Promoting the Use of the Outdoors with and for People who are DeafBlind for Leisure, Educational and Therapeutic Purposes.  
Transcript Start

Cyral Miller: I want to go ahead and bring Joe up. He came here all the way from Scotland, I would like to welcome Joe Gibson, he's going to be talking to us about movement.

Joe Gibson: It's a real privilege to be here in Texas. To speak to you today.

When Robbie said last night that one of the early Symposiums there was only two or three people, I was very happy about that. I get very nervous talking in front of a lot of people. I'm much more comfortable out in the woods, doing the activities that I'm going to talk about than actually talking about it.

But I'm also very passionate about what it is that I do. So I apologize to the interpreters when I start to talk, I'll probably talk faster and faster and faster because I get excited about my work.

So first of all, I want to give you a bit of background of how I got here to Texas. Not my traveling, but why am I here? [ Laughter ].

First of all, for education I did a degree in outdoor education, which is the adventurous activities, climbing, canoeing, skiing. Then I started to work for sense Scotland as a support working, basically to fund my Ph.D., I started to work to pay for this.

When I was working in the house, two other men that I worked with really enjoyed being outside. And at the time my research was going to be on "Normal" special schools, kids with mild learning disabilities and how an outdoor program affected the learning in their school.

I was working with these two guys in the house who loved being outside and I read in the outdoor literature, there was nothing about DeafBlindness, unsurprisingly. I thought, well, I've got to find something new. Anything that I find will be new. So I transferred and started to do my research on these two ‑‑ on these two men who were DeafBlind.

When I finished my research, I got a new job with sense Scotland as their outdoor activities coordinator, I traveled across Scotland working with all of the different house, all of the different people providing and facilitating outdoor activities.

10 years ago, I took a sabbatical and work to Norway to live and spent a year as ‑‑ trophy wife, skiing every day. And I decided to stay, so I'm no longer with sense Scotland, I'm now working in Norway. And that's another reason why I'm really excited to be here today, especially hearing last night about all of the teacher education for the DeafBlind. Because I just last week started working for the school for DeafBlind in Oslo, a new chapter for me. I'm not a teacher but I'm working with the children now, I'm hoping to learn a lot these next few days as well as sharing some of my information with you. That's why I'm here, what I'm going to talk about.

I'm going to start off with a very brief overview of my research, you can see where the things that I'm going to talk about are coming from.

Then I'm going to talk about what I mean by outdoor education, activities with pictures of some of the guys that I have worked with doing the activities.

And then I'm going to go through the range of the benefits of the activities to people who are DeafBlind.

So my research, when I started, the aim of my research, because it was ‑‑ there was nothing written, I just wanted to understand these two guys that really enjoyed being outside. I wanted to understand what their experiences were.

When they were participating in the activities.

There were just two participants, so very low numbers.

And I was really keen ‑‑ I considered them partners in the research, not subjects. I was based in a small science department in the university. And they were doing experiments on people who related to the subjects, having a muscle biopsy taken, take blood, measure oh, again while you did various activities. Because of the history of my [indiscernible] I couldn't do anything like that. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to understand what they were experiencing in the activities. They were the experts, they were the ones that knew what it was like to be DeafBlind and to do the activities.

The other thing that was a long‑term study, not planned to be long term, but it took me eight years to do the research. Partly because I was working part‑time in the house and partly because I felt it need ‑‑ I needed a long time to really understand what they were thinking. It doesn't happen overnight, these things.

So these two guys, these are the real heroes of my research, the two men that I started my work with. They were Peter, who is profoundly DeafBlind. He uses some hand over hand signs, about 10 hand over hand signs. He really enjoys fingerspelling. He loves it when you finger spell to them. I don't think he necessarily has a concept of the alphabet. If you sign t‑r‑e‑e,it's the same as signing ‑‑ tree, it's the same ‑‑ he's more, more, more. You might not understand him, I might be talking a strange language, but I'm trying, he sees me as a trier. Not very good, but a trier.

He had a history of 10 years in a locked ward of a hospital. So he ‑‑ he contracted rubella, he's in his 50s now, but that generation when they didn't really know what to do, behavior that's challenging, so we'll lock him away.

While he was in the hospital he had a history of being restrained, a retraining jacket and a helmet which has significance for some of the things that I will talk about tomorrow.

So that was Peter.

And then Brian. He is a little bit younger, he's now in his 50s. He has some use of his vision. He uses some BSL sign, sign language signs, a lot of gestures. He has some ecopraxic signing. When you sign to him, he's repeat back what you sign. I'm not sure exactly what the function of that is, whether it's just reinforcing it himself to check what you have said. And he also has spent a long time in a state hospital. Both of these guys had really bad histories and I sometimes wonder if it wasn't so much the ‑‑ the problems with the congenital rubella, but the problems of the "Care" they had in the previous 10 years that caused a lot of their issues and a lot of their optics.

So when I very first started, I started to ‑‑ I transferred my research and I ‑‑ I wrote an article about my initial observations.

About the benefits, which I'm going to talk about mainly today.

And there were four that came up to me.

These were ‑‑ they were new and stimulating activities, we were doing things that these guys had never done before. They were increased learning opportunities, which now working on the school I'm hoping you as teachers or teachers among you will find interesting. Lots of health benefits of doing physical activities, being physically active. There's no question about that. And then lots of opportunities for personal and social development.

So that was my sort of starting point for ‑‑ for where the ‑‑ the activities, you will see later that's becoming a lot wider.

So the process of my research, just on the research process, was ‑‑ do activities and then follow it up in a variety of ways, again, I'll talk more about that tomorrow. The follow‑up ways. And then we do the activities again. We do the activity, maybe have a conversation and then do more of the activity based on the conversation.

Or do some art work and then, you know ‑‑ so it was a spiral, a constant spiraling of learning for both Brian and Peter and more for me.

To now on to the more interesting things. What activities? What did we do? What can we do?

In Norway, what I left yesterday morning at 3:00 in Oslo, 3:00 in the morning, there was lots of snow.

And lots of snow‑based activities in Norway. This is quite typical, typical scene there. The guy in the middle is a DeafBlind man that I work with called Tormod and he has been skiing and he has got two dogs leading him. He's skiing across the lake. He's the luckiest DeafBlind man that I know. He lives in an outdoor center. His parents run a camping center on a lake. He skis, he kayaks, he has the best life.

I think.

[ Laughter ].

I think everybody should be outside. [ Laughter ].

In Norway, they have a culture called in the whole of Scandinavia called [indiscernible] outdoor living, so everybody is very comfortable with being outside all of the time. So there's lots of different activities that we can do.

Sledging, they call it, sledges that you can see, they have big, long ski runs basically that you can go down on these sledges, which is great fun, very fast, you are very close to the ground. Even more exciting when you crash, because you have a big moment to talk about, a big thing that's happened to you that you can talk about. I will talk about these "Moments" later on.

You can also go ice fishing. Believe it or not, that's me there with the hair. That's last year. I cut 25 meters worth of hair off. Used to be my sign working with the DeafBlind. Now they're like oh, oh, where's it gone. Here we are with two DeafBlind guys on that same lake where you saw Tormod skiing, we drilled a hole in the ice, incredibly tactile, incredibly interesting.

