Teaching Authentic Cooking Skills to Adults With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: Active Engagement

This remarkable book is a unique instructional tool with which direct support professionals and program directors can address two critical issues in working with adults with IDD: promoting healthy eating habits and teaching real-life skills that will develop greater independence and self-determination. Active Engagement is the program developed by the author and tested and proven through her years of teaching these skills successfully. Traditionally, people with IDD are the passive recipients of meals prepared by others. But everyone, regardless of ability level, should be able to make choices concerning the food they eat and to learn to prepare food or to actively participate in preparing food for themselves and others. Teaching these skills to adults with IDD requires a new instructional model, which this book provides. Active Engagement is based on a framework of good nutritional principles and evidence-based instructional practices, including individualization, direct instruction, and experiential learning. This is not a cookbook, although there are a number of adaptive recipes embedded as examples throughout. This book provides detailed information on the Active Engagement program and how to implement it, organized into the following topics: Cooking as nutritional intervention A teaching framework for cooking skills, Developing cooking instruction around the patterns of American consumption, Teaching basic skill sets with adaptive tools, A new approach to recipes, Appliances from the universal to the specialized, Exploring different contexts for the development of cooking skills, Supporting cooking skills with food skills.

Janice Goldschmidt, MS, RD, LDN has worked with people with IDD for the last decade and has written and presented on her work in a range of professional formats. She received her Master s in Nutrition from the University of Maryland College Park, where she initially developed her program for the development of food preparation skills entitled Active Engagement. As director of Nutrition Services at Community Support Services, Inc. (Gaithersburg, MD), she has continued to build on Active Engagement so that it now includes many differing contexts for guiding people with IDD to independent cooking skills. In addition to the development of cooking skills, she has worked on the identification, classification and treatment of eating disorders for this population. Janice's research has appeared in the journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics as well as in the Behavioral Health Nutrition Dietetics Practice Group Newsletter. She has also had her work published in Qualitative Health Research and Eating Disorders Review and has made presentations on Active Engagement at academic conferences around the country.