Category: aaron johannes

aaron johannes, advocacy, belonging, books, community, community living, disability, facilitation, research, toolsLeave a comment

Planning for Vulnerabilities with Self Advocates

Aaron

Why is there a photograph of Woodlands Institution in a posting about planning for vulnerabilities with self advocates?  Because, once upon a time, our society thought that the best way to keep people safe was to look them away.  Ken Scott, in his historical research article, The BC Public Hospital for the Insane, 1872-1902, writes of the earliest institution being built in 1878 and in 1894, only 16 years later, with a total of 117 patients there was already a royal commission into abuses: . . . to investigate questionable practices . . . when a male patient died after … Continue reading Planning for Vulnerabilities with Self Advocates

aaron johannes, belonging, community, community living, critical disability theory, disability, person centred planningLeave a comment

Stories about access and cognitive dissonance

Aaron

“In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance. “Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to … Continue reading Stories about access and cognitive dissonance

aaron johannes, facilitation, person centred planning, personal development, planning, tools1 Comment

Shift-It Resources

Aaron

Someone recently wrote, kind of disparagingly, that there are hundreds maybe thousands of kinds of person centred planning tools.  Well, not really.  I’ve found about 80 and while there continue to be new ones created all the time, they often replicate other resources, for reasons of corporate or personal branding rather than because someone has a new, better idea.   These are also often uninformed by theory and contemporary practices.  If you really don’t have a better idea, don’t bother, really.  If you do, please create and share it! Of these processes, the most elegant and beneficial that I’ve found are … Continue reading Shift-It Resources