Monday, April 4, 2011

Learning Difficulties conference

Ok so Friday March 25th, all of us “Grad Dip Educationers” had to go to a conference, the conference went towards our Wider Field Experience hours (those wonderful volunteer hours) so I guess you didn’t really have to go but it was for your own benefit. Well at least so we thought – the conference was regarding learning difficulties and disabilities and autism and the like. We thought we would get a lot out of it – unfortunately we were mistaken. The conference wasn’t great, some of the speakers were, well let’s just say less than what we were expecting, and I feel like I just didn’t get much out of it.. But hey at least I’m 5 hours closer to those mandatory 65 hours. We had to choose workshops that we wanted to go to; the first workshop was regarding ‘Sensory Dysfunction’ which I thought would have been very informative and helpful. Instead the speaker was too worried about time, decided not to do a workshop on Sensory Dysfunction because the chances of getting a child with a sensory dysfunction was slim, in her opinion. So instead she crammed a whole broad pile of stuff into one hour, stuff we have already been through in our lectures. It was disappointing. The next workshop was on Autism, she didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know, but compared to the last workshop this one was really well done. You could tell she was passionate about what she was speaking about, and really wanted to make us aware. I think the best saying she said was “Breathe in the flowers, and blow out the candles” which I really liked – and it can work for everybody really. On top of that we spent the rest of the conference talking about ‘Indigenous Peoples’ and how important they are in the Australian Culture, and how important it is to adjust lessons to suit them, fair enough – but I’d say 5 hours was too long to cover all that stuff… All in all I just feel like I wasted $60 – oh yeahhh I forgot I had to pay for this conference… We have another one coming up in August – hopefully it isn’t as brutal.


So after the conference we were all feeling a little deflated – it was a long week followed by an especially long Friday – so a bunch of us went to the tavern down the road. It was an awesome night and the perfect way to wrap up the week. The next day Lise and I were heading to ‘Underwater World’ to learn about things that lived in the sea….

No comments:

Post a Comment