Developing Excellence in Autism Practice

Making a Difference in Education

Karen Guldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000071351
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This ground-breaking book gives an accessible overview and synthesis of current knowledge of relevance to the development of excellence in autism education. By situating understandings of autism within a 'bio-psycho-social-insider' framework, the book offers fresh insights and new ways of thinking that bring together global pedagogic practice, research, policy, and the insider perspective.

Guldberg critiques current notions of Evidence-Based Practice and suggests ways of bridging the research-practice gap. She explores the interrelationship between inclusive principles, distinctive group learning needs and the individual needs of the child or young person. Eight principles of good autism practice provide a helpful framework for how education settings and practitioners can adapt classroom environments and teaching so that autistic children and young people can thrive.

Written for anyone who wants to make a difference to the lives of autistic pupils, Developing Excellence in Autism Practice provides practitioners and students on education courses with tools for best practices, and shows how to draw on these to implement true positive change in the classroom.

1

Introduction

Key question

How can we arrive at a positive framework for developing good autism practice in education?

Introduction

When I began work as a teacher at a special school many years ago, I quickly realised that five out of the seven children in my class were on the autism spectrum. They were all very different from one another though. Dominic was older than the other children in the class. He was seven and non-verbal, but communicated well through sounds. He was agile, moving around the classroom and playground with ease. With piercing brown eyes and the most wonderful smile, he could also get very frustrated and angry with those around him, especially when he was trying to communicate and others failed to understand him. Dominic had an older sister with a learning difficulty and two younger siblings with profound and multiple learning difficulties. Dominic later went on to be educated in a private residential facility where he settled in well.

Kylie arrived in our unit at the age of three. She was also pre-verbal at the time. She was very scared and nervous about interacting with anyone. She had a phobia about going to the toilet and was still in nappies. Two years later, her phobia about the toilets had gone, and she was toilet-trained. She talked lots and was a fluent reader and writer. Her literacy skills were ahead of her age. She soaked up information and had a special interest in other countries. Her geographical knowledge put a lot of her teachers to shame. She transitioned from the special school to mainstream school. I recently learnt that she went on to study at university.

Dylan was five. He arrived like a whirlwind, swiping everything in the vicinity and spitting on everyone who came near him. He often scratched his face and laughed, especially when people raised their voices. When we first undertook observations to try to understand why Dylan behaved as he did, we recorded over one hundred instances of spitting or swiping every five minutes. His parents told us that they had not been able to go anywhere in public as a family for two years and Dylan had already been expelled from a nursery and another special school. He was nevertheless a very cheerful, happy and funny child. Ten years later, I met a teacher who had taught Dylan in secondary school. He told me he had bumped into Dylan with his mother at the supermarket. Dylan was then a polite young man who was helping his mother with the shopping.

John was very active and ran round on tiptoe most of the time. He constantly talked, was a very noisy child and asked a plethora of questions on a regular basis. He was an excellent reader and had a particular interest in dinosaurs. Staff found John’s continuous questions difficult to deal with. Like Kylie, John joined a mainstream school a couple of years later. He settled in well in the primary school he joined, but struggled with mental health difficulties in secondary school.

Liam was altogether different. He had high levels of stress, a very anxious look on his face all the time, and found any kind of change very difficult to deal with. He was also non-verbal and had difficulties in communicating his needs, beyond taking adults by the hand to show them what he wanted. He clearly had sensory sensitivities and loud noises were particularly distressing to him. He would often bite when distressed. Staff became frightened of him, and would often handle him in the wrong way because they thought he was just a ‘naughty child’. Liam was a frightened child though and biting was the only way he could deal with that fear. Careful observation helped us draw the conclusion that the only time he bit people was during transition time, especially if a staff member took him by the hand to guide him to a new activity. By implementing a visual system using pictures to show Liam when there was a transition to a new activity, he gradually managed to cope better with change.

Those experiences were my entry into the world of autism. I look back at those early days and remember with embarrassment how busy and noisy my classroom was, how little time I gave the pupils to process information, and how verbal I was most of the time. I realised quite quickly that neither my training as a teacher, nor my instincts, equipped me to be a good enough teacher for those children. I knew nothing about autism then, and although I worked hard to understand the children, and developed good relationships with them, I knew there were major gaps in my knowledge. As a result, I talked to other staff members about my difficulties, and one colleague suggested I contact the University of Birmingham, as she had undertaken an Advanced Certificate in Education by distance learning with a focus on autism there. I followed her advice, found out that the University of Birmingham ran a Masters in Education, and enrolled on this.

