futurama later and Sarah came back from uni, so I chatted to her about the experience at ATI. She told me about her day at uni and the wine tasting session she’d been to – a legitimate part of her course! She joined me watching tv and soon afterwards, Tom re-emerged with a DVD and we watched that. When that was over, we hopped in Sarah’s car and headed to the supermarket to pick up some things for dinner and then came back to the house in time to watch one of Tom’s favourite shows - M*A*S*H (of all things?!).

Becs came home from school and was barely through the front door before she was in full throw, telling us about the hilarious things that had happened at school. At break time, one of the children (a 5 year old boy) had climbed to the top of the climbing frame and jumped off, straight onto a pigeon, which had kind of exploded and covered the nearby children in guts and gore! To make matters worse, the pigeon wasn’t killed outright and the boy who did it was not remotely remorseful and totally uninjured, so Becs and the other teachers had to clean up all the kids, who were slightly traumatised. I think the story traumatised me too!

We had pizza for dinner whilst I told Becs about the ATI and then we all settled down for an evening of chatting and watching more tv, including of course, Neighbours and Masterchef.