Navigating Paradox: Reflections on Facilitating Self-Advocacy for People with Learning Difficulties

Abstract

It is quite usual for people with learning difficulties in self-advocacy groups to be supported by non-disabled staff of one sort or another. There is a wide range of literature detailing issues relevant to the practice of supporting such groups that can be drawn upon by staff to inform their practice. This paper suggests that there needs to be a more critical engagement with the experiential of working in this field and that group facilitators need to be critically-reflecting on their practice in this area as well as reading about it. This paper consists primarily of the author's personal reflections on facilitating a self-advocacy group for people with learning difficulties, derived from an action inquiry into his own practice. It is suggested that there is no clear and simple answer to many of the questions raised as a result of these reflections and that there is, instead, a need to navigate the paradoxes that arise in dealing with what at first appear to be ‘either/or issues’. Moreover, many questions that arise are not resolvable; rather, they must be dealt with throughout the practise of facilitating self-advocacy groups. It is suggested that through the dialectical accounts generated as a result of engaging with questions of the kind ‘How do I improve this process of self-advocacy here?’ that workers in this field are creating living theories of practice.