I never looked back. The course was just the start of a journey of beginning to understand autism, how it impacted on the children I taught, how to implement approaches and strategies, and how to evaluate my practice. It made me think critically about my practice and it helped me to apply theory and research to what I did as a teacher. It gave me the knowledge, understanding and skills to better understand the individual children I worked with and to adjust my support for them based on their needs. I became more astute in my observations, spent time undertaking thorough assessments, changed the way I ran group activities, reduced my language and gave the children more time to process information. I became inspired to observe, reflect and work closely as a team with the people with whom I worked.

It shaped my thinking about autism and my deep realisation that how we think really does change how we act and what we do, and that change is needed in education so that we can become better at meeting the needs of autistic children and young people. My experiences also convinced me that education is a context in which we can facilitate genuine change for autistic children and young people and their families. Most of all, I was fascinated by the way in which small adjustments in my teaching and my own ways of interacting could make such a big difference to the children and young people I taught. I put in place an augmentative visual system for Dominic based on symbols. He actively used those every day. They supported him to communicate with staff and his outbursts reduced. When he came back to visit me years later, he ran straight to the communication board in my classroom, using the symbol cards to greet me but also greeting me verbally as he was now a verbal young man.

I worked with Kylie to help her lose her fear of using the toilet. I set up a corner area with cushions, noise-cancelling headphones and a screen round it so that Liam could go there and have some space to himself when the sensory environment became too much. We changed the lighting in the classroom, and introduced more soft furnishings to make the acoustics better. I set up a workstation for John and used his special interests in dinosaurs to work on different areas of the curriculum. These small changes all made a difference in supporting those children to access learning. I came to realise that I could play a positive role in enabling those children to have a better quality of life, in enhancing their wellbeing and in enabling learning.

Through my work, it also gradually became clearer to me that enabling teachers to develop their own agency was equally important. After having worked with children with learning disabilities and autism in a special school, I moved on to working in a local authority outreach team. Our work consisted of supporting teachers in mainstream schools who were educating autistic children and young people. I remember visiting a school, and a teacher took me aside, saying ‘I have this child in my class, and he finds it difficult to focus during literacy hour. What should I do?’ I tried to indicate that the answer to this was something we would need to arrive at together by observing the child in the classroom so we could understand why he found literacy hour so difficult. The teacher was unhappy with this answer, as she wanted a simple answer with a clear strategy to deal with what she perceived as being the child’s problems.

The most striking point about her line of questioning was that she felt I was the expert and that she did not know what to do. Many other teachers I visited also had the same expectations. They felt they needed an expert to give them answers about what to do. They lacked the confidence that they could address the needs of the autistic children and did not know how to come up with solutions. To me, this emphasised the importance of professional development for teachers, of finding ways of enabling educators to develop their knowledge, understanding and skills so that they could make a difference. I therefore hope that this book will support educators to become confident about their own practices, and to enhance their knowledge and thinking tools to develop their practice. This requires an acceptance that there really is no such thing as a ready-made answer, and that there are no experts. In fact, the people who are closest to being experts are autistic people themselves and their families.

In this process of enabling educators to develop their knowledge, understanding and skills, and to change their practice, I am deeply convinced that a philosophical shift is needed towards seeing autism as a different way of being rather than presenting it as a disorder or a deficit. This entails moving past the psychological language of deficits and disorder to using a language that recognises the diverse ways of being human. Rather than seeing autistic people as lacking in something, or having an illness, autism is then considered as one of the many different ways of being human, as Barry Prizant so eloquently puts it in his book Uniquely Human (Prizant, 2015).

Rather than focus on the difficulties and ‘problems’ presented by pupils with autism, the focus needs to be directed towards the strengths of people with autism. An approach that presents autism as a difference rather than a disability, and that focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses, leads to practical ways of working that engage with the abilities of the person. It does, of course, also entail the need to understand and address the challenges and difficulties a child or young person faces.

