Autism and the Social World of Childhood

A sociocultural perspective on theory and practice

Carmel Conn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317747581
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A key issue for researchers and practitioners is how to support the social engagement of children with autism in ordinary, everyday social processes that are transactional in nature and involve mixed groups of children, with and without autism, in rich and varied relationships.

Autism and the Social World of Childhood brings together current understandings about the social engagement of children with autism, gained from psychology-based research into autism, with well-established ideas about children's everyday social worlds, gained from sociocultural theories of childhood. It describes the experiences of interaction, friendship and play from children's own point of view as a way of giving insight into children's lives as they are lived and understood by them. Such an understanding serves to inform educational practice and aids the provision of more effective learning environments.

Autism and the Social World of Childhood includes sections on:

• the nature of play, social interaction and friendship in autism
• the nature of children's ordinary social worlds, including children's cultures of communication and variation in children's play
• research approaches to investigating the social engagement of children with and without autism in natural contexts
• educational approaches to supporting the integration of children with autism within a school setting
• the importance of assessment in autism education.

Autism and the Social World of Childhood includes real life descriptions of children's social experiences taken from ethnographic research into the play and interaction of children with and without autism. Practical guidance is provided on educational approaches to supporting the inclusion of children with autism within the ordinary social worlds of childhood.

Part I

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Theorizing autism and children’s social worlds

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Part I addresses theoretical issues in relation to autism and children’s ordinary social worlds, exploring in depth the experience of social communication for children with and without autism. Chapter 1 sets out current understandings about the social engagement of children with autism, looking at the experiences of play and interaction for children with autism and the nature of friendship. The issue of how we choose to view shared experiences of communication will be raised, making reference to the social model of disability taken from disability studies. Chapter 2 outlines the purpose of social activity in the lives of children without autism and its importance to learning and development. It makes the case for sociocultural theory as a perspective on social learning that is complementary to ideas within developmental psychology, the discipline most often used in autism theory and practice. Communication is a key area of difficulty in autism and Chapter 3 specifically explores the issue of children’s communication in ordinary social contexts, looking in particular at how non-verbal and multimodal communication has greater significance for children than it does for adults.

Chapters 4 and 5 address the issue of how we can investigate and gain knowledge and understanding of children’s social worlds. Chapter 4 presents case-study material about two children with autism and their friends to illustrate important features of social contexts where children with and without autism play and interact. Chapter 5 explores methodological approaches to researching the social experiences of children with autism and makes the case for participatory research with a mixed methods design as the form most suited to investigating the natural social contexts in which children with autism engage with others.

Chapter 1

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The social experiences of children with autism

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Since he was a young child, Richie, aged 8, has had a special interest in cars. His mother describes how, when he was young, he got deeply immersed in his play with toy cars in a way that was different from other children of his age. As he got older, Richie’s interest in cars continued, but also developed with him becoming particularly interested in fast cars. His mother describes how he often likes to imagine that he is a car. She thinks that in doing this, his imagination has a particular quality that differs from children without autism. She believes that he is not concerned with imagining that he is a driver of a car and is instead imagining the much more sensory experience of being the car itself, of wheels going round and road markings passing underneath.

She thinks that this imaginative experience is no less rich for Richie than it is for other children, and believes that it has a peculiar intensity for him. She says, ‘Sometimes when we’re walking along the pavement, he will try and go off. He doesn’t make the noises but he is pretending to be a car. I do let him because that’s something he needs. It’s his passion, but I do try to keep it under control. He just loves doing it, pretending that he is a car. He just goes with the racing, the lines on the road, the fences going past, whatever is in his head.

This description of how a mother of a boy with autism imagines his experience of imagining raises the question of difference for an individual on the spectrum. Richie’s mother expresses a belief that her son has a fundamentally different experience of imagining, one that is intensely experienced and is focused on sensory detail. It is a belief that reflects the many first-hand descriptions of conscious experience produced by writers with autism. These emphasize the sensory, perceptual, motor and affective experience of the condition rather than its social-cognitive impact, and give the impression of a consciousness that is perceptually overwhelming, sensorily compelling and prohibitive to a small or large degree of social sharing (see, for example, Williams, 1996). What is being described is an essential difference to individuals without autism, a subjective experience that does not automatically ‘convert experience into abstractions and words’, as Temple Grandin (Grandin and Johnson, 2005) describes it, but processes the world in primarily sensory ways.

