DYSPLA’s “You Will Fail Her” is an outstanding experience of immersive theatre to enable others to better understand and shed light on the Dyslexic Narrative. You will experience, through the eyes of a creative, imaginative and neuro-divergent young girl what it is like to be labelled by others and herself as thick, stupid and a problem. You will see and feel how the fury mounts up in her, turning into rage and uncontrollable behaviour. You are taken with her on a journey through her life of mounting frustration as she is forced to be someone she isn’t, losing her sense of herself, her very being and her f fun for life.
I help students like this every day, but even I was awoken to long forgotten emotions conspiring to crush individuals, which in today’s focus on the need for literacy skills is even stronger than when I was a child.
The Arts are uniquely places to start creating change. For it is the creative, imaginative, neuro-divergent children who are most affected, by being pressurised to think and learn in a way that doesn’t work for these big picture thinkers.
In addition, you will be struck by how little our politicians understand about the vital connections between Dyslexia, other learning differences, mental health and even Dementia.
What you will witness is a child’s strengths being ignored in favour of continually focusing on deficits. Once a child understands and values their own strengths, they can discover how to learn through those strength, making literacy simple and moving away from the current deficit paradigm.
Society needs all the “out of the box” thinkers to resolve the major challenges in the world today. “You will fail her” is a major step towards enabling others to understand their challenges. Changing the paradigm is not just for those who struggle for literacy it is to enable all children to be more than any of them thought possible.
The panel discussion at the end also valuable created insights into real life experiences and the opinions of “experts” in the field.
Thank you DYSPLA and the actors for opening people’s minds with an exceptional performance. Every child, parent, teacher, politician and special needs expert would benefit from this experience, once they are open to new possibilities. Together we do have the skills not to fail our children.
Olive Hickmott, Forensic Learning Coach
http://www.empoweringlearning.co.uk
#youwillfailher
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