You put the fish hook in the mouth, taste it. Interesting nonetheless.

There's a big culture in dog sledding in Norway. Again, that's another great thing, especially for guys who may be a little ‑‑ with maybe a little less mobility, they can understand where you sit and drive around again very close to the snow and the interaction with the dogs.

So maybe not possible to do any of these snow based activities in Texas. [ Laughter ]. Not so much in Scotland. In Norway I do a lot more things in the snow. And then there are a lot of water‑based activities. 

This is Tormod again, the young guy in Norway I've been working with who is also lucky because his brother is a raft guide so he goes rafting every year and really enjoys that. Lots of movement again. You don't need a lot of mobility once you get in the raft. It helps if you can swim or are not scared of the water.

This is Tormod and me in the kayak by where he lives.

This is Petter, you saw earlier, sailing. Sailing is a fantastic activities because there are loads of jobs to do, ropes to pull and things to do that are very tactile. You have immediate response. When I do something, something happens and you get that immediate response to your happens. You don't have to move around much so if you have mobility props you don't have a problem.

You are very close, low down. It's a great thing. Unfortunately it's also very expensive.

There's a guy in Brazil who works with DeafBlind who started sailing now, Miguel, many of you have seen his work.

And then on to my favorite. I'm a climber. That's my outdoor activity and the work I've done a lot focused around the climbing and I'll show you some video tomorrow of Petter and me climbing.

But climbing is one of the things that we did a lot of. And it was what the research was based on as a regular activity.

So here is Brian climbing on an outside wall and climbing in a crag outside the mountains. And an indoor climbing wall.

And also once you've climbed up obviously you have to go down, so there's outside as well as another activity.

And there's also Brian in a competition. We'll have more about that later on today on the competition side. 

We've also been camping, and traditionally you put up a tent when you're camping. The first time I went to Norway with Petter 10 ‑‑ more than 10 years ago, we went ‑‑ we all had rooms in a hotel and then we set up a camp a kilo meter from the hotel. And we sat around, lit fire, everything. And fell asleep ‑‑ he fell asleep next to the fire and I didn't want to wake him up. So I put more and more reindeer skins on him and slept out next to the fire.

So this guy who had spent 10 years in the ward of a locked hospital and then three nights not inside at all, outside. And it was my first encounter with the Scandinavian concept of nature living. I'll talk a little tomorrow about some of this. But in the UK we have a culture with the outdoor activities where it's very ‑‑ they call it the McDonaldsization of the outdoors and you pick the activities you want and you go and do your activity and then you come back.

And it's often difficult to say why don't we canoe out and come back again and then get on the bus. What was the frozen that? What if we climb up this thing and come back down.

With these threes days with Petter. You get cold, you make a fire, you get hungry, pick berries, very easy for him to understand.

And he's ‑‑ I've never seen him happier for the three days that we were outside. He had his shoes off for the whole three days. We had food all down our front. No one could see us. We didn't have to worry about being clean. He only got clean when we got back to the hotel for the night and I was being careful about feeding him again.

What was interesting is he fell asleep there, we slept next to the fire. That was no problem at all. And the next morning when we woke up, and he woke up, as he does, and he put his hand up and felt we were still on the ground and he looked at me ‑‑ he doesn't have any eyes and looked at me to say as if, what? What are you making me do!!??

One of the big activities that I do with a lot of people in Scotland was gardening. This was really easy to do with any of them who had a garden, or even if they didn't have a garden with raised beds and planters. And especially food to get the link where the food comes from, not from the supermarket. It's a problem we have in Britain with all young children who think that carrots come from the supermarket.

For these guys, the DeafBlind guys to be involved in planting the seeds, watering them, feeding them and then picking the food and having a meal from the food that you've made was fantastic. 

So a whole range of different sorts of activities.

And then my colleagues in Norway, a man ‑‑ I don't know Norwegian, but they have a phrase in Norway which is "Simple is often the best." And it's certainly the case when I've been working. Often the activities where there's a lot of focus on the activity and the equipment, the climbing and the canoeing and the sailing, my focus is on facilitating, your focus is on the safety aspects and all the equipment. Sometimes it's just better to go out into the nature and see what happens. 

And this is why the outdoors I think is so fantastic because the nature can provide such a variety. 

So here we are, what was just going to be a walk along the river, however it had been raining as it does ‑‑ this is the lake district in Britain where it has been raining and raining and the river had burst its banks. So we were walking in the river.

And this was great because we could talk about it's like the bath, but we've got our clothes on. It's easy to explain these things when you're experiencing it.

Just a walk in the snow in Scotland.

Exploring bridges and stop to talk about things, rivers and bridges. 

It does ‑‑ the sun does sometimes shine in Scotland. [ Laughter ].

We do have some nice scenery in Scotland, that is ‑‑ Scotland, that is one of the sad things about leaving.

Another simple thing is exploring the animals that are in the environment. This is a big Highland cow and this brought up some interesting conversations with Petter when we felt the cow ‑‑ and I still had my hair because it felt very similar to me. [ Laughter ].

You can see he's thinking what am I thinking here? You're here, but you're here? And it also brought up a gap in ‑‑ a gap in the vocabulary or a mismatch in understanding because he would often have a carryout meal, takeaway meal on a Friday evening, Petter, and it would often beef curry, his favorite. And it's the same sign, cow and beef. And you can see it and feel. And then ‑‑ but that's not the same as what I get on a Friday. It's completely different. [ Laughter ]. So you had to start to think about how we describe things differently and the assumption was that we make ‑‑ I made about what his understanding would be. 

We had a similar situation to that with we were eating a sandwich one day in the park and a bird came ‑‑ a seagull came up and took the sandwich out of his hands. And I was trying to explain the bird. And you could see him thinking chicken, chicken. That's the sign for chicken. What are we having?

So again by having these experiences you can start to broaden their understanding of the vocabulary. 

And it's not one of the big things, but the small little animals we can explore as well. This is a tiny frog we found on the path. And I was worried. I thought I was submitting this frog to a certain death [ Laughter ] by letting Petter pick it up. I wanted him to be able to feel it because it was so small and light. But he was so gentle and held his hands open. He made me feel from my body language the way we picked it up and then he held his hand open and let it walk across his hands.

So that was quite special moment for me, hey, this is great, he's understanding we have to be a bit more gentle here. 

So there's a whole range of these different activities. And then there's more and I'll ask at the end about if there's other things that you have done or have experiences of.

But on to the meat of this. Why do we do these activities? I know I do them because I like them and I want to do it. I think I found a job where I can do the things that I like doing.

But we have to look a bit deeper into this, so I think the reasons we need to understand why ‑‑ the why is to find out what are the benefits? Why should we be doing them? What things can we get out of them for the people we're supporting and why do we need to know this? It's to offer the best service so we can improve or find the best activities for the person or for the learning that we're trying to achieve.