The essential difference of autism probably accounts for the fact that children with autism are often viewed and treated in ways that are different from children without autism. However, everyday knowledge and experience of being with children with autism indicates that, in many ways, ‘difference’ does not describe all that they are. We may see, for example, that children with autism are socially engaged – sometimes or for most of the time – in their families, schools and communities. We may see them communicating, playing and sometimes having friends. We may know that they are interested in people and want to be with other children. Close attention to the activity of a child with autism sometimes reveals a logic that is not easily apprehended or understood, but that does make social sense when considered from the child’s point of view. What is at question in this book is the nature of that engagement given the essential difference of autism and given too that social experience is importantly a dyadic situation experienced by more than one party. What happens when a child with autism engages with other children and what is their experience too? How do children together, and left to themselves, make sense of and engage with each other’s communication? What are the misunderstandings that arise and the nature of any conflict? In order to address these questions, there needs to be an acknowledgement that children with autism are both different and the same as children without autism and that to think about what autism means in any situation involves, above all, engaging with more than one way of looking at things.

A recurring theme of this book, which is introduced here, is that any discussion of the social engagement of children with autism necessitates consideration of how we ‘see’ autism. Our knowledge of any complex phenomena, such as social engagement, children’s play, friendship and so on, depends to some extent on how we choose to view it. How we look at autism – whether we focus on sameness or difference, the individual or the group, strengths or weaknesses – affects our understanding of what autism is and our ideas about how to support it. The typical view of autism that is used in theory and practice is a medical one, sometimes known as the medical model of disability. This uses a normative discourse and positions autism as a situation of ‘deficit’ compared to the ‘norm’ of ‘typical development’. The view is reductionist where ‘what is autism’ is simplified to single variables that can be studied, measured and supported. Part of the premise of this book is that social processes are not straightforward but are inherently complex and that it is not helpful or indeed possible to separate out social functioning into discrete areas of capacity. The argument being put forward is that an understanding of children with autism within ordinary social contexts must come from engagement with complexity, not only with the complexity of autism but also with that of social phenomena per se.

The idea of a sociocultural perspective on autism will be introduced in this chapter as an important framework for thinking about autism which provides a complementary view to that provided by the medical model of disability. The view is a wider and augmentative one that looks beyond the individual and takes in layers of cultural influence. Sociocultural theory is concerned less with the individual and more with the group, looking at the details of cultural practices within a setting and how people individually participate in these. It focuses on contexts and is concerned with competencies, that is, what people actually do in relation to the social context rather than their ‘difficulty’ and what they do not do. A sociocultural perspective supports the social model of disability which views disability as the result of a confluence of factors in impairment as well as cultural and social relations and seeks to describe positive social identities for individuals with a disability.

A discussion of the medical versus social models of disability will be provided at the end of this chapter. Before this, the chapter will outline what we currently know about the social engagement of children with autism. Since this has been gained predominantly from investigations of discrete areas of social functioning, these will be used as a starting point here. The chapter will outline current understandings of the play, social interaction and friendships of children with autism, taking each in turn. It will be noted that research evidence shows children and adolescents with autism are at least partly socially engaged, though with some differences in the nature of their engagement compared to children who do not have autism and with considerable individual variation across the autism population. Specific issues have been highlighted by research in relation to the possible differential experience of social engagement and the difficulties inherent in researching this area of study, and these issues will also be outlined.

The play of children with autism

Although we know that autism is a developmental disorder that has a strong genetic basis (Abrahams and Geschwind, 2008), social factors are used as the criteria for singling out children with autism from other children (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Play is key amongst these; children with autism are characterized by their lack of variety in play and unusual play behaviours. However, what we know about how children with autism participate in play contexts presents a mixed and complex picture, of some play participation as well as some areas of difficulty. We know that children with autism can play but tend to produce less play that would be described as spontaneous, that is, produced without any support or ideas provided by an adult (Rutherford et al., 2007). They also spend more time looking away from play situations (Libby et al., 1998), and are less likely to share or engage the interest of others when they are playing (Mundy et al., 1986; Williams et al., 2001). Though children with autism do express positive feelings when they are interacting with an adult, these expressions tend not to be evident in shared playful situations that involve joint attention on an object of interest (Kasari et al., 1990).

Children with autism have noted difficulties with the development of pretend play and this was thought to reflect what is the core difficulty in autism. Leslie (1987) made a strong distinction between the capacities needed for pretend play compared to those needed for other forms of play and argued that the child’s capacity for pretence depends on their capacity in terms of theory of mind. The link was made to autism and the child with autism’s difficulties with pretend play, but subsequent research has shown that pretence does not necessarily involve metarepresentation and that children with autism can produce pretend play (Jarrold et al., 1994; Jarrold, 2003). Children with autism tend to underuse pretence in natural play situations, but can be encouraged to increase the amount of pretence they carry out when structure is provided by an adult (Lewis and Boucher, 1995). In a large intervention study designed to develop joint attention and pretend play skills in children with autism, Kasari et al. (2006) showed that both these areas of functioning can be developed in children with autism and can be generalized to everyday play and interaction with their caregivers. There is evidence that young children with autism respond to a range of structured and naturalistic interventions and that progress is better if the approach used is child-centred as opposed to adult-led (Bernard-Opitz et al., 2004; Kasari et al., 2006).

