ABSTRACT
As part of my teaching at University College Dublin I was due to work for twentyfour classroom hours with a post-graduate class with whom I would explore new, reflective ways of interacting with service users. The class in question consisted of a group of health and social service professionals attending a part-time postgraduate course in Intellectual Disability Studies. At the start of the academic year I met these professional students and discussed the proposed research with them. The class consisted of twenty-three postgraduate students from a range of professions - nursing, social work, psychology, medicine, teaching, occupational therapy, childcare, management and administration. All except two students were in current practice in the area of intellectual disability and all had worked in the area at some point in their professional lives. The age range of the class extended from mid-twenties to early fifties, with a number of students having over twenty years of experience in the area of intellectual disability. I was able to negotiate that the time I worked with the class would always be their last session of the day, to help them put some distance between the earlier didactic teaching and the participatory nature of their work with me.
