Lilli Nielsen

Dr. Lilli Nielsen ("née" Reker) (b. December 21, 1926, Rønne, Bornholm, Denmark) [http://www.lilliworks.com/dr_nielsen_cv.htm About Dr. Lilli Nielsen:CV ] ] is a Danish psychologist in the field of teaching blind children and those with multiple disabilities. She has written several books on the subject.

She is the second of seven children, four of whom were born blind. When she was seven she was charged with the responsibility of taking care of her blind younger brother. [http://www.lilliworks.com/about_dr__lilli_nielsen.htm About Dr. Lilli Nielsen ] ]

She was a preschool teacher, then worked in a hospital, became a psychologist, and eventually was hired to teach the blind.

In 1988 she earned a PhD in psychology at the University of Århus.

Lilli Nielsen has worked as special education adviser at Refsnaesskolen, National Institute to Blind and Partially Sighted Children and Youth in Denmark. [ [http://www.tsbvi.edu/Education/vmi/nielsen.htm An Introduction to Dr. Lilli Nielsen's Active Learning ] ]

She has been awarded the Knight Order of the Dannebrog.

A Very Special Educator
"excerpts of an article by Dave DeRoche"
Lilli Nielsen, born 78 years ago {in 2005} on a remote Danish island, is the world’s premier teacher of the blind and multiply disabled. If the multiply disabled pose the biggest challenge to educators, then Lilli is the ultimate teacher. Dr. Nielsen has all the advanced education degrees, has read all the books and all the research and all the footnotes, and has written many groundbreaking books herself. Her innovative but time-proven theories are known and studied around the world.

Lilli Nielsen was born on a small island at the eastern edge of Denmark. She was the second of seven children, four of whom were born blind. “I was the strange sister,” she says, “because I could see.” . When charged at age seven with the responsibility of taking care of her blind younger brother, this serious woman with the pixieish smile and twinkling eyes took the assignment very seriously. She devised her own techniques by trial and error and observation.

She started her career as a preschool teacher, then worked in a hospital, became a psychologist, and eventually was hired to be a teacher of the blind. Lilli visited and studied virtually every blind child in Denmark for 30 years, working as a special advisor for Refsnaesskolen, a Danish national institute for blind children.

Lilli has circled the globe. She has given at least 300 three-day one-person seminars and has visited 220 educational institutions in 24 countries. She is determined that her teachings live on. Her followers and students are most numerous in parts of Europe, throughout Australia and South Africa, and in parts of the United States. In the U.S. the most practitioners are in California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, and especially Michigan, where the exemplary Penrickton Center for Blind Children is the epitome of Active Learning in the U.S.

Lilli Nielsen has invented many important devices for challenged learners: the Resonance Board, the Support Bench, the HOPSA-dress, the Essef Board, the MFA Table, a Velcro vest of toys, The Little Room, and other “perceptualizing aids” for helping development and learning in children with multiple disabilities {www.lilliworks.com}.

Children learn by doing, which starts as play, and disabled children are especially dependent upon learning by doing and by playing/doing. Lilli would say children exposed to her environments exhibit “Active Learning”. Indeed, these two words, the term her approach, adopted by thousands, is known by, sum up her approach to education, and to life. Letting children discover and explore their own world -- and make their own mistakes -- is the basis for success in education, for both the handicapped child and the nonhandicapped as well. In Denmark, people in the 1970s started calling this The Nielsen Approach. “I said No, I’m honored, but we need a name that is useful, not personal, and won’t die with me. Thus, Active Learning.” {Lilli made her last lecture trip in 2005, as her polio is bothering her increasingly and making travel no longer possible.}
"Some principles of Active Learning:"
1) Everyone can learn. Everyone can learn more – in the right environment.

2) We all learn best by actively doing, rather than by passively receiving information.

3) Observe typical or able children and note how they move to explore and how they participate in interactions. “Keep in mind what the normal child is doing at that stage of development,” says Lilli. Disabilities can impair or retard many interactions, so set up the special child’s environment to encourage exploration and interaction.

4) Observe each child and assess his or her stage of development, his existing skills, his preferences, and then observe his disabilities and compensating mechanisms.

