Back in June, I attended a session at Roehampton that I'm going to reflect on here - because there is so much that bears on my autism and classical mythology work and because it provides one example of just how far autism research has come on since I started this blog in 2009. Back then, terribly little was known about autism but things were changing. They are still changing, and here I shall sketch out some of the changes as I understand them, aided by what was raised at the session. I shall do this with a view to setting out how my own thinking around autism has been evolving.
For one thing, there has been an increased awareness that autistic people grow up - when people diagnosed as autistic move into adulthood, they haven't somehow left autism behind, and as autistic adults, they may have gained the social skills that previously led adults in their lives to seek to support them. As Steve Silberman sets out in Neurotribes, his recent book on autism, autistic adults have reported that when they were children it is not that they didn't understand what someone was saying to them - rather, they didn't know how to set about responding to what the other person was saying. The precise reference to Silberman's book is to follow; plus I really need to set out just how much I've gained from reading this book...
Linked with this, it is over-simple to assume that autistic people lack empathy and need somehow to be taught it - in this regard I am led to rethink a posting I put up a couple of years ago that came out of a conversation with a student about where dyspraxia stands in relation to autism - where I referred to dyspraxia being something like autism-with-empathy. Not only am I now thinking that the relationship between the two is less divisible, but I am recalling a training session I went to around a year ago on supporting students with ADHD. Here the trainer discussed just how fluid the relationship is between particular conditions, autism being just one of them. Unlike when I got started on this project, I am now thinking of autism as part of a wider set of differences. And this takes me to the session in June - I would like to name the trainer, but I'd better check with him first. What the session set out is that neurodiversity is gaining such currency at the present that it is becoming possible to talk about a neurodiverse community and about a neurodiverse movement - one fuelled by the move away from the medical model of disability which saw disability as, for instance, something in need of a cure. As Jim Sinclair says: 'don't mourn for us'. Autism is not something to be pathologied as an impairment - it is way of being. Autistic people are different not disabled. In place of seeking to make someone autistic 'more like me' - by, for example, helping them make eye contact or helping them stop making repetitive actions - there is a move to thinking instead about embodied differences and about advantageous autistic behaviours.
There are many implications here for my project - just when I am exploring what potential there is in classical mythology for those who support autistic children. The very issue of what it means to support - let alone 'reach' - autistic people is open to debate. How far should I be developing materials to help autistics develop social skills? How far should I be exploring the potential for myth to speak to different ways of thinking and behaving? As is typically the case when I blog I end with questions rather than answers - but that seems about right at this current early stage of what I'm doing.
For one thing, there has been an increased awareness that autistic people grow up - when people diagnosed as autistic move into adulthood, they haven't somehow left autism behind, and as autistic adults, they may have gained the social skills that previously led adults in their lives to seek to support them. As Steve Silberman sets out in Neurotribes, his recent book on autism, autistic adults have reported that when they were children it is not that they didn't understand what someone was saying to them - rather, they didn't know how to set about responding to what the other person was saying. The precise reference to Silberman's book is to follow; plus I really need to set out just how much I've gained from reading this book...
Linked with this, it is over-simple to assume that autistic people lack empathy and need somehow to be taught it - in this regard I am led to rethink a posting I put up a couple of years ago that came out of a conversation with a student about where dyspraxia stands in relation to autism - where I referred to dyspraxia being something like autism-with-empathy. Not only am I now thinking that the relationship between the two is less divisible, but I am recalling a training session I went to around a year ago on supporting students with ADHD. Here the trainer discussed just how fluid the relationship is between particular conditions, autism being just one of them. Unlike when I got started on this project, I am now thinking of autism as part of a wider set of differences. And this takes me to the session in June - I would like to name the trainer, but I'd better check with him first. What the session set out is that neurodiversity is gaining such currency at the present that it is becoming possible to talk about a neurodiverse community and about a neurodiverse movement - one fuelled by the move away from the medical model of disability which saw disability as, for instance, something in need of a cure. As Jim Sinclair says: 'don't mourn for us'. Autism is not something to be pathologied as an impairment - it is way of being. Autistic people are different not disabled. In place of seeking to make someone autistic 'more like me' - by, for example, helping them make eye contact or helping them stop making repetitive actions - there is a move to thinking instead about embodied differences and about advantageous autistic behaviours.
There are many implications here for my project - just when I am exploring what potential there is in classical mythology for those who support autistic children. The very issue of what it means to support - let alone 'reach' - autistic people is open to debate. How far should I be developing materials to help autistics develop social skills? How far should I be exploring the potential for myth to speak to different ways of thinking and behaving? As is typically the case when I blog I end with questions rather than answers - but that seems about right at this current early stage of what I'm doing.
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