Lynn Murphy

As part of the professional masters in art and design education at NCAD, I completed a two week special needs placement at Stewarts Care in Palmerston. I mentored an education degree student and together we created a flexible unit of learning for the service users and created lesson plans and visual aids etc. We had very clear contact with one another and met up to plan and discuss the placement during summer which helped us to be more prepared in September. We visited the centre a number of times before beginning placement which helped the service users become more comfortable and familiar with us. 

Our placement was with adults, mainly men and one woman, who have a variety of learning difficulties. Everyone was so warm and welcoming and my mentee and myself grew very fond of them and were inspired by how caring they were towards one another. There was a few challenges with the placement as it was different to the style of teaching I was used to in post-primary and as the service users were adults, a great emphasis was placed on service user choice, meaning they could decide what they wanted to do or they might not be there every day. However, as we created collaborative works, they all wanted to be involved and worked very well together and with us. We brought them on a trip to Recreate to collect materials for their mosaic and they created tiles in the kiln to add to the mosaic. Our tutors were blown away with the amount of work they created by the end of the two weeks and asked my mentee and myself to come back to college in May 2019 to talk about our work and experience. We had an amazing two weeks and learned so much from working with the service users. Details of the lessons can be seen in the presentation below.