And also sadly at the moment it's to get funding. We have to show the benefits to get the money. And that was one of the biggest battles in Scotland is it was a constant cycle to get money do the next project and I felt like I was doing less and less of the actual activities and more on the cycle of getting money and then writing a report to that fund and then getting money from this person and writing a report.

So it became easier once we built up all this list of benefits because then we could just put down "These are the benefits, these are the benefits. It's been shown, here we are." 

So ‑‑ so I'm talking about the benefits, of the activities, I found this continuum that I use as a framework. This comes from research here in America in ‑‑ in a mental health institute. That uses a ropes course, which, you know, a [indiscernible] type of thing. The researcher looked at these activities with the ropes course with patients in the hospital and come up with this ‑‑ this medical looking continuum of the benefits from relaxing and fun and there were physical and then therapy and clinical benefits as well.

And I've adapted this slightly.

For the DeafBlind. To still have the leisure and the health and the learning. Sort of therapy. I mean learning in the broadest sense. I'll go through this now.

So you will now see where I have expanded on those four benefits that I observed right at the beginning into this slightly more complex matrix and ‑‑ first of all, the activity is a fun and ‑‑ is fun and interesting experiences. This is the reason that I enjoy being outside and why I enjoy doing all of the activities.

There's ‑‑ as all of these benefits come out, I'm going to explain coming up, but that's not the reason that I do the activities. I do it because I like being outside, spending time with my friends and doing the activities.

Quite often, people with disabilities are denied the opportunity to do something just because they enjoy it. They have to show it's has an educational benefit, it has a health benefit. I think that's a shame. They should be allowed to do activities because they enjoy them. That should be good enough.

[Applause]

But I also put being able to participate in these leisure activities, people can have a sense of identity, I have the identity as a climber or an outdoor educator. I'm over the course of the research, eight years going to the climbing wall every week with Brian and Peter, Brian particularly the guy who had some vision, began to identify himself as a climber. There were a couple of occasions that I lost him in the climbing room. When I found him he was sitting with all of the instructors who were my friends on the step outside. He managed to get a cup of tea and a magazine, he was sitting flipping through a climbing magazine because he identified himself as a climber now. When he moved from Glasgow to Newhouse. We met with instructors that he was able to carry on. So he could identify himself as a climber. It's really important that he's been able to continue with this activity because he enjoys it, despite all of these other benefits. Who am, this develops the who am I?

Ultimate health. I ‑‑ I'm more comfortable at the moment talking about this. My girlfriend in Norway is a medical doctor. So she gets really particular about these health benefits.

So I actually spent the first year of my sabbatical living in the mountains and she worked in a health sports center. The Norwegians are so lucky. They have a system where people with disabilities can get sent by their doctor to a health sports center for a month. Four weeks for adults, three weeks for children, to learn to ski, climb, cycle, to ‑‑ they have every type of adaptive bike, adaptive ski, they can try all of these different activities. So it was fantastic opportunity for me to ‑‑ for me to be there and see how it worked and pick up some more of the health benefits.

First off, any sort or form of physical ability is going to ‑‑ certainly in the U.K., figures show that people with disabilities tend to have a more sedentary lifestyle than people without disabilities, even more so with learning disabilities. It's unsurprising or it's surprising, rather. But it's more learning disability population that has a lower ‑‑ more sedentary lifestyle. So any form of increase in physical activity is good.

What's really useful about their ‑‑ the outdoor activities is the exercise part is incidental. It's not saying we need to have an exercise program, came sit on this cycle machine for an hour or come and work on the treadmill, which is also very difficult to explain to a DeafBlind person. Sit on this bike for an hour, you'll not get anywhere. [ Laughter ].

Whereas if we're in the woods, collecting pinecones or going to look for thing, the fact that we are looking for an hour, bending down and standing up, that's not the focus of the activity. The focus ‑‑ if I said we're going to go for an hour's walk they might not be so happy. So the exercise component is incidental. That's the first benefit, the cardiovascular benefits of the activities.

Also, my first six years working for Sense I was a night shift worker, worked nothing but nights for the first six years, it was really obvious to me no matter what day it was, when the weekends were, because they didn't have any activities, programs, during the weekends. Quite often they didn't sleep so well. It's not rocket science. Anybody who has got children knows if you are busy during the day with your kids, they sleep better at night. This is even more true for people who have got sensory impairments, who can't see that it's night or day.

And so that's something that was really, really simple to see. It not a difficult thing to understand nor to do. To do activities and be busy, people sleep better.

I'm not going to talk too much about this, especially with [indiscernible] in the room, but ‑‑ but being outside on rough ground and roaming around in the environment can stimulate other senses, development of vestibular system. By being in the rough ground and being out in an environment that is not always perfectly flat. Another element that we developed.

Mental health can be improved. There's a lot of funding in the U.K. as the moment for mental health projects that use physical activities. This is another big improvement thing, a big impetus in Norway about this, there's a couple of books that have been written called Kropp og sinn body and mind. They are in  ‑‑ Norwegian unfortunately. About the benefits of mental health and physical activity, in particular environmental physical activity. The [indiscernible] green exercise and doctors in Norway can prescribe green activity. Instead of prescribing medication for somebody with a mental health problem, they can prescribe them with some green activity to go work in the woods. Which is fantastic, I think.

Then there's ‑‑ the healing effects of nature. Now, this is somehow not ‑‑ I'm not quite sure how it works, but there is research written about the positive effects on our health of being in nature.

So this particular paper from Frumkin is a collection of lots of different research. It concluded there is evidence that contact with the natural world can offer health benefits.

They had some really interesting studies from hospitals where they had some patients in rooms with no outdoor windows and some patients with doors and windows to an outdoor space and people with the outdoor space access, healed quicker. They also ‑‑ there's also some research from prisons, where prisoners who had access to outdoor space and prisoners who didn't have access to outdoor space were better behavior, there was less behavioral problems if they had access to the outdoors and to the natural environment.

So I won't ‑‑ I worked many years ago in the [indiscernible] southwest of England where there's a big surfing population, all of the surfers used to talk about the positive effects of being by the sea and the positive ions.

So like I say, I don't profess to understand why or how it works, but there is definitely something about being outside that is positive for our health.

There's more recent research now from the U.K., that also supports this. This green prescription is becoming popular in the U.K. now as well.

So now on to the learning.

This a bit maybe that's going to be the most interesting for all of the teachers in the room.

There are a few different aspects to learning. As I said, I'm taking it in the broadest sense. The first thing is learning about yourself. Learning what you can do, what you can't do. And how you can adapt to ‑‑ to what you can do. When Peter when we were out walking around the woods, he develops a technique, the ground is too rough, I'm not comfortable walking by myself, he would sit down and shuffle around on his bum when we were in the woods, independently. He also [indiscernible] around the house, we went to the climbing wall, we started climbing up the wall. It was quite amazing that we were going up this flat room. But he also realized that he could stand on very small holds, small footholds. The with a big step, he was comfortable standing on his toes and stretching up and down, so he was able to learn a lot about himself and about his physical capabilities by ‑‑ by interacting with the activities and doing the activities. He had a better picture of himself.

