Drs. Barry Parsonson and Jane Rawls of New Zealand were awarded an international development grant to conduct an intensive 2-week workshop in the practice and application of behavior analysis for children with developmental disabilities and war trauma in the Republic of Georgia.
There are 8,000 children in institutions in the Republic of Georgia and war-traumatized children among the 300,000 displaced persons in the autonomous region of Abkhazia. As a result, there is a need to train individuals to assist children in the region with physical or intellectual disabilities. In 1997, Drs. Parsonson and Rawls went to Georgia to teach a three-month program on the theory and practice of applied behavior analysis. Of 50 original program attendees, a core of 16 continued with a more intensive tutorial and practical experiences. In 1999, Drs. Parsonson and Rawls returned to Georgia for a further three months, this time working with a core group of eight from the former 16 students.
The workshop aided by this grant will be open to professionals who attended the earlier workshops, and will focus on developing remedial education programs in areas such as language, counting, letter discrimination, color naming, and in self-care and independent living skills. This workshop will both add to existing skills and increase the pool of behaviorally educated psychologists in Georgia, to the benefit of the children receiving their services.
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