Kathy Talks About Writing in Partnership

Seven learning disabled researchers and three university researchers wrote the article THIS IS WHAT WE THINK together. You can see parts of the article at An example of writing in partnership.

We started writing in January 2003. We had to finish the article by April 2003 because the person who asked for it needed it by then. It was hard work, but we did it.

First of all I asked a group of learning disabled people who sit on the Steering Group of the BA Learning Disability Studies course at Manchester University if they would like to write something with me.

They asked who would support them to write the article with me. This was an important question.

They were worried I might put words into their mouths.

They were also worried that that if they said something which I disagreed with, I might not write it.

I offered to try and find a research assistant to support them. In the end two research assistants joined us and we called ourselves the Writing Group.

Altogether we had ten article-writing meetings and two meetings to discuss the feedback we were sent from people who read our article.

We made tapes of our meetings and I typed them up afterwards.

Then we took some bits out and changed the order of the learning disabled researchers’ words.

I learnt a lot from writing with the learning disabled researchers:

• The learning disabled researchers told me they wanted to study the social model but it wasn’t accessible to them.

• Once they told me this, I saw how important it was to write our article in large print with pictures without big words or jargon so other learning disabled people could learn from our article.
  
• I also realised that I had my own ideas about how we should write together and was starting from how I saw or understood things, and then trying to make my ideas into an easy version.

• Through working with the learning disabled researchers, I realised that the best place to start was with their ideas; not academics’ or professionals’ ideas about their ideas.
• This seems very obvious now, but it wasn’t at the time.

Pictures from:
Change Picture Bank (2001) Compact Disc containing pictures, available from CHANGE, Unity Business Centre, Units 19 & 20, 26 Roundhay Road, Leeds, LS7 1AB, Tel: 0113 243 0202; Fax: 0113 243 0220; Minicom: 0113243 2225; Website: www.changepeople.co.uk

Access2Pictures, People First, 3 rd Floor, 299 Kentish Town Road, London , NW5 2TJ , UK . Tel: 020 7485 6660; Fax: 020 7485 6664; Website: www.peoplefirstltd.com