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I'm glad the question has been raised. I'll be interested to look at the literature, too. I'm inclined to be very suspicious of "simulations"-- in part because their transience tends to be trivialising, but perhaps more importantly, because there's no way they can impress on my students the experience of being and of having lived the life of a disabled person. Regardless of what impairment is simulated, the participants inevitably have a self-perception that includes unimpaired function and "included" social status. The exercise never seems to me to really get any meaningful information across. The only simulation that I'd love to be able to try on people is a simulation of the radical disempowerment imposed on people with intellectual disabilities by many group home "caregivers". Thus, I'd have a pair of total strangers invade their homes, light cigarettes, brew coffee and not let them have any, turn their television on to a soap opera and then treat any attempt at communication as "attention seeking" and respond by "extinction." I'd guess a week would be about the right length of time. This exercise has always struck me as having considerable instructional potential, but somehow no one has ever been interested in letting me try it... All that said, I'm told that the CNIB still has its guide dog trainers do a two-week simulation exercise, during which they are unable to use their sight , and which ends with them being guided by the less successfully trained dogs. This *might* begin to be useful... Liz Elizabeth Bredberg, PhD Department of Educational Counselling and Psychology and Special Education The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4 Phone: 604-822-4589 Fax: 604-822-3302 e-mail: [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%