Therapy experiences France

France

1. Can Titella help the integration of foreign children in school?
2. Stories without words? (Therapy with deaf children)
3. Puppet workshop in a 6th grade class.
4. Work experience bringing together a group of students from the school sector and a group of maladjusted children
5. Stage Marionnette therapeutique INEP -MARLY LE ROI-
6. Psychomotor experience with children with pathologies: organic or neurological, personality disorders, psychiatric disorders, psychoses and character disorders with global delay

1. Can Titella help the integration of foreign children in school?

Madeleine Lyons. Art-Therapist. Paris (10)
http://marionnettetherapie.free.fr/

What happens when we learn a foreign language?

Immigrant children think they know how to speak French, and what they know are phrases for their immediate needs. When they get to school they notice the change. These students can more or less follow the rhythm of the class orally, but when it comes to the written part they have problems. And they have to constantly interrupt the class by asking questions. Many times these children are students with disabilities, they are difficult children.

An Arab girl did not want to write because the French words were not pretty.

The reality is that her parents had planned to make her a quick marriage of convenience in order to secure her financial stability, and she thought that for the short time she would have to be in France it was not worth it for her to learn to write French. 

Here's the experience: 

“We made finger puppets representing the letters of the alphabet and we played with these puppets, and there were always letters that fought to be in front of each other claiming schedule imperatives. B said: I have to take care of the children, so I have to be there before A, etc... Later on, when I knew the order, I could look up words in the dictionary. With these words we made puppets.

From here we discovered new meanings and word origins. He liked to write.”

Many of these students are not well fed and do not sleep well (sometimes in rooms of one person where there are more than 7 or 8). They are very tired and that is why it is also more difficult for them to concentrate.

Fig. 54

Fig. 55

(10) MARIONNETTE ET THERAPIE. Number 24 – 1995

2. Stories without words? (Therapy with deaf children)

Mr. Jean Paul Pallard. Specialized educator and puppeteer.
Regional Institution for Young Deaf People – Poitiers (11)

Thanks to the puppet's speech, useful privileged, among others, for communication and non-verbal expression, deaf children can enter this imaginary world that is populated by princesses and demons.

The workshop we currently have was born in 1990 from the desire and will of a certain number of teachers who worked with deaf children in kindergarten and primary school and who wanted to develop visual communication to allow these students little by little to have access to coded language LSF (French Sign Language).

We also wanted to give the possibility of a better construction of the imaginary through different stories. And a third aspect was to allow students to meet around a story and various activities: mime workshops, visual communication, pre-reading exercises, ideograms, graphics, drawing, painting, collage...

The team leading this workshop is made up of: Three teachers of specialized education (a speech pathologist, an audioprosthetist and an educator from the early medical-social action center -CAMSP-), an LSF teacher, a specialized educator and me . Every Thursday we do the session after lunch. Each session begins with the explanation of a story with puppets made by the therapeutic team.

Then 4 workshops of half an hour each are organized and the students are divided into 4 groups:

Body expression workshop.

A character from the story seen is explained. A puppet is used and the character is made bodily. The animator explains it in LSF Finally the students mime the story.

Reading workshop

It helps the students to have pleasure in looking for the books, opening them, finding the characters again... Pictograms are also used to make the logical composition of the story.

Games are played.

Manual expression workshop.

Here the puppets seen in the story are made, and the story is relived with the dolls.

Auditory Education Workshop.

It is animated by an audiologist. A lot of work goes into tying an instrument with an animal. For example with a woodpecker puppet, a Chinese box is used. The child notices the vibrations of the box, and when he hits it, the puppet also hits a piece of wood with its beak, and a game is created between the musical instrument and the puppet. Another exercise is done with a xylophone and a squirrel. When the squirrel is up, they play the higher part of the xylophone, and when the squirrel is down, they play the lower part. Later the story is re-enacted and the students understand it better.

The first time they see the puppet show, they don't fully understand it, they don't understand the logical sequence of events, they don't know what the characters are, they can't name them because they don't have the right language.

The second time, they are already starting to name them, because they have worked on it in the Workshops. The third time, three weeks later, allows them to address a logical sequence, the setting itself, the story.

This work with the story is done during half a term. Costeau's underwater world was also worked with shadows. Subsequently, these students have had the habit of going to see puppet shows and of finding out beforehand (going to the library) about the stories they were going to see.

