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JLY Facilitator contributions for Variety Royal Commission application.
facilitator
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If JLY was around when you were in school, how would have this impacted you? My disability was acquired at the age of 16 due to an injury. So although I did not go through childhood as a person with a disability, the lessons would still have been extremely valuable in understanding many aspects of disability when it did occur. I think it would have been really valuable in the sense that while I would learn about the different ways disabilities affect individual people, I would have also been able to understand and accept these things for myself in a much healthier and understandable light. Something as simple as truly understanding that people with disabilities are faced with many barriers and wholly understanding that people with disabilities are not the barriers themselves. I struggled a lot for many years following my injury with accepting the need for assistance or need for adjustments and felt as if I was being a hassle when my needs were required to be met. This as I understand would have been part of the learning and adjustment process, however learning and understanding these things at a young age I believe would have made a significant difference.
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Have you ever experienced a similar program? I personally have never experienced anything like the Just Like You program. When I was in school, the only thing that even resembles anything like it was Healthy Harold. While I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Sydney Paralympics as a child, that was the only exposure I had to disabilities.
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Why do you think JLY is important in today’s society? As I can see within the schools that I have delivered the JLY program, there is more of an understanding now than there was when I was at school. This shows that society is heading in the right direction around inclusivity and education around disabilities. I do however think that it is still a work in progress and JLY definitely aids in that. There are key points throughout the JLY workshop that wouldn’t be covered in day to day lessons. While it is great for kids to learn about disabilities and differences, as a whole, the JLY program also teaches about behaviours and attitudes and the impact that we as individuals have on people with disabilities too. This I feel is extremely important for our society and our future, as these kids are the future and what they take away from JLY will help to pave the way for a much more compassionate, empathetic and inclusive future.
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Can you share any examples on how the program has positively impacted students you delivered the program too?
One of the more memorable examples I can give is from one of the first schools that I presented JLY at. In one of the sessions, there is an activity where a student is picked to be a character of a story. This character loves to be different! The questions follow, “if this person had this kind of hair, if this person become an astronaut, if this person only had one arm” “could we still be their friend? Would we still treat them the same? Why ( because they are still the same person!)” The student I ended up picking, turned out to actually have only had one of her arms fully developed. This was not to my knowledge, but it turned out to work so well! As the questions followed and the students were so enthused in letting myself and her know that “Of course we would still be
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her friend“ and “Of course we wouldn’t treat her any differently”, this student completely lit up and I could really see just how positive this interaction was. On the outside, for anyone else, seeing kids with disabilities have friends and the same treatment is really important and a great thing to see. What we don’t sometimes see is the individual struggles that kids with disabilities may have on the inside. Sometimes its obvious, sometimes its not, sometimes it comes just on a bad day. I wasn’t to know if this was the case for this little girl, but it most certainly showed that what she was hearing and what she was feeling from her peers was something truly uplifting.
Facilitator
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If JLY was around when you were in school, how would have this impacted you? I would have had a better understanding of what it means to live with a disability. As someone who wasn’t yet diagnosed with Autism, it would give me a better positive light to the disability, and help me accept my condition when I got diagnosed at the age of 16.
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Have you ever experienced a similar program? I run social mentoring programs for Autistic Teens. As a kid I used to go to Healthy Harold, and I remember an incursion that involved a bald puppet. It may have had leukemia, alopecia, or cancer, but its one of those three. As for Just Like You, Autism Spectrum Australia hosts Autism related programs for schools, but not programs that talk inclusivity for people of all types of disability.
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Why do you think JLY is important in today’s society? From what I have faced as an autism advocate/mentor, I have seen autistic people are still not being invited by neurotypical (people with normal wired brains) people out to events, to parties or many other matters. This isn’t just neurodivergent (people with a hidden disability) that are facing this issue. It’s difficult as a disabled person to socialise with the rest of our community, because people just see the disability. In my talks about Neurodiversity, even though there is diversity in this world, if we were to compare neurodiversity to biodiversity, the environment we are currently in, has the same diversity as a desert. Due to our society’s lack of understanding and willing to change for their disabled peers, the environment’s are taking forever to change.
