Keynote by Bernadette van den Tillaart (Netherlands) & Gunnar Vege (Norway) at the
2015 Deafblind Symposium in Austin, TX. Gunnar and Bernadette introduce the concepts of "co-presence" and Bodily Emotional Traces (BETs). Through role play and videos, they demonstrate how an active communication partner (parent, educator, caregiver, etc) can enter the tactual communication of a person with deafblindness and equally share in his/her experience of the world. When the communication partner comments on these shared experiences, using signs from the language of the culture, it both, affirms the person with deafblindness, and opens a cognitive door to language development.
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