(11) MARIONNETTE ET THERAPIE. Number 24 – 1995

3. Puppet workshop in a 6th grade class.

The UPI where I work was created by Dr. Metzger, head of the psychopedagogy service. It is one of the first open integration classes in a school. This unit responds to several parents who want their children to do school learning in an ordinary medium.

Most of these students have followed the elementary course in CLIS (Specialized Integration Class).

The UPI of the Collège Chartreuse in Saint-Martin-le-Vinoux welcomes boys and girls who suffer from personality and behavioral disorders.

This class depends on the National Education, it is under the direct responsibility of the "Principal du Collège".

A specialized teacher, assisted by a school reinforcement assistant, ensures pedagogical monitoring and accompanies them in classes and in extra-curricular time.

A medical-social team that depends on the Psychological Medical Center of Saint-Martin-le-Vinoux ensures psychological support. It is made up of a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a nurse.

The guidance law in favor of people with disabilities of 30 June 1975 institutes the educational obligation for children and adolescents with disabilities. It sets maintenance or integration in an ordinary school environment as a priority objective.

UPI centers have been created in schools to accommodate pre-adolescents or adolescents with different forms of mental handicaps. These classes are organized based on the child's needs; integration should not be limited to a simple socialization action. It must allow each student, whatever their difficulty, to progress in school learning. Rather than the exact level of knowledge, the student is admitted to this class based on developmental ability.

In any case, it is necessary that the reading process is at least in the process of acquisition and that the logical and operant capacities are sufficiently localizable. Students must be able to demonstrate cognitive abilities even if they appeared in limited moments.

The students have been in the class for at least two school years.

They are between 11 and 14 years old.

Expression workshops are held during school time. 

PUPPET WORKSHOP 1999-2000 

The activity takes place every Thursday after lunch for 1 hour. 30'. The class is divided into two groups: A and B. We have 11 students. We have divided them into 4 and 4. There are 3 that do not participate. The teaching team meets alone and also with the team of carers.

The division of the students is done according to the intensity of the pathological disorders, the psychological suffering, and the cognitive possibilities, in order to achieve homogeneous groups.

The team is made up of an occupational therapist-puppeteer, a psychologist and a psychology trainee. The work space is a room with water, with a power outlet and a wardrobe.

Presentations are made in the first session. A drawing is made (reproduce 2 geometric figures and a cat on its back, and then a drawing) to place the student in the structural and psychomotor plane, to assess each student for the purpose of respecting the instructions and their cognitive skills, to allow the student to choose the name of his future puppet and to create a first performance with it.

The following sessions (construction and manipulation):

1. Construction: allows the child to transform and manipulate matter outside of any conscious project. The experiences made with the materials forward psychic experiences of manipulation: being able to destroy and repair according to one's desire.

The expression of his own creativity allows him to project and solicit personal affections, often tending to trigger processes of identification.

It allows a revaluation and a better self-esteem.

By creating and imagining the puppet and focusing on the representation of the body, the child must question his own body, and overcome his anxieties linked to his body schema due to the absence of limits.

1. Representation: allows verbal expression, making up stories from the puppets, participation in the representation, inter-individual exchanges and gestural expression. This stage revolves around two concepts that generate personal investments:

• The notion of intersubjectivity illustrates the encounter with others. In the picture of interpersonal relations, the puppet embodies an intermediary object between him and others. The creation of this mediation structure allows the reduction of any anxiety linked to the relationship with the other. This theatrical game allows the creation of a meeting place for individual and group affections.

We have chosen the marota technique. The procedures for construction are: sewing, gluing or stapling. The head is made with a "porespan" ball covered with modeling paste that hardens with air.

(12) MARIONNETTE ET THERAPIE. Number 28 – 2000

4. Work experience bringing together a group of students from the school sector and a group of maladjusted children (13)

M. Georges Arnaud. Paris. 1980

We have four children from each sector. (ordinary school sector, day hospital sector). The teaching team consists of two puppeteers and two psychologists.

We do 21 work sessions, which allow the children to approach the puppet and its possibilities of expression, both in personal and collective realizations.

The progression of the work depends on each child and the group.

The first two sessions serve to introduce children and adults.

All types of puppetry techniques are also presented, with the possibility of touching, playing... Then they choose the type of puppet they want to make.

The third session is cut out and a collage is made on cardboard of the puppet they want to make. From here they build. The sessions consist of building the puppet itself, manipulating puppets left by the puppeteers and creating the story to be represented. (two, three children and then the whole group).

