Synthesis Sunday: Day 11 - Things To Do

I just remembered that I have a small room carpet in the back of my car that needs to be removed from said car to be cleaned and so I can stuff my car full of groceries and, hopefully, some bookshelves or chairs for my home as I go out and about. I think I will dump the carpet in the garage for steam cleaning and park in my driveway for a bit until it dries and is ready to head back to my new (old) office space. I haven't had a carpet in that space before, but I am looking forward to getting it. If the rug doesn't clean up the way I think it will, I will just dump it into a local dumpster and be done with it. That thought, though, just popped into my head as I was debating whether I should order a big breakfast from a local restaurant before going to get my grocery order. Then, I remembered the rug.

Over the past day, I managed to spend money on food and medications as well as on a bunch of poly storage folders for my communication binder system. I need to print those pages out, laminate them, score them for easy folding, and then get them into the folders. I've decided against using binders because binders do not last long in my clinic. I have students who will go out of their ways to step on binders. They will not be able to destroy the poly binders as easily - I am hoping!! This project is a labor of love and goes through many revisions before things are presented to my clients, but they are also essential tools.

I was reading a blog post about the ways people interact with museums. Written by Seema Rao in 2014, the post, entitled, "Disinterested or Excluded? Two Very Different Forms of Non-Participation," highlighted some of the thoughts that I have had recently about my clients and how they interact with me and with music during their mandated music therapy times during the school week. There isn't much to the post - it is only a page on my screen - but it brings up some very good points about how we can make things as inclusive as possible and still not get our target audience engaged. Of the two states, I feel that exclusion is more important than disinterest. After all, there are many things that I am disinterested in - sports, crowds, all sorts of things. It doesn't matter how inclusive or planned or designed these things are to bring me in, I am not going to participate. Some of my clients feel the same way about music therapy.

As I have been reading and rereading this post over and over again, I have been drawn back into the ideas of Universal Design. This concept started (as far as I can tell) in architecture and challenged building designers to consider the ways buildings excluded people and could be changed to include more people without significantly inconveniencing others. There is a very nice picture of a staircase somewhere that has steps and a ramp that criss-crosses over the steps. It is a beautiful way of accessing a building, and the people who want to use the ramp can do so. The only problem that I see with the design is that a person who needs a ramp would go four times farther than a person who could access the stairs. That is a bit challenging to someone who has recently had to face a decrease in mobility and is something that I would not have noticed before.

Isn't that the point, though? It is time to expand our thinking past what we experience and know and stretch it to the unknown, the un-experienced, the unfamiliar. So, I am thinking about how my clients communicate with me during music therapy, and I am trying to increase their opportunities to share all sorts of things with me. Part of this is spurred by the new program that we have starting at my facility, but much of it is based in my own desire to make my music therapy room a places where even the disinterested feel included but get to make a choice about whether they participate...or not.

Before COVID started, I had books that I used for some of this communication. I used them with many of my group members. They included emotion cards (I love these from Educate Autism), color cards, and a visual for the Zones of Regulation program that our social worker uses to discuss emotional states. These communication books were fine, but they did not go far enough. I have been trying to make these books a bit more robust and more useful for my clients for a long time now. I think I have finally come up with a plan that will be a bit more germ friendly as well as just plain old better for all of my students. In addition, I have plans to make larger versions of each page to put up on my walls - there will be some modifications to make the larger visuals a bit more session friendly, but there will still be an opportunity to make it work within the music therapy session. I want my students to tell me when they like something, but I also want them to be able to tell me that they do not like something. I want them to be able to ask for a break or to be left alone. I want them to disagree with something I say.

One of the things about trying to make a communication centered music therapy session is that there is no way to ever be finished with the process. If I want to have musicians to select, there will never be a time when I will complete that particular page. What do I do when Billie Eilish is no longer popular and has been replaced with fifteen other musicians? I will never be able to anticipate what every single student of mine will want to communicate, so the process will never be complete. I can, however, try my best and continue to refine things as needed. 

So, it is time to remove the rug from the back of the car, get the poly folders ready for loading, and print off my binder pages onto cardstock and prepare for laminating. In between those tasks, I'll get my groceries and start making some meatloaf (Hi, sister!!) for the rest of this break. Here we go.

Happy Sunday.