The Puzzle Approach
The Puzzle Project team have developed and applied an inclusive ‘co-production’ approach as a solution to the information challenges that our learners with ID face around understanding their human rights. Through evaluative research in the partner countries, the Puzzle Project identified barriers to people with ID understanding, accessing and achieving their human rights. The research also evidenced some effective working solutions to these challenges that involved greater active participation of people with ID in the development of information materials. These solutions use simple media and drama production activities to engage learners in a range of different roles, using workshop approaches that focused on individual learners’ personal goals and how they can be practically achieved.
The emphasis of this ‘co-production’ approach is that it encourages the learner’s self-advocacy both in the process of making easy to understand material and the content of the information produced.
We call this new way of working ‘Easy to Understand’ and the purpose is to make innovative educational tools that can help other professionals across Europe to take up and develop these new ways of working.
The Easy to Understand approach:
- Engages people with ID as participants and as active information producers through activities that they enjoy
- Helps people with disabilities themselves become supporters for other disabled people as content producers, as instructors and as role models
- Enables people with ID to understand what we mean by ‘Human Rights’ and why they are important for their own lives
- Creates information in multiple media formats to suit the many different ways in which people are able to understand information
- Includes the best practice in Easy to Read approaches and adds new tools and methods to widen its reach and effectiveness.
The aim of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is that everyone should have equal access. We believe that the Easy to Understand approach can help us to realise this goal for people of all abilities. These Easy to Understand methods can enable everyone to access information that makes sense to them and understand their human rights entitlement and so access the life opportunities and support they need to live independently as much as they can and to lead the lives that they want to lead..
