Facilitation: In a Completely Different Zone
In December of 2009 a YouTube video called “QWERTY - Linsey Pollak, Peter Rowe, Terri Delaney” showed two people using facilitated communication (FC). The claim was that Peter Rowe, a non-speaking individual, tapped out improvised song lyrics using FC with Terri Delaney, his facilitator. It appears Linsey Pollak acted as the camera person for the demonstration.
Terri Delaney (Facilitator) and Peter Rowe using facilitated communication (FC). He looks at the camera while his facilitator looks at the board. (2009 YouTube Video posted by Rufus Lane).
There are plenty of red flags raising questions about authorship in this video. Rowe does not look at the board during the typing, but Rowe and Delaney’s hands fly across the letter board at breakneck speed as Delaney, unconvincingly, calls out words that cannot possibly match the finger movements.
Do I think the facilitator is sincere? Yes. Do I think the facilitated messages are the words of her client? Absolutely not.
I think many of our regular readers will spot the problems in the facilitator’s “technique,” but I thought I would take the opportunity to walk through what they are, as it might be easier for people new to FC to spot facilitator cuing in this example than on some of the more subtle videos we’ve seen.
As the video starts, three grown people are tickling each other: Peter Rowe, Terri Delaney, and Linsey Pollak. Rowe seemed good-natured about it, but I wondered about the appropriateness of the activity. Maybe it’s just me but, it felt weird and uncomfortable.
In any event, Rowe is holding the letter board, but it’s Delaney who signals Rowe to stop the tickling and start tapping. It is commonplace with FC for the facilitator to control the communication in this way. Rowe on the other hand, starts tapping on the letter board as soon as Delaney grasps his hand. Rapidly. 81 times in 30 seconds. I ran out of breath counting after that.
Perhaps because of the way Delaney holds onto Rowe’s wrist, the tapping seems, generally, to hover around the bottom of the letter board, closest to their bodies. I am guessing that the way the two are positioned, arms intertwined, it would be difficult to get full extension of their arms to, say, touch the top rows of the letter board.
Rowe’s finger swipes across the letters in a strange mixture of hard taps but soft motions, like someone trying to squash a bug then wipe it off the letter board’s surface. The taps are so hard that, with headphones on, I found myself blinking. I wondered if the facilitator did, too? By blinking, she’d be sure to miss some of the letter selections.
Even if I believed the words being typed were Rowe’s and not Delaney’s (which I don’t), I have a hard time understanding how the facilitator—Delaney--had time to process which letters were selected or if, indeed, they were the correct ones for the words being spelled out. At the rate they are tapping out words, she’d have to process 2-3 letters per second.
Presumably, the facilitator does not know what words or letters are coming next in the sequence--especially true in the improvisational style they claim to be using. Yet there is no hesitation in the movements, no pauses to find letters on the keyboard or, even for a brief second, for Rowe to figure out what next to say. Delaney’s acting as if she already knows what her client is going to say or, is, perhaps, making the words up as she goes along.
I wonder, though, how it is that Delaney could tell if Rowe was selecting the correct letters or if he was selecting a letter at all? Maybe he was overshooting some and landing in the spaces between letters? With no pauses in movement, how would she know when one word or sentence stopped and another one started?
Most of the letters for the facilitated sentence “Hi. We’re Qwerty and I am Peter Rowe and we are using facilitated communication to talk to you.” are located in the top two rows of a QWERTY letter board, not toward the bottom of the letter board where it appears Delaney and Rowe spend most of their time pointing.
I read in one of the news articles or on Rowe’s blog that Delaney uses a QWERTY letter board with her client. If they used a QWERTY letter board for this session as well, then most of the letters in the first sentence (which I analyzed for the video included with this blog post) are located on the top two rows of the letter board. That is inconsistent with the location of the tapping which, as I said, appears to be closer to the bottom of the letter board.
I found it odd that the number of taps did not correspond with the number of letters in the sentence. There are too many taps if they spelled out the sentence without punctuation or spaces between the words, and too few if they included them.