And it was one of the things when I first started my research, it's all of the outdoor centers in the U.K. say in their publicity, U.K. literature, that you can develop the perception of yourself. I said this is obviously something that I need to research with these DeafBlind guys. But they couldn't tell me about the perception of themselves. All of the measures about yourself, you tick boxes. I was looking there were third person measures where I could look and say I think ‑‑ but I wasn't comfortable with that. Me thinking of what their perception of themselves were didn't seem right. Ultimately it wasn't answering the question of what's their experiences.

So I haven't gone too far down that line beyond just the observing how they learned about themselves.

We could also learn about others. This is a crucial thing, I will talk about it later on. But the relationships that have been developed and the change in understanding of relationships from the guys when they're in the house, that person doesn't like that, that person, this one won't talk to that one, they're scared of them. Then when we were out doing activities, how this perception the staff changed. 

So there were a few different relationships. Brian and Richard in particular, there's a guy Richard who was also in the house and he used to come to some of the activities. And they were very much in competition in the house where I worked. They were both the two in the house that had some vision that could see. And Brian had been there since the house opened and then this Richard came later on. And I think Brian saw it as a threat to his dominance in the house. I'm the best here, I'm the most able person.

And then there were a couple of incidents during the outdoor activities that really highlighted this relationship. The first we were ‑‑ we were at the outdoor center, we were walking back to the accommodation block, and it was down a very steep, zigzagging path with grass slopes in between each level of the path. And me and the other staff members had gone ahead. Both of the guys had been on the path, they could see the path, they knew where we were going. And we were keeping an eye on them, but letting them move by themselves. And we were one zig lower, so we certainty on a lower level of the path with Brian and Richard. And you could see Richard instead of walking down the path, he had come to the edge of the path and seen us down below and was about to step off into this grassy path. And Brian came up behind him, put his hand on his shoulder and pulled him around to the right direction and marched him down the path, which I thought was fantastic. This is the guy who had no contact with the others. Won't interact with the others at all. And he obviously had seen him and noticed him. And he had noticed something was wrong and he did something about it. He was like three levels beyond what everybody had said about him just by the simple thing of walking down the path together by themselves.

There was another incident with these two that showed the level of competition. Brian was a bit nervous of water. He had had an accident with an adaptive cycle in his younger days and gone into a pond. So it's understandable that he was a bit nervous about water. There was a river crossing activity where we put a rope across the river and we were going across the river with wet societies and floating aids. And Brian walked in first and he went up to his chest and came back to the bank and then he sat and watched everybody else go through this activity. And he watched Richard in particular go the whole way along over the river, and he started pointing again and pointing again. He wanted back in.

And he walked back to the same place up to his chest and he held on to the rope and ducked his head under the water and then came out looking as if to say, you might have been across the river, but I've been under the river. [ Laughter ]. 

So that was really interesting. It highlighted this relationship that these two guys had and it was far more complex than he doesn't talk to him. These labels that I give them very easily were blown out of the water by doing some of these activities. 

There's also some relationships, there's a course that happens every year for the youth ‑‑ younger people, DeafBlind people in Norway, that I've been fortunate enough to work on the last couple of years, although not one of the younger people. And their peer‑to‑peer relationships have been very interesting to observe. And actually two years ago when one of the girls got home, her mom asked did you have a nice time with Trina? 

And the girl answered Trina and Petter, and she went through all the other four DeafBlind people. She didn't mention any of the staff, but she mentioned her gang, who were the DeafBlind guys on the course, and this had built up over the years on this course. But that was interesting. They identified with each other as their group.

We've got some pictures here. This was the first trip to Norway when we were outside three days. And this is Petter with a Danish did DeafBlind guy who also doesn't mix and doesn't contact with the other DeafBlinds. Very relaxed lying next to the fire on the reindeer skins lying next to each other.

This is just Tormod laying down next to a Norwegian DeafBlind guy I've been working with and a Danish DeafBlind guy Petter, and we had been skiing up to this cabin and spent the night in the cabin and they spent the evening sitting on each other and exploring each other and feeling each other, really interesting.

This is a few years later, an outdoor week in ‑‑ this is in Norway again, but a different place. And this is the Danish guy we saw lying with Petter, and Brian. And this is the first walk of the week. And they're sort of eyeing each other up a little, sitting apart. They never really sat close to each other.

By day two they were sitting on the bench next to each other. [ Laughter ] I think from Brian's point of view, Dennis has got a beer and Brian is very interested in beer, very interested in beer. [ Laughter ].

And this is on the last night with Brian and Dennis and other young Norwegian guy relaxing together and interacting. And it's the same for all of us. When we spend an intense amount of time together, sharing activities together, our relationships, our bonds grow. And it's no different than the DeafBlind people that we support.

So in the research there was these relationships with the peers, these relationships between the DeafBlind people, but there are also relationships with the support staff that really increased. 

Heres Brian and his support worker in Denmark. He's relaxing quite happily using her as a pillow. 

And this was ‑‑ there were a few things that came back regarding the relationships with the support staff. The first off there was the support of coming out of the house and coming to a residential center. It was a completely different situation for everybody. So people with cognitive dissonance, people were in a different place differently, but mentally as well. We were in a different residential setting, the activities we were doing was different. As staff we were sharing rooms with the DeafBlind people. There were the girls room and boys room and that was it, we were all in one room together. And that created some really interesting experiences, especially in the night, but Brian as he does, gets up and he has his own room at home and he gets used to going to the toilet and he would flick the lights on and off. And when he did that and we were all sleeping in the room, instead of having a waking night shift person opening the door, he had three pillows thrown at him, which he thought was hilarious. Oh, oh, and hiding the pillows and climbing back into bed. He must have thought it was interesting to go through all our bags and try some of the clothes that we had on. 

[ Laughter ]

And then as Brian and Petter and some of the other guys in the house had been told three or four times to these outdoor centers and on these outdoor weeks, they had become quite experienced at some of the activities and sometimes staff would come for the first time. So it was a fantastic opportunity for Brian to show the support worker how to put the climbing harness on. For him to be in that position of power and to be the knowledgeable person and I've got some video that I can't show, but that shows Brian leading the staff member up towards the cave and you can see the staff member looking nervously over his shoulder, are we going the right way? There's a big black hole we're about to walk into. [ Laughter ].

Okay. And I've talked about this Frilutkurs, this outdoor course in Norway that I mentioned with the my gang story, there's also the concept of that is it's run into someone with all the Norwegians that have a holiday, everybody, all the professionals are on holiday at the same time. So staff and other support workers aren't ‑‑ predominantly aren't professional workers or staff. They're siblings or relatives, cousins, and there was a group of trainee doctors at one point who spent the summers coming to work or training teachers coming to work, but they are roughly the same age so it was like aged peers with the DeafBlind people.

So it was all these 20‑year‑olds doing activities together. Not professional staff with their DeafBlind people, but young people doing activities together. That was until I came along and I wasn't one of the young people. [ Laughter ]. But that was part of the concept behind this, this week, is it's young people enjoying activities and having experiences together. 

