After some months of participating in MINDs Tampines, I have really enjoying my time in this service. It is a really collaborative and enjoyable service, where mix service and fun very well together. Although the main purpose of the service is to come and dance with our clients, it is a very collaborative service as well, as when we dance together we are facing together as a group, and working together to entertain our clients. We have also had sessions in which the clients don’t come to school, and we sit together and discuss what is going well, what needs improving, and how we are going to improve. We have shared with each other about what everyone individually thinks is going well, and also compliment each other on what we think is going best with them if they re contributing well in the group. Something that is also really effective, is when we watch a video of ourselves during the session in which the clients came, and we reflect on how we acted, if anyone was just dancing with their friends without a client, and we give feedback to each other and share ideas on what we can do next time to prevent that from happening as much as we can. I feel like during these sessions, everyone in the team is willing to help others and work collaboratively to give feedback and work together to come up with new ideas and methods to improve our service work.

Something that I have also learnt from this service is about the significance of working with metalling impaired clients. I have never worked with mentally disabled clients before during service, so this experience has really opened my eyes to that issue. This new experience has really educated me on the issue on how not all mentally disabled people have a support system like our clients do, a well as how their disability affects their life. I think that issues like this should have more awareness and help as it is a big issue in the world, and not as looked at as other issues in the world right now. I’m really intrigued by issues like this regarding then brain and such, so I feel really grateful to be able to have been educated this way as it is a really impacting experience. U also learnt about the choice we make around them and how we have to be careful with how we acted as they were a lot more sensitive than the people we are normally surrounded by. Our actions and words towards them could have a bigger impact on them than we anticipated, therefore we had to learn to be more sensitive as well towards them. There were some times were some students felt a bit uncomfortable with maybe the way our clients were communicating with us or perhaps how close they would get to us, but we discussed during our classroom sessions, that even if we felt uncomfortable we couldn’t publicly express that but instead speak to a teacher or staff privately regarding the matter. This would be because we didn’t want to make the clients feel bad or make them uncomfortable as they are much more sensitive than we are. This was a very important thing to think about ever session we had with MINDS.