Category: education

Texas Republicans: Upholding White Supremacist Mythology with the Power of Law

Republicans in the Texas House passed a bill Tuesday that effectively bans public school teachers from talking about racism, white supremacy or current news events.

Source: Texas GOP Passes Bill To Stop Teachers From Talking About Racism | HuffPost

Texas is awash in bills aimed at fending off critical examinations of the state’s past.

Source: Texas Eyes Laws to Limit Teaching Slavery in Classrooms – The New York Times

The Republican Party habitually inverts American history and the moral universe while quelling speech about actual American history. I grew up in Texas public education. We learned the Southern Strategy, the Confederate Catechism, the Lost Cause, and the Traditional Segregationist Discourse. We were taught a pile of racist, revisionist nonsense. I still recall a 7th grade history teacher yelling at us for saying the Civil War was about slavery, drilling “states’ rights” into us instead. Texas schools teach such white supremacist mythology to this day.

Critical Race Theory, a bogeyman and straw man for White evangelicals and the GOP, is rooted in Traditional Civil Rights Discourse. Both are necessary parts of K-12 curriculum. “The Front Porch” has a great series on CRT framed for White Christians that I wish my toxic Christian representatives would read in good faith.

But there is not a drop of good faith in my Republican representatives, nor in groups like the College Republicans, who direct the conservative outrage machine against institutions who haven’t hardened against it, resulting in the firing of journalists, teachers, and professors.

If you belong to, report on, or teach about a marginalized group, you’re an “activist” who will be harassed and hounded out of work.

Institutions must harden against Republican bad faith and protect us as we tell the truth and lay bare the mythology.

Previously,

“Autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.”

Hyper-plasticity predisposes us to have strong associative reactions to trauma. Our threat-response learning system is turned to high alert. The flip side of this hyper-plasticity is that we also adapt quickly to environments that are truly safe for our nervous system.

The stereotypes of meltdowns and self-harm in autism come from the fact that we frequently have stress responses to things that others do not perceive as distressing. Because our unique safety needs are not widely understood, growing up with extensive trauma has become our default.

Because of our different bio-social responses to stimulus, autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.

Source: Discovering a Trauma-Informed Positive Autistic Identity | by Trauma Geek | Medium

“Autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.”

“We also adapt quickly to environments that are truly safe for our nervous system.”

That really resonates and calls to mind this passage of mine from “Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism”:

Since reading NeuroTribes, I think of psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work as “Cavendish bubbles” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privileges of nobility afforded room for his differences, allowing him the space and opportunity to become “one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.”

Let’s build psychologically safe homes of opportunity without the requirement of nobility or privilege. Replace the trappings of the compliance classroom with student-created context, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and BYOC (Bring/Build Your Own Comfort). Let’s hit thrift stores, buy lumber, apply some hacker ethos, and turn the compliance classroom into something psychologically safe and comfortable to a team of young minds engaged in passion-based learning. Inform spaces with neurodiversity and the social model of disability so that they welcome and include all minds and bodies. Provide quiet spaces for high memory state zone work where students can escape sensory overwhelm, slip into flow states, and enjoy a maker’s schedule. Provide social spaces for collaboration and camaraderie. Create cave, campfire, and watering hole zones. Develop neurological curb cuts. Fill our classrooms with choice and comfort, instructional tolerance, continuous connectivity, and assistive technology.

In other words, make space for Cavendish. Make spaces for both collaboration and deep work.

Source: Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism

There isn’t much psychological or sensory safety to be found in schools or workplaces. I spent a lifetime trying and ended up helping start a fully distributed company built on written communication so I could work from home in a sensory space and communication culture curated to my needs.

Create Cavendish space in our schools and workplaces. Create safety accessible to autistic people. Neurological pluralism makes for good, universal design.

Previously,

Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction

Social skills training programs for autistic youths and adults exist in nearly every school district and community; these programs focus on bringing autistic people into synchronization with developmental, linguistic, and social norms. However, these norms have not been critically evaluated, and autistic people themselves have not been surveyed about their experiences of, responses to, or opinions about these programs. This study sought direct input from autistic people about these programs.

Nothing About Us Without Us (NAUWU), an anonymous cross-sectional survey study, was posted online from 18 February, 2014 to 4 April, 2014, and was open to adults (18 years or older) who were formally diagnosed or self-diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum.

Major findings from the NAUWU study are that most of the 91 autism-specific social skills programs studied are not focused on individuals or their unique sensory and communicative needs, do not recognize participants’ existing social abilities and accomplishments, do not provide age-appropriate or gender-inclusive instruction, and do not consider or support autistic ways of learning and being social.