The other relationships, there's ‑‑ there was peer research, relationships with external professionals. I used to go to the climbing wall every week with Brian and Peter for eight years. So that was the opportunity for Brian in particular, with Peter as well, but with Brian to build up relationships with these climbing instructors. I told you about when I lost him and he was sitting with the instructors on the steps. They also learned signs so they could work with him themselves. They would finger spell their names to him, ask what next? We would take them to what he wanted to do next. After a couple of months of this, he started to sign all of this stuff to me, biscuit, bath, toaster, he was signing all of these signs. I don't know the function of Brian whether he suddenly realized, you only know two or three signs, I'm going to hit you with all of the signs I know, I'm signing, you're not. I know Joe is not bringing him a biscuit or a bath, but you might. So he was either showing off or trying to get something that he knew he shouldn't really have at that time. But he built really good relationships with these external professionals.

There's another project in the ‑‑ I'll talk about that in a second.

Also to build up relationships with the public. The public are at the climbing wall at the same time as everybody else, it was a busy place.

And that was really interesting because quite often people would come and talk to me, not while the guys are climbing, but when we got down to the ground and then they saw me, especially with Peter hand over hand signing, I didn't realize that he couldn't see. Why are you talking like that? When we were doing the activities they were the same as everybody else. Then there's a disability, a barrier when they were back on the ground and we were communicating directly. I thought that was really interesting for people who ‑‑ especially these two guys who had come from the locked wards of a hospital and had a terrible experience, at the house in the U.K. locked away, and then doing these activities that were a bit [indiscernible] and really out there. They really raised the awareness of people who were seeing the activities, raised their perception of what people with disabilities were capable of. That was the same when we are out doing projects in the wood, making arts in the woods. People were like this person has a disability? Oh, my goodness. When they realize the level of their disability. That was really good not just for the DeafBlind people, not just to be out in the public, but to be out in the public in a positive way, doing activities in the same way as everybody else.

It was also ‑‑ learning some of the social skills, Brian when he led the instructor ‑‑ he had a very strict routine, climbing routes that he liked to do. But if somebody was on the climb that he was wanting to do ‑‑ now at home, if he wanted to do something and there was somebody in the way or doing it, the chances are there will be a bit of anger and irritation. He realized that wasn't going to get anywhere. And he would just stand away or go to another room. He learned a socially acceptable way of dealing with his frustration, which was fantastic.

Also there was ‑‑ an incident with a young boy once, which was fantastic from Brian's point of view, not so fantastic for the young boy. He came up to the room he wanted to climb, you will see on the video as Brian starts to climb, the instructor on the next door route, with the rope going up, you can't see, there's somebody up there, you can see the instructor belaying, you can see the instructor saying go let go, let go, lean back on the rope, I've got you on the rope. The video follows Brian as he climbs up. As Brian climbs up, you can start to see the feet, legs, body of this boy gripped on to the wall. This is a young school boy with no disability, just school group that was also on the climbing wall at the same time.

So Brian climbs up and they come level and you see Brian look over his shoulder and carry on climbing to the top. And this young boy still holding on to the wall really tight. Brian starts to lower down, lower down, he looks across at this boy again and starts to burst out laughing, he is lowered back down to the ground. I think this is one of those sorts of experiences that really reinforces I'm a climber, actually I'm quite a good climber. I'm a lot better than you are.

So it's ‑‑ [ Laughter ]. It wasn't just about the public learning about people who are DeafBlind, but it was about people who are DeafBlind realizing that actually we can be good at things as well.

And it might not be such a positive experience for this young boy to see this guy with disabilities and climbing up and looking down laughing at him.

And then also there's the relationship with the environment.

That ‑‑ that the guys ‑‑ they are never going to learn about the environment by reading it in a book or very unlikely that they could read and pick up much by learning, reading in the book.

But to go and stand and feel the insect or frog on your hand or to be out in the environment and feel the rain on you or feel the sun, the staff in Scotland when I worked, yes, they would take people for a walk in the park but they would stay on the path. They would say a rabbit hole. That's no good. You have to get on your hands and knees and put your hands in the rabbit hole to talk about the rabbit hole. So by being in the environment they can learn about the environment and develop a relationship with them, but it's not scary, which it could be. It ‑‑ you don't have to go to Alaska or Greenland to have a Wilderness experience for the deck, you just have to go outside their house, outside their familiar. So we can have these sessions in the woods in the nearby park, it could be in the Wilderness as far as Peter is concerned. I have some video for one of the other sessions later on.

And there's a project in Norway that I've been involved in, in the end part of called the Bua Mi project, translates as my little house. It's Tormod, the guy with the good life, who has dealt with his friend Petter, another DeafBlind guy, they have built a little cabin, they started off by going exploring all of the cabins around in the area and feeling cabins, feeling roofs and walls so the group had an understanding of what a house was, what a cabin was. Then built the cabin with a carpenter. There's lots of different relationships that have come out of this. Is Tormod and Petter working together very close. Tormod and Petter, the carpenter, a professional guy who had no experience working with disabilities, just a local partner who was also a carpenter. He came and helped with the building of this house and he's now ‑‑ Petter and one of the other guys, he's his hero now. To talk about [indiscernible] the carpenter. He was very upset one day when [indiscernible] cows were calving and he had to stay in the farm and couldn't come. He got quite emotional that the carpenter couldn't come that day.

It's been a fantastic experience for the support staff and Petter and Tormod and they now have somewhere to go and lots of shared experiences but they have a location to go and do activities. It's only a tiny maybe three meters square cabin with a little fire in the corner and a bed, but they can go and do all sorts of activities there, they have something to talk about because they shared the making of the place together.. 

They also take lots of visitors because people who come to the center often go see the cabin and you can see the pride of two people around his house and it's not his house where he lives. It is the house that I built. 

And it was the making of the building of the relationship and the understanding of the building, of building it with every step from even the ‑‑ they cut down the tree and they took a tree to the saw mill and milled plank and they had a relationship with every aspect. They had a metal worker come and melted some iron and made some nails so they could have an understanding of every aspect of where these things came from. 

So relationships are crucial. 

And then learning about the world. I mentioned that with the relationship, the environment, this big thing in the world to understand it. 

And there's a quote from Helen Keller's teacher that said that the happiest school room was by the river outside, which I thought that's it, I don't need to do anymore.

[ Laughter ]

If Annie Sullivan said it was a good place, that's good enough for me. 

So we've gotten the learning about self, we've got the learning about society. There's also activity‑related learning.

And I will talk a lot more about this tomorrow and how to do the activities and how to [indiscernible] the activities.

For example, how to tie a knot is part of the activity, part of the activity of climbing. Brian learned to tie a knot by himself. And what is a map? We've used different maps, tactile maps, big and large visual maps, all different sorts of mapping to understand where we are. Even a stick that I'll show tomorrow this map stick idea of how to explain to somebody how far in a walk you are.

And how to walk with poles. Brian has a bit of difficulty on uneven ground, but as soon as we started to introduce like ski poles, walking, and he was able to walk next to me without being linked in all the time, as long as he could see where I was, he was happy to walk independently next to me. Or how to paddle a canoe. There are all sorts of different learning related to the activity.

And I'll talk tomorrow more on how to do.