It is possible that the distinction made between the competency of children with autism in pretend play situations and other forms of play has been overstated. In actuality, children with autism display difficulties in other areas of play too; for example, in simple functional play with objects where they show less varied play with fewer play ideas compared to other children (Williams et al., 2001). They also demonstrate different preferences in play, showing a clear preference for sensorimotor play beyond the usual cut-off age, for physical play that involves rough and tumble, and for play that has clear interactive turns (Boucher, 1999; El-Ghoroury and Romanczyk, 1999; Libby et al., 1998). Anecdotal reports by individuals with autism about their play experiences as a child describe preferred categories of play that stand apart from recognized notions of relational, functional and pretend play. Such things as collecting items, playing with words and sounds, making lists, dropping and spilling objects are not often thought of as developmentally significant types of play (Donnelly and Bovee, 2003; Williams, 2008). However, the categories of play that are used in the literature on autism are narrow and tend not to recognize the many different ways that children without autism play at different ages (Anderson et al., 2004).

Play is a particularly complex phenomenon that involves biological, sociocultural and ecological contexts and research into autism and the development of play increasingly recognizes the need to take a more integrative approach, investigating different types of play, focusing on naturalistic settings and incorporating a range of measures of play behaviour (Barton and Wolery, 2008; Boucher and Wolfberg, 2003; Jarrold and Conn, 2011; Luckett et al., 2007). Some studies have tried to combine measures in play behaviour – for example, in motor, manipulative, functional and symbolic capacities – with measures of mental state understanding and qualitative assessments of social orientation and social behaviour in play (Brown and Whiten, 2000; Thorp et al., 1995; Wolfberg and Schuler, 1999; Yang et al., 2003). Wolfberg has been particularly prominent in considering the cultural context of children’s play, using natural settings and other children as play partners in her Integrated Play Groups (IPGs) to assess and develop levels of children’s play (Wolfberg, 2004). She uses mixed groups of ‘expert players’ (children without autism) and ‘novice players’ (children with autism) who are both supported in situ by the teacher as they play, the teacher providing prompts in terms of play and social communication. Across studies that have used an IPG-type approach, success in terms of play development has been consistently reported, but the difficulty of identifying which aspects of the approach are critical to that success is regularly noted (Ingersoll and Schreibman, 2006; Yang et al., 2003; Zercher et al., 2001).

A key issue within the literature on autism and play is whether the development of play, if and when it does occur, takes the same form as it does for children without autism. Some play interventions assume a kind of ‘kick-start’ to development. Wolfberg’s IPGs are conceptualized in terms of Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’, specifically that play with objects and play with people is a primary driving force behind the development of other capacities in symbolic thinking, interpersonal skill and social knowledge. Wolfberg reasons that play serves a quite similar function in the development of children with autism as it does for other children and that development in play will lead to development in other areas (Wolfberg, 2008). Others conceptualize development in autism as qualitatively different from neurotypical development. Hobson et al. (2009) have made the case that children with autism lack the fundamental biological background in social-emotional relatedness that underpins ordinary psychological development. They emphasize difference in terms of autistic and neurotypical experience and development. Research into the progression of early development of children with autism shows that difference does exist. Carpenter et al. (2002) looked at this in their study into the development of social-cognitive skills in young children with autism. They found that the ordinary developmental pattern of shared attention – so critical to the later development of social cognition and language – emerges first in ordinary early infant joint engagement with an adult, the child alternating their gaze between an object of interest and the adult, but that this pattern is reversed for young children with autism. The children with autism in their study differed from other children in that they used imitation and referential language before any joint engagement with an adult. Findings such as this have given rise to the idea that children with autism do not follow a typical developmental pathway, but learn to compensate cognitively for social-emotional barriers to learning. The social-cognitive skills that are demonstrated by some older individuals with autism, particularly those with higher cognitive ability, may be acquired through ‘artificially’ learned strategies and understandings (Kasari et al., 2001).

However, as Carpenter et al. (2002) point out, there is no consistency across the autism population...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Richness and variation in children's lives
• I Theorizing autism and children's social worlds
• II Educational practice in inclusive school settings
• References
• Index