It’s not clear from the video whether Pollak is a “trained” facilitator, like Delaney, but, as the camera person, he may have noticed Rowe staring directly into the camera while she was calling out the words. How is it that he didn’t mention it? You’d think Delaney would have wanted a head’s up that her client wasn’t looking at the board. Wouldn’t she be concerned that she was inadvertently cuing her client?
Given all this, and the fact that FC is known to be facilitator controlled, I highly doubt any of tapped words were Rowe’s.
According to most video or news reports I found, Rowe was diagnosed with Down Syndrome and has limited or no functional speech. He does have the ability to communicate basic needs with rudimentary hand gestures. In one article, the description also included autism, but I could not confirm that on a website set up on Rowe’s behalf.
Another short YouTube video shows Rowe feeding himself independently, making a bed, using a paintbrush and art pencils, sitting upright without assistance, and walking around, so it does not appear that his fine or gross motor abilities would interfere with his independently selecting letters on a keyboard. In fact, in most of the videos I found, Rowe helped to hold the letter board steady in the air. The only thing he does not do is consistently look at it while he and his facilitators type.
Peter Rowe at the 2013 “Finding My Place Conference” being facilitated by his mother, Betty. He looks at his mum while she looks at the board.
Rowe was 30 years old when he was introduced to FC. The “cutting-edge technology,” as it was called in one news report, that unleashed Rowe’s language and literacy skills was a small wooden board with a picture of a computer keyboard glued to it. He learned FC from founder Rosemary Crossley’s disciple, Jane Remington-Gurney. His first facilitated words were “I love you mum.” His mother, Betty, when she interacted with her son post-introduction to FC “found almost a stranger, another person I hadn’t known.”
This would make a lot of sense if the facilitated words were not his own.
This facilitated message (attributed to Rowe) reveals the unexpected literacy skills we’ve come to associate with unsubstantiated FC claims:
I had no problem doing it, I could spell and put sentences together and my vocabulary is good as if I have always known how to write. (I learnt) from Sesame Street and copying books and magazines and training myself for the day when I could use my knowledge and my gift for writing.
I wonder how Rowe trained himself, exactly, and why caregivers didn’t realize in the 30 years prior to FC that he could write sophisticated and poetic messages by tapping on a letter board without looking at it? It is, after all, quite a feat.
Reportedly, he attended college for a brief period, apparently taking a poetry class with his facilitator, though It is not possible to determine from the videos or news reports Rowe’s truly independent academic skills.
By documented accounts, we know Rowe has been subjected to FC for numerous years. I was curious to see if Rowe ever reached “independent communication.” Wouldn’t that be his facilitators’ ultimate goal?
The latest video I found was June 2013. About 20 minutes in, Rowe and his mother, Betty are shown using FC. And, sadly, while she intently focuses on the letter board, he looks around the room while the two tap furiously away at the letter board. Occasionally, he looks at the board, but not often enough to convince me much has changed since 2009.
Rowe is credited with writing and illustrating several books. His handlers take him to schools to present his works to children, tapping messages via FC with a facilitator holding onto his wrist. I guess I missed the video that shows him typing without physical cues from his facilitators.
The only true incite I found into the practice of FC in doing research for this blog post was from Delaney’s description of what FC was like for her:
It takes so much time because you’ve got to have so much trust. You’re talking about being someone else’s voice—it’s a huge responsibility…when it’s happening I’m just in a completely different zone. It’s mind, body and spirit engaging. (Emphasis mine)
To me, this sounds like someone engaged in the dissociative state of automatic writing.
If anyone should be in a “different zone” when they’re writing, it’s Rowe, not Delaney. The facilitator’s job, purportedly, is to support the client. She should be objectively monitoring letter selection, not working herself into a transcendental state.
To date, there is no reliably controlled evidence to show that FC is an independent form of communication. (See Controlled Studies, Systematic Reviews, and Opposition Statements).
References
Anonymous. (2007, May 5). Out of Silence, poetry and son. The Sydney Morning Herald.
Fuge, Nicole. (2011, March 9). Peter’s tale of inspiring hope. The Courier Mail.
Rowe, P. (2017, September 14). Peter Rowe - Connecting Through Art. What’s on Fraser Coast.