Improving Classroom UX with Autistic Flow Patrol

This small group of autistic pupils from a school in Chile reveal the important insights that can be gained from engaging with children and young people directly on how to facilitate their own educational inclusion (Humphrey & Lewis 2008).

Source: Perspectives on Educational Inclusion from a Small Sample of Autistic Pupils in Santiago, Chile

Via:

The kids were great at improving classroom UX and intuiting their needs. Adults need to listen and act.

Even better than designing for is designing with. Neurodivergent & disabled students are great flow testers. They’ll thoroughly dogfood your school UX. There are great opportunities for project & passion-based learning in giving students agency to audit their context and design something better.

Source: Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism – Ryan Boren

The Flow of Multi-age Learning and Peer Mentoring

Time flows differently when children work together, the older becoming aspirational peers for younger children, no bells demanding that they stop what they are doing to move in short blocks of time from math to reading to science to history in a repetitive daily cycle. Instead, they work on projects that engage them in experiences across content areas and extend time as they see the need.

Source: Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools (Kindle Locations 4366-4370). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

We lose so much when we divide students by age… We lose peer mentoring, we lose the aspirations to be “like the big kids,” we lose the ability of younger kids to become leaders, and we lose the ability to let kids grow at their own rate. We also lose the shared public space which lies at the heart of community, culture, and democracy.

Source: SpeEdChange: The Multiage Magic

Via: Making Sense of Multi-Age Learning – Abe Moore – Medium

Via:

We’ve noticed this with homeschooling/unschooling networks using programs like Science Olympiad. Students with Olympiad experience loop through helping newcomers and younger kids. They get to demonstrate their expertise and teach.

“Time flows differently”, indeed. It flows more on a maker’s schedule than a manager’s schedule. It flows through backchannels because written communication is the great social equalizer. It flows in ways more compatible with neurological pluralism.

A Triptych of Triptychs for Designing for Neurological Pluralism

ANI launched its online list, ANI-L, in 1994. Like a specialized ecological niche, ANI-L had acted as an incubator for Autistic culture, accelerating its evolution. In 1996, a computer programmer in the Netherlands named Martijn Dekker set up a list called Independent Living on the Autism Spectrum, or InLv. People with dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia, and a myriad of other conditions (christened “cousins” in the early days of ANI) were also welcome to join the list. InLv was another nutrient-rich tide pool that accelerated the evolution of autistic culture. The collective ethos of InLv, said writer and list member Harvey Blume in the New York Times in 1997, was “neurological pluralism.” He was the first mainstream journalist to pick up on the significance of online communities for people with neurological differences. “The impact of the Internet on autistics,” Blume predicted, “may one day be compared in magnitude to the spread of sign language among the deaf.”

Source: The neurodiversity movement: Autism is a minority group. NeuroTribes excerpt.

A triptych of triptychs for designing for neurological pluralism…

The cave, campfire, and watering hole archetypal learning spaces:

The red, yellow, and green of interaction badges:

The three level communication stack of distributed collaboration:

 

Living Privately. - Building and maintaining a sense of what to show in each social environment. - Discovering and creating new environments in which we can show more of ourselves. - Assessing where you can grow new parts of yourself which aren’t (yet) for public display.

Source: On Privacy – Human Systems – Medium