Asperger Syndrome

A Practical Guide for Teachers

Val Cumine, Julia Dunlop, Gill Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135223731
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This fully revised new edition is a clear and concise guide to effective classroom practice. It is designed for teachers and assistants supporting children with Asperger syndrome in mainstream schools and other non-specialist settings. The book provides up-to-date information on the latest developments in this area and relates this to educational practice. With examples of innovative strategies and approaches to facilitate progress in learning, this new edition:

• outlines the underlying impairments and their educational implications;
• explores the process of assessment and diagnosis in Asperger Syndrome;
• offers practical strategies for effective and realistic classroom intervention, including access to the National Curriculum;
• considers the behavioural challenges the child with Asperger Syndrome may pose;
• shows how transitions can be supported.

Asperger Syndrome: A Practical Guide for Teachers, 2nd Edition seeks to inform professionals meeting a child with Asperger Syndrome for the first time and equip them with effective educational and behavioural intervention strategies. This new edition is also updated with reference to Every Child Matters, the Disability Equality Duty and Access Inclusion Planning.

This book will be essential to professionals in mainstream schools, educational psychologists, INSET providers (including initial teacher training), as well as to parents, carers and others supporting social and behavioural progress for students with Asperger Syndrome.

CHAPTER 1
Asperger syndrome An introduction

Who was Asperger?

Hans Asperger (1906–1980) lived and worked in Vienna. He qualified as a doctor and specialised in paediatrics. His work brought him into contact with a number of boys who found it difficult to ‘fit in’ socially. In addition to their poor social interaction skills, the boys had difficulties with the social use of language, together with a limited ability to use and understand gesture and facial expression. Also evident were repetitive, stereotypical behaviours, often with ‘abnormal fixations’ on certain objects.

Having noted the similarities in the behaviour of a number of these boys, Asperger (1944) wrote and presented his paper ‘Autistic psychopathies in childhood’. He recognised how severely the boys’ difficulties affected their everyday lives, commenting, ‘they made their parents’ lives miserable and drove their teachers to despair’. He was also aware of the boys’ many positive features – they often had a high level of independent thinking, together with a capacity for special achievements – but he didn’t underestimate the impact of their individuality on others with whom they came into contact, and he noted their vulnerability to teasing and bullying.

Asperger’s paper was written in German towards the end of World War II, and for this reason reached only a limited readership. It only became widely accessible in the early 1980s when it was first translated into English and referred to by Lorna Wing in her own research into autism and related conditions. It was felt that the term ‘Autistic psychopathy’ sounded too negative, and ‘Asperger syndrome’ was suggested as a more acceptable alternative.

Autism and Asperger syndrome

At the same time as Asperger was doing his research in Vienna, the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner was working in Boston, USA. He saw a similar cluster of behaviours in a number of children whom he went on to describe as ‘autistic’ – using the same descriptor which Asperger had used for his research group. Both Kanner and Asperger had referred to the work of Bleuler (1911) when choosing the word ‘autism’. However, Bleuler had used the term to describe people who had withdrawn from participation in the social world. Kanner stressed that the children he was describing had never been participants in that social world, whilst Asperger felt that the coining of the word ‘autism’ was ‘one of the great linguistic and conceptual creations in medical nomenclature’.

For Kanner, ‘early childhood autism’, on which he wrote his (1943) paper ‘Autistic disturbance of affective contact’, had a number of defining features, including:

a profound autistic withdrawal;

an obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness;

a good rote memory;

an intelligent and pensive expression;

mutism, or language without real communicative intent;

over-sensitivity to stimuli;

a skilful relationship to objects.

Later researchers, particularly Lorna Wing (1981b and 1991), compared Asperger’s writings to Kanner’s early papers and noted significant similarities between the children being described. The key difference was that the children described by Asperger had developed grammatical speech in infancy – although the speech they had was not used for the purpose of interpersonal communication.

The core difficulties in autism and Asperger syndrome are shared. Asperger syndrome involves a more subtle presentation of difficulties. This is not to say that it is a mild form of autism – as one parent said, ‘My child has mild nothing’. Asperger syndrome affects every aspect of a child’s life and can cause great upset for the family.

A commonly held view is that Asperger syndrome should be regarded as a subcategory of autism – part of the wider spectrum, but with sufficient distinct features to warrant a separate label. This view is useful for educational purposes as it is generally accepted that intervention and treatment approaches for children anywhere within the autism spectrum will share the same foundation.

The term ‘Asperger syndrome’ is useful in explaining to parents and teachers the root of the many problems they encounter with a child who is intellectually able, yet experiences significant social difficulties.

The triad of impairments in autism

While Asperger’s paper lay undiscovered, Kanner’s observations on the nature of autism were the subject of much discussion, debate and further research. Lorna Wing and Judith Gould (1979) carried out an extensive epidemiological study in the London borough of Camberwell. They concluded that the difficulties characteristic of autism could be described as a ‘Triad of Impairments’.

They emphasised the fundamentally social nature of the three linked areas of difficulty:

impairment of social interaction;

impairment of social communication;

impairment of social imagination, flexible thinking and imaginative play.

Wing and Gould noted that there were many children who did not exactly fit Kanner’s description of ‘early childhood autism’, but who, nevertheless, had significant difficulties within the areas of the triad. This led Wing (1981a) to use the term ‘Autistic continuum’ and later (Wing 1996) ‘the Autistic spectrum’, allowing for a broader definition of autism based on the triad.

Many individuals with Asperger syndrome experience sensory processing difficulties which impact on their learning, behaviour and everyday functioning. It is not clear that sensory processing problems are central to the condition; however, it is considered that sensory issues can give rise to difficulties and need to be taken into account.

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