Source: Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction

Via autism researcher Noah Sasson:

“Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction”

I love that title. This paper from 2014 really is prescient. Social skills programs are detached from our needs. Recent studies and polls reinforce what autistic people, and this paper, have been saying.

A friend working on experiments related to autism representation lamented the state of the field in recent correspondence.

At this point I’ve read about 80 studies related to this, and I’m so grossed out. Also furious. EVERYTHING gets done from the clinician/special ed educator perspective, with an occasional entry that includes the parental perspective for comparison. NONE of the studies include the perspective of autistic people.

Similarly, the author of “Interrogating Normal”:

In 2012, I entered the education program at Sonoma State University in order to search through the literature in education and the social sciences, and I hoped to bring together research on the enforcement of normality that would describe and illuminate the everyday dehumanization autistic people face. This dehumanization is not restricted to the exclusion and bullying that is a reliable feature of the social lives of autistic people; it is also a regular feature in clinical settings, in academic research, in seemingly authoritative books about autistic people, in media reports, in education, in social services, in fundraising narratives, and in social skills training for autistic youths and adults. This dehumanization is so widespread that it seems to be an intrinsic aspect of normality – an accepted and acceptable way to view the bodies, minds, and lives of autistic people, or of any people who consistently breach the unwritten rules of normality.

Source: Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction

Lit reviews through the ignorant and ableist morass of autism studies are gut-punching for autistic researchers. I share the sentiments of autistic autism researcher Kieran Rose.

Perspectives that lack knowledge are often dangerously misinformed.

You would think that would be a pretty obvious statement and perhaps you might think that there are certain contexts where that should be a mantra imprinted in the brains of everyone involved.

Naively, when I was much younger, less knowledgeable about myself and much less worldly-wise, I used to think that Autism Research would be one of those contexts.

How wrong I was and how terrifying it is when I look around and see so many Autistic people invested in Autism research like it’s written in the holy scripture of [insert religion here].

Autism research is incredibly flawed in an enormous number of ways. One example of how, is the fact that the sum total of all knowledge of Autism in academia is based on the work of two incredibly flawed men, both with incredibly flawed ideas and practice from the 1940s. Everything we know professionally and societally about Autism is underpinned by their work. As I’ve said so many times in talks and trainings the whole of Autism research is built on a foundation of sand.

Why is it a foundation of sand? Well, right from day one the narrative of Autism research has been this:

  • Expert’ looks at Autistic person (usually child; usually white child; usually white boy child; usually white boy child that presents in a particular way).
  • ‘Expert’ takes notes.
  • ‘Expert’ forms opinion.
  • ‘Expert’ writes it up.
  • Another ‘expert’ nods wisely.
  • ‘Expert’ publishes.
  • ‘Experts’ applaud ‘Experts’.
  • Whole world believes ‘Expert’.
  • Services are developed around ‘Expert’ knowledge.

Source: Autistic Masking: Kieran Rose a new Academic Paper

This is a depressingly regular occurrence.

A fellow late-diagnosed autistic summarizes the state of things well.

The tyranny of the norm, thoroughly institutionalized and instrumented against us:

This ableism follows a long tradition of devaluation of disabled people in regard to their deviations from the norm. As educator Thomas Hehir (2002) writes,

ableism uncritically asserts that it is better for a child to walk than roll, speak than sign, read print than Braille, spell independently that use spell-check, and hang out with non- disabled kids as opposed to other disabled kids, etc. In short, in the eyes of many educators and society, it is preferable for disabled students to do things in the same manner as nondisabled kids (p. 3).

In nearly all media accounts, and throughout much of the research literature, autistic functioning is portrayed in thoroughly ableist terms as a medicalized deficit that requires extensive correction. For many autistic toddlers and young children, the requirement to do things in the same manner as non-autistic kids often means that months and years are spent in some form of intensive behavioral training meant specifically to make them appear less autistic. Educator Lennard Davis (2010) calls the ableist enforcement of normality onto the bodies and minds of disabled people “the tyranny of the norm,” (p. 6) and states that “the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (p. 3).

This problem-focused and medicalized approach to autism, which is devoid of autistic voices and autistic agency, leads to treatments, therapies, and educational approaches that do not respect the humanity, autonomy, or dignity of autistic people – and this is especially true for many of the treatments that are focused on autistic toddlers and young children.

Source: Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction

Yes.

To get off this foundation of sand, listen to us, respect NAUWU, and reframe away from the tyranny of the norm.

understanding the perspectives and experiences of autistic children and adults in particular was essential. Time and again I found that issues aired say, by teachers, would be completely reframed when the autistic adults discussed the same points.

Source: Inclusive Education for Autistic Children: Helping Children and Young People to Learn and Flourish in the Classroom

Previously,