We look through the child's behavior for the puppet's impact on manufacturing, verbal production, dramatic play and the group.

We didn't know anything about the children, only if they were in regular school or in the day hospital

(13) MARIONNETTE ET THERAPIE. Number 8 – 1980

 

5. Stage Marionnette therapeutique INEP -MARLY LE ROI- (14)

Odette Boone. 1979

The children we have are mentally retarded, that is to say, they do not normally perform intellectual activities that are proposed to them.

They often get blocked when they discover that man, that the outside world are important, and they have to communicate or evolve.

The psycho-affective causes that have been blocked are imprecise to give a line of conduct, whether psychotherapeutic or psychopedagogical.

Faced with this fragility and these uncertainties, all this has given us the strength to find a free expression with the aim of helping the mentally retarded child to discover or rediscover the dynamism nested somewhere deep within himself.

Free expression seeks to make him leave the external appearance of weakness, inertia, passivity that he presents especially in class and that represents a small death of himself.

The puppet technique is interesting because the child identifies with his puppet, and is not held back by paralyzing shyness, by his inhibitions, his blocks.

The puppet can allow you to say what you wouldn't say otherwise. What lives inside, what moves takes on a comprehensible and communicable meaning.

His voice, his gestures, his feelings, he gives them to the puppet spontaneously.

The mentally retarded faces enormous difficulties in his creative activities.

His graphics are often poor and he often fails to explain what he wanted to draw. The making of objects from earth materials, wood pulp, is almost always without form, since he has not acquired sufficient knowledge of techniques to know how to use and transform them.

To create is to project with the help of symbols to the outside, a part of oneself, the emotions and feelings and to know how to communicate them to others in order to be able to share them.

The creator gets pleasure, since he was able to "build himself".

The child who invents a story feels alive, creates and recreates himself.

Half of our children have no relationship with their parents except for one visit every month.

They are joined by feelings of unconscious aggression linked to the separation. The story is often directly related to the child's father, mother, loved and separated object. Creation calls for symbols.

The mentally retarded child is described as unable to appeal to symbols.

Our sessions show that these children have access to a pre-symbolic thought that, exchanged with the educators, will make them discover little by little a symbolization.

(14) MARIONNETTE ET THERAPIE. Number 6 – 1979

 

6. Psychomotor experience with children with pathologies: organic or neurological, personality disorders, psychiatric disorders, psychoses and character disorders with global delay (at the level of language, motor, instability, affective disturbances) (15)

Medical-Pedagogical Institute (IMP) of Maíz. France.
THE SPATIAL STRUCTURING MARIONNETTE
Pierrette Savage 1988

This psychomotor experience with puppets has been going on for five years.

The construction materials of the puppets are recycled (bottles, boxes, buttons, handkerchiefs...)

Manipulation of the puppet involves an adjustment to body mechanics. It is necessary that the child's posture is correct and controlled. This is called background tone.

Another important notion is to adjust the background tone to allow the body mechanics to function with maximum efficiency and minimum effort.

The puppet puts all body balance into play by the directions it prints on the body, especially on the arms, which are its extension.

Static balance is necessary, to restore the imbalance generated by the manipulation of the puppet, at the level of the upper half of the body.

The puppet lives in the extension of the body, it is located in the axis of the body of the child who manipulates it. He will take various positions, standing, kneeling, bent over... which needs to bring into play the various stabilizing muscles.

The body is the receptacle of numerous sensations, which allow the subject to be constantly informed, both of his inner space and of his outer space.

Sensory and sensitivity develops as the child will be able to become aware of the space in which he moves.

Developing its sensitivity allows the body to position itself correctly in space, in relation to the object and to others.

The object, in this case the puppet, is the indispensable support and intermediary in psychomotor re-education, the sensitivity allows you to come into contact with it.

The puppet puts into play the discovery of internal sensitivity (visceral, circulatory and respiratory).

The construction of the puppet develops awareness of its body scheme. The child is faced with making an object that represents a human person.

During its construction, the child unconsciously pierces the image of his own body, and discovers it materialized in the form of a puppet.

The time of construction where the imperatives of reality and the child's imagination are confronted, is primordial.

This time allows the manipulation of the materials. We can see the manual skill of each child and it allows the emotional filling of the puppet, which becomes "the child's creation".