Who would benefit from this session? 

Educators; Students; Administrators; Family 

Learning objectives:

• Understand the value of lived expertise in autism education;
• Explore strategies to promote neurodiversity-affirmative practices;
• Collaboratively develop policy recommendations

How will we promote engagement?

• Share insights from student education professionals;
• Explore example assignments, including neurodiversity manifestos and autobiography presentations;
• Collaboratively develop a draft manifesto with policy recommendations for empowering neurodivergent people and building community.

Autistic individuals are underrepresented in the field of education. The goal of this proposal is to better understand the value of lived experience in autism education and its impact on teaching perspectives, goals, and practices. In this workshop, we will share 1) example teaching strategies from an autism certificate program for educational professionals on sabbatical and 2) an evaluation of the program. Our sabbatical program is majority autistic taught. Using a multi-method approach, we are examining potential impacts of our program on educational professionals’ views of autism, pedagogical philosophies, and teaching strategies. The professionals participating in our program represent various fields, including teachers, therapists, and more. Our sabbatical program is a year long. It is comprised of two 15-week-long courses each semester. Each course meets for approximately 2.5 hours a week and includes opportunities to engage with the research literature, ample discussions, a fieldwork component, and hands-on activities. 

By adapting pedagogy to be more neurodiversity-affirmative, educators can champion positive change for autistic individuals throughout their lives. Experienced educators can learn a great deal through dialogue with one another. However, they may need specific instruction to help them understand what neurodiversity-affirmative practices are, why they matter, and how to apply them. Autistic-led instruction may have a significant impact on educators’ pedagogy. Indeed, prior work has demonstrated that autistic-led autism training is more impactful than training developed without substantive autistic input (Gillespie-Lynch et al., 2022).

We will share example assignments, including neurodiversity manifestos and autobiography presentations, and educators’ answers to pre-term and mid-term survey questions including, “Have your experiences in this program so far changed how you think about autism? If so, how did your perspectives change and what changed them?” and “Please share the most important things you have learned in this program so far and how you plan to apply them in your work.” Preliminary analyses of themes in their responses indicate shifts in their teaching philosophies away from neuronormative frameworks towards increasingly neurodiversity-affirmative stances. 

Educational innovations that help educators advocate for the rights of neurominorities and build and maintain strong communities that prioritize appreciation of neurodivergent perspectives can be crucial for the success and resilience of neurodivergent students. As a neurodiverse team of researchers, many of whom have lived experience with difficulties in the education system, we hope that the strategies we share will be meaningful to autistic students, their families, educators, administrators, and the broader community. After viewing example neurodiversity manifestos created by educator-students in our program,  workshop attendees will collaboratively develop our own neurodiversity manifesto, highlighting policy recommendations for making CUNY, and higher education more generally, increasingly neurodiversity-affirmative.
 

Additional Presenter: Daniel Batkin