We need to show the next generation how important it is that disabled people are in their lives, that when we change environments for one kind of people, it can improve the quality of life for everyone else. The sooner we can show kids that it’s important to include disabled people, the sooner we can build longer lasting friendships. The quality of life for disabled people is improved when they feel safe in an environment, and when they have friends, then disabled people like myself can finally feel like they have a place to belong.
- Can you share any examples on how the program has positively impacted students you delivered the program too?
Classes have asked for further reading material and more sessions. As someone who hasn’t returned to a school yet, I haven’t seen any long lasting effects, but I have had students stand up and proudly declare to the rest of the class that they are autistic. This is followed by the teachers telling me that autism was never mentioned before in the class, and even though the student never brought up their autism, this was a big moment for them.
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Facilitator (request to stay confidential)
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If JLY was around when you were in school, how would have this impacted you? If JLY had existed when I was in school. My childhood would have been a lot different to what it was. I would have felt safer, more included, and less different to my peers. I would not have been bullied, excluded, judged, ignored etc daily at school and I would have grown to not have the mental health issues I now do as an adult. JLY is impacting and educating students in a way that has never been done before. It is bridging the gap and lack of education that unfortunately I and my peers never had at school and it is providing a safe space and opportunity for teachers and students to learn, ask questions and have conversations that they might otherwise be too afraid to have or ask.
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Have you ever experienced a similar program? There used to be a program I volunteered for called social Inc which was run through the Cerebral Palsy Alliance many years ago. It was aimed at high school students and although not an educational program like JLY is, it was a social group which gave the students a place to be included at lunch time at school. It gave them a sense of belonging and allowed them to flourish in confidence, independence and even leadership abilities. It helped the students to make friends both with and without disabilities; however I think JLY is impacting in a whole other way, as it is actually teaching young students the tools they need to learn on not only how to treat someone with a disability (Just Like them) but also how to include them.
I think if JLY was to be adapted and to branch out into high schools and beyond e.g. workplaces, TAFE’s etc. It could really change the world. If it was a compulsory program in all educational spaces and workplaces, we would break a lot of barriers and allow people a safe space to be educated and ask questions that they may usually be too afraid to ask, and we can put an end or at the very least, ease the amount discrimination and exclusion that happens in these types of environments to people with disabilities.
- Why do you think JLY is important in today’s society? JLY is important in today’s society because without it we risk more people with disabilities being treated differently for simply being who they are A PERSON - Who also just happens to also have something different about them - a disability. If children are not taught from a young age that people with disabilities are just like them and they are not given the correct information or taught how to behave around those with disabilities, then how can we expect them to grow into the type of adults who will have a positive impact on people in society Education should start young, but it shouldn’t end there. Education and knowledge are for life.
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- Can you share any examples on how the program has positively impacted students you delivered the program too?
I have seen first hand the positive impact the JLY program has had on many students both with and without disabilities, for example, a boy who had autism but was always embarrassed by it and never spoke about his disability. During the program however he completely opened up about his disability and shared how his autism affected him and that even though he had this disability he is still a person like everyone else.
Another positive story was of a boy who had Cerebral Palsy. He was always teased and excluded because of his disability. After seeing our program and having the chance through our program to also share with his class briefly about his CP his peers started to realise that he was in fact a really smart boy and that he is a person just like them who should and wants to be included. After our program his peers behaviour changed towards him and he was treated in a much better way. I have also heard positive stories from other facilitators. For example, a child who had autism was never included with his peers and had never been invited to a party before. After seeing our program his peers started to include him and he got his first ever invite to one of his classmate’s birthdays. I have also witnessed students who have siblings who have disabilities and JLY has been the first time they have felt safe enough to open up to their class about their personal experience and to also ask questions about how they can better understand and help their siblings. Although JLY is currently aimed at primary school students. I have also heard firsthand the impact it is having on teachers and families. Teachers often come up to me at the end of our sessions and thank me for teaching them something new that they didn’t know before. Parents have also approached me if they see me leaving the school and share with me the impact the program has had on their child and how it has helped them to have open conversations with them about people with disabilities. There are many more examples I could give here, but the bottom line is that JLY is a program that has the potential to have a universal impact if given the chance and the funds. JLY could change the whole world and all the current and future generations to come. Our program is not just about behaviour change in the school environment, it’s about giving people (students) the basic knowledge and guidance they need to make a greater impact in their lives now and beyond their schooling years.