There's also from the mainstream outdoor research, there's evidence that cognition can be improved by exposure to an actual environment. This piece of research was a pre and post test of people, mainstream people who had a precognition test and then half of them sat in a room for half an hour and half went for a walk in the natural environment for half an hour and then they did the post test. And the people who had been out in the natural environment did better statistically on the post test.

So it's you just another tick for the being ‑‑ so it's just another tick for the being outside, which is my mission for getting everybody outside. [ Laughter ].

There's also some evidence from the world of neurology. It's getting a bit more complicated now on the neurology side. But there was some research by Hari and Akos about experiencing work, by doing things, helped correct ‑‑ artificially impose visual impairments. So they had people put on glasses that turned the image upside down and then half the group were ‑‑ sat in a wheelchair and moved around the house and half were told to walk around the house and bump into things. And after an hour, the people who were allowed to walk around by themselves could put their hand out and the image in their mind had been turned back the right way, whereas the people who had been moved around could never get to that stage, could never get for their mind to reinforce ‑‑ revert the image correctly.

They also did an experiment with cats where they would put two cats in a box. One of them harnessed up like a little horse to a cart and one sitting in the back of the cart with one eye each covered. And they would swap positions and swap the eye that was covered and then they tested the vision. And the vision was always better on the eye that was exposed where they were moving around compared to the eye that was exposed when they were sitting being moved around in the box. And no cats were harmed. [ Laughter ].

It just showed that moving around in the environment helped to correct these artificially imposed impairments.

And then Hodgkins talked about the importance of tacit knowledge, touched in meaning making and how important that is.

And then more recently I've been writing an article with Jay Nicklaus, a psychologist from Norway, and he's working on memory and working memory and autobiographical memory and talking about how outdoor memories with reinforce autobiographical memories. So there's a whole lot of stuff going on and the activities and the environment can help benefit.

And I would ‑‑ my hope in regards to this neurology stuff is participation in the activities in the natural environment may help with sensory impairments [indiscernible] in the world. It's not to say you've got to be out there feeling the tree roots ‑‑ and then you realize okay, there are tree roots, trees are around. If you touch it you have the image of the trees being round.

That reminds me of the story when I first started working with Petter I think I confused him because we would go into the woods. He loved being in the woods. I told you he liked to be feeling trees, he would sign tree, fingerspell tree and we would go on to the next free and feel the tree and sign tree. Then I started to think we're feeling an oak tree and silver birch. They feel completely different, but I'm signing the same thing. And I thought does he even realize they're round. We're off touching one tree, off to the next tree and another one. So we started to walk around the tree and talk about big trees and small trees and go around to the back.

And then we would also pick up leaves and branches on the floor and talk about the arms of the tree and the fingers of the tree, concepts that I thought he might understand.

And then I started to think does he think that the branches are the arms and leaves of the tree lie on the floor beneath the tree because he can't feel beyond his reach.

So once he started climbing and he was comfortable with the climbing harness we put a rope up into the tree and we put a rope up into the tree so he could have a picture of the whole tree because he had to do it tactilely.

Still on the learning, and in Scotland there's ‑‑ it was four or five years ago, but they had a new curriculum and the big question is this curriculum for mainstream, all education in Scotland, was making cross‑curricular links and not creating subjects in isolation. And the outdoor world took this as a big opportunity and I wrote a booklet about the curriculum for excellence is what it's called, through outdoor learning. And that's available online, that book.

And there's lots of different organizations that have taken this on and tried to explain some of the different learning opportunities and how you can fit some of the curricular activities using the outdoors and nature.

And there's a book that I helped set up with a teacher, special education teacher, about some different activities that we had used, and she took the activities and wrote the curricular learning points, learning outcomes for each one on the leaf. And I can give you the links to all these things after if people are interested. You can email.

So learning about the world. And then the holy grail, learning to communicate. 

Why is communication such a big issue? This is probably good in this environment. I don't have to explain about DeafBlindness. When I'm talking to the [indiscernible] about the DeafBlind, I spend a lot of time talking about DeafBlindness and it's not deaf and blind people. It's people who are deaf and blind. And how does that work and how does that impact.

So back to my research, my aim was to understand Brian and Petter's experiences of these activities. But for that to happen they had to learn to express their experiences or more importantly I had to be able to understand when they were expressing their experiences.

So Petter especially who classically had lots of very functional signs, drink, toilet, bath, toast, how could he tell me how he felt or how could I understand when he probably was all the time talking about how he felt about things in the past and things in the future.

And his communication was only ever acted on in a functional way. He signed drink, he must be asking that he wants a drink. 

So that is why I started to focus and turn the research into, okay, this needs to be about how I can understand. And I was very inspired in this ‑‑ how to do this process by a Norwegian [indiscernible] named Gunnar. And if you've seen his videos of the activities where he would do activities and then talk about it the next day, to talk about it in that declarative sense in the past. And I was very inspired by his videos, especially the keys with Ingrid, and go for coffee every Thursday and come back to the car one day and throw the keys on the ground and where are the keys? We can't find the keys. It was a big drama. And I thought this is fantastic. I can't do that, I can't pretend. I'm not an actor and I'm not as dramatic as Gunnar. He's a fantastic signer and pedagogue. I felt I couldn't do that, but I felt that the activity ‑‑ when we were standing in the river I was cold and wet. I didn't have to act. It was real. [ Laughter ]. When we were climbing for the first time I was terrified. [ Laughter ]. I was scared.

When we slipped on the snow and fell down the hill, I was scared. When we crashed the sledge I was feeling the same feelings.

So I thought we could use the outdoors as part of this development of this declarative communication. 

As part of this, there was a concept that's been one of the interesting things, plus the things in it the outdoor literature that were relevant to the work with the DeafBlind, although not aimed at the DeafBlind, but just transferred across. And one of them there was a Belgium experiential educator who had this ‑‑ written lots of articles about marking moments. With the mainstream group how you say a word or do something, a lot happens in the course of when you're doing something, somebody may decide to go through the tunnel and you say a word so when you're rehearing it later, you can say that word and it brings back all the feelings.

I thought this is like punctuating. We talk about when things happen how do we tactilely make this a mark? 

The difficulty is that we have to mark these moments in a tactile way, try to think okay how did that feel for the person?

And ‑‑ and it could be difficult, also, because the things that we think are interesting might not always be the things that the person we're working with thinks are interesting.

And I've got a little bit of video to show you from an environmental session with Peter. This is a session that worked for weeks and weeks and weeks. A very set route. We would come to a tree hyped us, which is a [indiscernible] tree with two big arches that swept down to the ground. We climb over the first one and on to the second branch. And this was our marker. So this was our base camp at the tree. Then we would go and see the old tree, the old tree with moss, a tree with feet, tree with skin, bark, walk around the various trees, the roots, we will come back around to the tree. We would talk about that, we had our set routine, if there were other things that we could see on the way, we would talk about them as well and fit them into the story. You will see here ‑‑ there are things that I think are interesting. There are things that Peter thinks is interesting.

I'm going to talk overs the signs. We're going to look, look, for the old tree. Yes.

