Teaching someone with traumatic head injury

[teekin]

Does anyone here have any experiance teaching a student or students who have traumatic Brain injuries with accompaning memeory loss?
I would be interested in hearing what your experiances were if the people you trained were OK with you disclosing this information on a public forum. I have no idea if my experiance is like any one elses, but I would like to see if anyone else has any insite for me.
I was also toying with the idea of recording this so maybe there is a body of information. Of course this depends on the Sensie(s) I am working with and how they feel. It's a collaberative effort to train me and would be a collaberation to write about it. Would it be a worthwhile prodject?

Humbly
Lori

 

[bluekey88]

I've never trained anyone with TBI in martial arts, although I got into my current job via work at a TBI rehab center. Also, my mother is a licensed cognitive behavioral rehabilitation specialist who does a lot of work with TBI clients.

I imagine there are no hard a fast guidelines for training those with TBI. A lot will depend on the extent of the injury, where it is, how much they've repsonded to initial treatment, etc. You'll protenitally be dealing with memory issues (both encoding and retrieval), impulsivity, lowered frustration tolerance, potential gross and fine motor skills deficitsw (depending on the location of the injury) language/communication issues (both receptive and expressive).

How I would go about things would really depend on the individual, their goals, my skill level, etc.

That being said, teaching one how to do a martial art woudl be no different in many respects to teaching one to tie their shoes, play an insturment, or any other gross motor activity. One might need more repetition, breaking down tasks into more steps than usual, more prompting and structure with an expectation of lesser ability to generalize form one skill set into another.

good luck and let us know how things progress.

Peace,
Erik