Project objective 10: Case stories (including video and photo material)
A special feature of the VEMAS project is that we first test and evaluate all methods and measures during development in Belgium in the practical field. For this purpose, people with intellectual disabilities and behavioural disorders have volunteered as "experts in their own cause", who want to be available with their stories in this project for "case studies". These people live and work in different institutions for the disabled. All participating institutions support the project, are very interested in the project results and want them to be implemented in their institutions. This gives us the unique opportunity to use these case histories to present the measures and methods (and their effects) in an exemplary, practical and concrete manner. On the other hand they are an opportunity to record life stories that could hardly be more different and which are intended to show that the most diverse behaviour makes sense - even if this sense remains hidden at first.
With the individual case histories we want to use interviews and narratives, biographical vignettes, video recordings and photographs as examples to document the extent to which each human behaviour makes subjective sense. And at the same time we seek to illustrate that a changed view of a person, which takes into account his or her entire life history and life situation, opens up
- new ways of seeing,
- new ways of dealing with the people in question and also provides
- new possibilities for action.
We assume the documentation to have about 20 such case stories. These stories and the materials developed for them form the foundation and the common thread for the training and further education within the framework of VEMAS. The work with these stories in the context of further education and training as well as with people with intellectual disabilities and behavioural problems and their social environment enables an experience- and practice-related, understanding, empathic and sometimes also irritating learning-experience on realistic cases. The contents will be didactically and methodically prepared for this purpose, taking into account the different target groups of the project, so that different approaches on the material will be possible, depending on the personal, professional experience and interests of the users of this offer. In order to ensure the accessibility of the collected material for people with intellectual disabilities, the case histories will also be transferred into so-called "easy language".