5) Patiently wait for the special child to explore on his own. A child learns from his own attempts and repetitions. To learn, the child must have his own success. Don’t suggest strategies. Don’t correct. The parent or teacher’s role is to provide favorable conditions, choices, safety, and increased and updated challenges that stimulate at just the right level and keep boredom at bay.

6) With developmentally threatened children, exhibiting autism-spectrum disorders, let the child play according to his level of emotional development. Lilli sees autism as an arrested stage of emotional development. A goal for these children is to help them develop emotionally to near their intellectual level. Emotional-Development Level should be top priority. Discover the child’s language or non-verbal language and reply to it. If the child exhibits stereotyped behavior or “unvaried activity”, entice the child to vary his activities with playful challenges with which he can succeed. His unvaried activities should be respected, but his varied activities should be discovered and encouraged. Lilli has a five-phase method for facilitating learning for these children.

7) Let the child have control of his own hands, with vision-impaired children especially. For example, a blind child or any child should not have a rattle toy shoved into his hands and then his fingers squeezed around it and his hand shaken. The discovery and use must be made on his own. It is counterproductive to put your hands on a child’s hands and do things for him or demonstrate for him your suggested hand-use strategies. Their hands are often the best or only tools these children have and the foundation upon which they have built their strategies for dealing with the world. Thus blind people’s hands are extremely sensitized, considered highly personal, and zealously guarded.

8) Lilli rarely talks to a child while he is exploring and actively learning. “Don’t talk, even to praise. It interrupts learning and fizzles the neurons,” she says. “After he’s had his fill, then talk with him about the exciting things he’s done.”

9) “I never teach a child -- I let him learn. Let him find ‘the right way’. Let him experiment. Let him fail! Let him learn how not to do it –

10)“Learning from his own active exploration, the child will achieve skills that become part of his personality and will then be natural for him to use; they will gradually make him react relevantly to education and develop independence.”

Paraphrasing Lilli’s concepts is not the same as watching her work.

In her seminars, Lilli is a captivating lecturer. She explains clearly, cogently, and personably. She uses anecdotes and humor to self-deprecatingly walk rapt listeners through the steps of how she discovered something, and you get the sense of discovering it with her.

She balances theories with hands-on (actually, hands-off) advice. She balances descriptions of how disabled children are different from typical children with descriptions of how they are similar. By the seminar’s conclusion, her audience has absorbed her theories, her methodology, her tips, her practicality, and her personality, and they are raring to work with – and play with, and silently observe – their children. When visiting a classroom of multiply disabled children, she keeps her heartfelt pleasantries brief and gets down to the work of play, rummaging around for devices that can provide learning opportunities, making suggestions to the teachers, plopping herself down on the floor to assess each child, and creating enticing learning environments.

Lilli is many things: a teacher of special-needs children, a teacher of teachers, a researcher, a writer, an inventor, a motivational speaker, a psychologist, a therapist, and a role model. She is vibrant, energetic, elderly, modern, old-world, intense, light-hearted, cajoling, and above all, devoted.

She has spent a lifetime working with the blind and the multiply disabled, and she remains the eternal optimist. Her rewards are great: converted professionals; the spread of her methods through schools and institutions around the world; increasing exposure of her books and inventions; letters from ecstatic parents proclaiming “...he’s never done that before!”; and a treasury full of children’s proud smiles of accomplishment.

"Little Room"

One of her most famous ideas is that of the "little room." This is a box that is laid over a blind or severely disabled child that has toys and other stimuli hanging from it. The child can then explore and play with the toys. Most will vocalize, even for the first time, due to the superior acoustics of the Little Room. As Nielsen wrote: "The purpose of the 'Little Room' is to facilitate blind children's achievement of spatial relations and reaching behaviour, but it can also be of considerable help for sighted low functioning children." [Nielsen, L. (1992). Space and Self. Copenhagen, Denmark: Sikon Press]

"HOPSA-dress"

The HOPSA-dress provides vertical orientation, without the need for weightbearing, to children with multiple disabilities. Items with interesting textures can be placed near the feet for tactile stimulation. Later, the pulley system can be adjusted so that the child can bear weight gradually, at their own pace.

References

External links

* [http://www.lilliworks.com/ LilliWorks Active Learning Foundation]