Final reflection

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 facingĀ 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.

First Reflection

Minds Tampines supports movement for the intellectually disabled in Singapore. They provide movement activities such as dancing for disabled citizens around the Tampines area and we help to join in with dancing to connect with them too. Minds Tampines also provides help with daily routine and living skills for them, including bathing, dressing, writing, and home living. In our specific service activity, we dance with them to mainstream music to get them moving.

I have not had many previous experiences that are similar to this, I have mainly worked for young children or the elderly, which is why I wanted to try something new as I got accepted into a service I have already done before. As this is a more physical service including dancing, I think I will be good at keeping a positive attitude and trying to raise the spirits of the clients if ever needed to and to keep dancing with them. In the past I have been good at talking to younger children and communicating with them, but as I have never interacted with special needs clients I think I will be a bit rocky at the start as typically I’m not very good at talking to new people which is also something I would like to improve on myself but I’m sure after a while I will get a hang of it. This week we made a trip to the Minds Tampines building and we got to meet the clients and get a feel of how our communication with them would go. There are 2 groups, in the first group that I visited, a lot of the clients are mute by choice(chose not to talk) and I found that it was harder to communicate to those who chose to be mute than those who were more communicative and loud. All clients in the second group were loud and very interactive, commonly asking for our attention and to communicate with us. Interacting with both groups made me realize that I need teach myself how to communicate with the mute clients and pay attention to their body language in order to do so, and also that a need to be able to calm myself down as sometimes with the second group it can get a little overwhelming and makes me anxious as they are extremely loud and hard to control. I think learning this will help me in the future of my service and also in future activities. At first I found it quite awkward to try to dance with the clients especially when they were uncooperative, but over the duration of the session I started to be more comfortable with dancing and trying to lift their spirits even when they clearly didn’t feel like joining in.