Moss. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

For the tree. Look for the tree's feet. Yes, yes, yes. Walk back to the tree, yes, yes and have ‑‑ have [indiscernible], yes, yes, yes, you can see him start to smile. That's me thinking all of these interesting environmental things to explore.

So it's just a wee example of that. To bear in mind, something that happens all of the time as part of the research we would do these activities and for Peter, the follow‑up was these conversation sessions when we would sit in his room and talk about the climbing or the ‑‑ these environmental sessions, you always had the harness, the helmet. There's a few sessions, I'll show you one tomorrow. A few sessions with all of this stuff, you can see on the floor shells, pine cones, leaving, climbing harnesses, ropes, he just wants me to tickle his ankle. You can see my face like really, we are going to have a conversation about something. Tickle my ankle, tickle my ankle. You could see the frustration that I had. No, I want to have a conversation about something else!

So ‑‑ so ‑‑ as a result of all of this, I came up with a model and ‑‑ and as to why ‑‑ why the outdoor education with DeafBlind adults, as they were, was useful in developing the communication, particularly this declarative communication.

So this is a model ‑‑ I'm going to talk through it in a second. This is the model as it was in the ‑‑ [indiscernible] stimulating activities and relationships.

And then over the course of ‑‑ the next 10 years of working in Scotland, I had another bit called the nature of the activities. And neither of those slides are really clear, so I have highlighted this. These are the three aspects. That I think are really important.

So first off, the stimulating activities. The first thing that benefits chance ‑‑ these activities were authentic. It was important for me to be authentic, but they were memorable as well.

You can and you talk about ‑‑ you can have a communication development program based on making a cup of coffee. You can.

But it's not very exciting. When the exciting bit is we've run out of sugar, you know where the sugar is, that's not exciting. Why would you want to remember that and why would you want to tell somebody else about it? But to be in the river up to our wastes in water, climbing up and having coffee at the top of this mountain, they are more excited, more interesting to talk about. Stimulating activities, something to talk about, we have a subject. The relationships ‑‑ the activities we do, I talked all about all different sorts of relationships that came up. So we know relationships ‑‑ communication ‑‑ we are doing these activities together. So I was there or whoever the person was, that person was there as well. And like Peter and Brian and other people, they're not going to sign in conventional signs necessarily and say I remember, I'm thinking about this thing that happened.

So you will see tomorrow Peter talking about his hat, more like the feeling of the hat, emotional traces. Or if you see maybe rubbing their knees, we banged our knees together. So ‑‑ so if you were there, you've got somebody to talk to who was there. And something yesterday from [indiscernible] a Norwegian psychologist who works for the DeafBlind to get into the mental space, we have to share the experiences to try to get into the same mental space.

It's a good thing to share these stories and tell so other people can have the conversations. But it's even better to be one that's there. Especially if you look at the video, I'm not talking, not signing, you can't see who is leading the signing. But something that you see Peter or Brian turn around, because the ‑‑ because I was the one standing with them, the wind was blowing, on the video you can't necessarily see that. So being there.

It's really important. Sharing activities is really important.

And then this new aspect of the ‑‑ of the activities. There's something about the nature of the activities and the outdoor environment which lends itself ‑‑ the activities are physical, we go canoeing, we go climbing, big movements that lend themselves to being recreated in a physical, visual or tactile way.

I also ‑‑ the natural environment is incredibly tactile, incredibly sensory, it's interesting. You can see Peter here, sitting on a reindeer skin when he spent the whole time stroking, on the snow. This is very interesting. At home he likes to pick up very tiny little stones and rub them between his fingers. It's one of the fascinating things because he's pick up, throw away, pick up throw away until he finds one that he likes. I don't know what it is. To me there's no difference. If you talk to him, when he wants to sign, he will put it in his mouth and take it back out again. [ Laughter ]. He will bust out laughing sometimes, is it a funny taste? Shape? What is it? When we were sitting in the snow, the snow can sometimes be quite granular. And it disappears as the warmth from his hands melts the snow. He thinks this is a strange country, this country Norway. You can see him here trying to find the stones, we don't have stones in Norway. It's hard water.

 ‑‑ on the equipment, the ‑‑ so the activities physically we do a lot of physical stuff. The environment is very ‑‑ very tactile and interesting.

But also the activities that we use, the equipment sorry that we use during the activities are very tactile. So this is ‑‑ this is when Peter is first climbing with a full strap around ‑‑ I'll talk about it tomorrow, this was the moment I was nervous about with him because of his history of being restrained, having a restraining jacket. I will talk about the steps leading up to putting the harness on. But the first one, I was really nervous, the first time we got the full body harness on, you could feel his body tense as we put the neck straps on and over the shoulder. I put the carabiner. He burst out laughing saying this is rubbish, I've escaped from much more than this before. [ Laughter ].

This is Tormod outside the ski slope in his house, going skiing. Licking the ski pole, I thought that I would see what that was all about to try to understand.

This was crossing the river in Scotland. In that absolute freezing cold.

So again lots of things to talk about, lots of tactile ropes, harness, back to the natural environment, this is on the beach in Scotland, another sunny day. And being in the water and in the sand and you can see ‑‑ people are like he's in the water! He's getting wet! Yeah, he's not made of sugar, he won't dissolve.

And this guy found ‑‑ he spent an hour and a half just in this, you know, two centimeters of water playing with the sand, the wet sand and then went and spent another hour and a half with the dry sand. Feeling the difference between the wet and dry sand, how it sticks to your hands and it was fascinating. 

And then we saw earlier the Highland cow and a little tiny frog. And we've also been able to catch fish. And not just catch the fish, but gut them and cook them. So that feeling immediately of where the food has come from. We've cooked this thing, we've cut it open and taken certain bits off, cut off the head, tail, put it in the fire and then we'll eat it. 

So learning to communicate. Another thing that we can really, I would say, address through the outdoors. So you can see how it's become a bit more complex, this matrix.

And these things are all interconnected, and it's getting a bit busy here so I think we can see that the ‑‑ they're all linked together, the leisure, the education, learning and health are all interconnected each other.

And another advantage with the activities is they're not mutually exclusive. When Brian goes to the climbing wall as a leisure activity it doesn't stop it being healthy and stop it from being learning opportunities.

If we're going to the woods and doing a approximate project about different trees and collecting different leaves and trees and bits of bark as a learning project, it doesn't stop it being healthy. We walk into the woods and hopefully it doesn't stop it being fun. We can enjoy the activities. And the same if we have a physical health focus it doesn't stop the other two things happening. So that's another real benefit is we can be hitting all these targets at the same time.

There's also some aspirational benefits that have come into this. This may be hard things for everybody, but there are things maybe to aim for aspire too.

So there are three things, there's work, science, competitive sports and there's certified projects and exhibitions.

So before I left Scotland I had two service users working for me and we had a [indiscernible] in Scotland called the therapeutic wage scheme where people could learn up to 20 pounds a week and it not affect their benefits. So it's seen as a job, but it wasn't enough money to affect their benefits.

And it varied from person to person how much actual money it was and how much the job was important.

