The Background of the van Dijk Method
Dr Jan van Dijk was the main speaker at a gathering in the US called “Weekend Away” in 1987. This is how he explained his background. “I would like to tell you something about myself and my Professional career, not because I find that important in itself, but it reflects my personal growth and develop in the area of the education of the multi-handicapped.”
“Exactly 25 years ago, I started working as a young teacher with the deaf-blind children at the Institute for the Deaf in Sint-Michielsgestel in the Netherlands. When we started this work, we had very little knowledge about how to educate and teach the deaf-blind rubella children who came to our small department.”
“Later when our knowledge and insight grew, we came to understand that our youngsters were really very intellectually backward. I went to Perkins later and saw how capable deaf-blind persons managed to develop quite sophisticated levels of language. In observing and participating in all of this I became rather sad, because our youngsters did not respond to the Tadoma method*, neither could they keep themselves occupied in a meaningful way. The opposite was true. The moment we left our children alone, they regressed to the stage of self- stimulation and even self injurious behaviour. Finally we came to the conclusion that in our group of low functioning deaf-blind rubella children we had to find more or less our own way. And that is what we did. Today they call it: 'The Van Dijk method'.