Importantly, such an orientation sees autism as a transactional condition that requires mutual adaptation on behalf of the person with autism and those who live or work with that person. Barry Prizant captured this well when he wrote:

Autism isn’t an illness. It’s a different way of being human. Children with autism aren’t sick; they are progressing through developmental stages as we all do. To help them, we don’t need to change or fix them. We need to work to understand them, and then change what we do.

(2015: 4)

Such a transactional model is based on a deeply humanist perspective. It sees disability as being part of diversity, with difficulties arising from an interaction between the individual and the environment. As a consequence, rather than viewing autism as an ‘impairment’, or the autistic person as a ‘collection of deficits’ that need to be corrected and in which the difficulties are located within the pupil, it focuses the lens on the interactions between people. It puts those who care for and work with individuals with autism in a position in which they need to think about what they can do to change their practice.

The consequences of this is that in developing inclusive pedagogy for autistic pupils, solutions need to be located in both curriculum adaptation, and in changes in those who are engaged in planning and teaching that curriculum (Peeters & Jordan, 1999). This means that educators need to be open to thinking about the world and people in different ways, and to becoming more aware of how their thinking might shape their actions. It involves having a commitment to understanding difference, to making adjustments to one’s own style of interactions and modifying how the curriculum is delivered. It means reflecting on the dynamic relationship between the child or young person and those around them, understanding the way the person processes and experiences the world and finding ways to empower and give the autistic child or young person control over their learning.

Even for those autistic people with the highest support needs, environmental change and the provision of appropriate assistive tools can reduce their challenges. Importantly, to minimise disability for autistic people, both the physical and social environments require change, as attitudinal barriers to inclusion and acceptance are often significant. Good autism practice therefore needs to be about having an interactional and transactional perspective that attends both to individual needs and to changing society, schools and classrooms.

When Liam screamed, holding his hands over his ears and biting anyone who came near him, the key to addressing this situation was therefore to understand why he reacted in this way. For a long time, teachers and support workers had responded to his behaviour by physically taking him by the hand to whatever activity was happening next as they felt he needed to learn to conform. The result of this was that Liam became more and more distressed. When the staff team took a different approach and carefully observed what was happening whilst trying to understand why Liam was reacting like this, they soon worked out that he was reacting to both sudden noises and to changes in the classroom.

As a consequence, they started preparing Liam for changes in routine by showing him pictures of what would happen next to prepare him, and they did the best they could to minimise sudden noises by introducing a ‘low-arousal’ approach in the classroom. This included keeping voices low, not touching Liam, nor using restraint. This helped to support him when he was in a crisis situation. It led to staff starting to treat him as a person to be understood rather than as a problem to be solved (Prizant, 2015). By observing Liam, staff started understanding what his behaviour communicated and realised, to paraphrase Carol Gray, that they held more than half the solution (Gray, 1994).

Finding ways of understanding the perspective of the autistic child or young person is crucial in education. It means having a commitment to listening to what they say and to what their behaviour tells us. Damian Milton is an autistic scholar, parent of a child with autism and teacher. He has developed the theory of the ‘double empathy problem’. Milton (2012b) has proposed that theory of mind or empathy problems should not be associated solely with the autistic person. Rather, such difficulties are reciprocal, so a ‘double empathy’ problem exists. Both the autistic person and the non-autistic person struggle to understand and relate to the experiences and perceptions of the other. Milton presents the ‘double empathy problem’ as a breakdown in communication and social interaction between people who process information in very different ways, and that both autistic people and non-autistic people have difficulties in understanding one another. It goes both ways and is not a one-way street.

If a teacher looks at a child and thinks, ‘he is just naughty and needs to be taught to behave in an appropriate manner’, then the teacher is likely to focus on wanting to make that child conform. Equally, if a teacher looks at a child who is spinning, rocking or flapping, and feels that the most important thing to do is to reduce those behaviours, then the teacher will want to find ways of reducing these behaviours. If, on the other hand, the teacher sees those behaviours, and thinks that there is a need to observe and understand what functions they have for the child, the teacher might reflect on the fact that they could potentially have a soothing and meaningful function for the child. The energies of the teacher might then become focused on finding ways of helping the child to communicate in a different way. This different way of thinking about the child then leads to a very different set of actions. This highlights the need to think carefully about the values, ethos and the language one chooses to use in education.

People will come across a number of differ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I – Current evidence and knowledge from different domains in autism studies: Implications for education
• PART II – Inclusive practice and distinctive pedagogies for autistic pupils
• Index