So he had one on the left work for me as a gardener and he would sweep up the leaves in different houses, gardens, put the bins out on bin day, jobs like that.

And Gavin, who worked as a walk leader and it was his job to phone everybody the night before and tell them where the walk was going to be. And he would always go to the back of the group to make sure everybody was kept together. I think he actually thought I was the assistant and he was the walk leader want and I was his assistant to lead these walks.

But for him the pride in the job was more than the money. The money wasn't so important, it was the fact that he had a job.

And then there's competitive sports. This is Brian at the first of the British mountain nearing council had a competition and I took two guys from Scotland down. And as with the paralympics they had all these categories for parasports. And it was visual impairment, hearing impairment, low availability, and I said most of my guys can daybreak at least three of these boxes. Which category do you want them to compete in.

So it was a good challenge for them to think about. 

And also, it was interesting because Brian who liked to climb with ropes and didn't like waiting, as I mentioned before. So we climbed the first competition route and there was only four routes that he had to climb as part of the competition. And we went to the next one and there was a line of people.

So he decided to climb on the route next to him even though it wasn't a part of the competition. I think he thought we've driven all the way from Scotland, we're not wasting our time. [ Laughter ]. Let's go climbing.

And he actually came in third in the sensory impairment category, which was great. What was interesting is the guy that gave the prizes, you can just about see him in the green top there, is a Scottish climber called Jamie Andrew who had an accident in the Alps 10ish years ago and had to have both hands and both feet amputated through very bad frostbite and he was giving the prizes out. And he had the bag between his stumps and he held it out to Brian, this bag of ‑‑ and Brian took the bag, dropped the bag and grabbed Jamie's two stumps and he looked at me as if to say he has no hands? How does he talk? Has anybody realized this man has no hands? And luckily I know Jamie and was talking to him. So he was just letting him explore the fact that he had no hands. And he found that more interesting than the prize that he had just been given. 

And then certified projects and exhibitions. We have ‑‑ I was fortunate in Scotland I worked very closely with the art team so a lot of the ideas and a lot of the experiences we were able to ‑‑ the arts team were able to turn into proper art. Not something I would have done, but it was proper art. So proper, in fact, that it got often put into exhibitions. And this is one of the pieces, the first piece that I did in collaboration with the art team. I worked with them where we collected lots of things in different activities and I had the idea that I was going to get a big piece of wood and stick the pine cone, stick the feather and stick the leaf on the wood and write the date and the location and the date so we could have a conversation, have a conversation with her and talk about it with a little bit of information of what it was.

And the art teacher was like no, no, give the stuff to me and they made these textured board with this white stuff and then they chose where to put each thing and it got selected to hang in the exhibition. It looked like a piece of art and somebody bought it. Somebody paid a fortune to buy the art she had done. So I thought it was fantastic. The most fantastic thing is when we were at the exhibition the opening night and she was exploring with her dad and she saw the pine cone and started to sign rain and it had been pouring with rain. And I thought that's the why. That's why I want do it. Never mind this art business. [ Laughter ].

But I'll talk more about the links with the art tomorrow and how we can take these activities a bit further. 

So aspirational benefits. And then I've been constantly adding and adding to this and it's getting really untidy now. It's still ‑‑ there are still more things left.

In Scotland in our big center in glass could you they opened the new center and they spent thousands of pounds on a sensory room with fiber‑optic lights and vibrating pillows. I was like I can take you guys out into the woods. We can lie on leaf mulch and that's tactile. We have the sun coming through the trees as the wind is blowing and that's ‑‑ it costs you nothing. Or you can give me the money, but it doesn't cost you anything. [ Laughter ].

A natural sensory room just outside the door.

We can do functional assessments of people. People can look at the videos of Brian climbing and say he never touches the holds. Is there something about his vision he doesn't say red or whatever it is. He doesn't see that there are certain things that we can assess by doing the activities.

At the health sport center in Norway where I was living until recently they used to use a railing for people's ‑‑ horse riding for people's posture and see how they could sit on the back of a horse.

All these benefits are for the DeafBlind participants, if we're out doing the activities as well, we get all the same benefits. So all these health benefits and all these learning opportunities and the leisure activity, it's all good for us or whoever the support person is as well. So that's another positive. 

On the mental health side, increased motivation. I talked about the exercise being incidental. By then I was getting service users who didn't like exercise and didn't like ‑‑ asking when are we going walking? When are we going walking? We have some nature sweets and we were picking berries and she wasn't allowed sweets, this girl.

Out in the sun, outside we can get an increasing vitamin D. We can help be physically active and moving around can help stabilize people who have problems with their bowels, another health thing.

So lots and lots of additional benefits. And I'm constantly working with this and I'm trying reorganize. So if anybody has any more benefits or things that they can think of and activities they've done, please, please tell me and we can add and try to build up as big a picture so we can all get more money to do these things. [ Laughter ]. 

Just in the last few minutes, I want to talk about the DeafBlind international outdoor network. On the first trip to Norway when you saw Petter and me camping when we were outside, it was just a group from Norway who were having an outdoor week in the summer and invited us along and invited some people from Denmark.

And this was really great to finally I felt like I wasn't alone. I wasn't the only person doing these activities and taking people outside, but there are other people I could talk to and discuss the activities. And also we had a fantastic week. The DeafBlind people made new friends and did some new activities. We learned about the different cultures.

And we carried this on every year after that and going to Denmark and Norway and Scotland and England. And then I had applied in that time to DeafBlind international about setting up a network, an outdoor network, we have all these different networks within DBI. In 2012 we had an outdoor network accepted and we had the first year in Scotland of an outdoor network week. And these have continued. It's been in Norway last year, England just last year, 2016.

Right now it just consists of a mailing list so I have a list of people's names and emailing address and I send out the information. And thereof also a Facebook group. So we invited them to join the Facebook group where people share and talk about the activities they're doing or if there's local events in different places. And there's now I think about 180 people across different countries who are members of the group. Some in Canada, some in Brazil. There's a couple of people from America, but not many. So if anybody is interested, please just come tell me. All I need is an email address if you're interested in joining the emailing list or I can invite you to the Facebook group if you want to see and connect with other people.

And then having that digital connection as we talked about last night, you can start to share experiences and ideas and people in different countries have different ways of doing things and I can share that and talk about the different ways of doing things a bit tomorrow. 

So to finish off, I've got two questions for all of you and there is a lot more of you than I anticipated.

[ Laughter ].

So first off, are there any activities that you think are not possible with people who are congenitally blind, outdoor activities in particular. That's the first thing to think about. And are there any other benefits ‑‑ I've already asked this one ‑‑ are there any other benefits of the activities that you can think of or that you have recognized in your work that I haven't mentioned yet that we can add to this ‑‑ this growing list of benefits. Maybe new research directions for people to evaluate.

Because I think in that way then we can ‑‑ the more we investigate, the more we're adding, the more we're able to do because the more funding we can get.

I hope that's been of some interest and some use, I've been able to ‑‑ to talk about some of the activities, some of the work that I've done. And that it's maybe something that you can do or are doing or can do more of here in Texas. Thank you.

[Applause]