There are texts and conversations after which you do not suddenly see everything differently, but something still shifts because they offer a new frame for convictions that were already there. That was my experience listening to the episode The Already Whole Child from That Early Childhood Nerd, in which Heather Bernt-Santy speaks with Em Clark about her article The Already-Whole Child: Reconceptualizing Care and Sanctuary through Childism. Much of what they discuss felt close to ideas that have shaped my own educational work for years: agency and co-agency, children’s rights and equity, learning as a relational process, playfulness, learning for…
Author: Stephanie Wössner
The longer I engage with neurodiversity, the less sufficient any single category seems for understanding what people experience. Even within one neurological profile, there is enormous variability. Attention and executive functions, learning and information processing, communication and social interaction, regulation and emotions, interests and motivation, motor skills and praxis, perception and cognition, or sensory processing can vary considerably within the same person depending on context. Such a profile is not linear. High abilities in one area do not rule out substantial support needs in another, just as a diagnosis does not reliably predict how a person thinks, perceives, or acts.…
A group of avatars stands in a digital world in front of an empty plot of land. Some immediately set off to explore the surroundings. Two start collecting materials. One character stays at the starting point and watches. Another begins placing blocks according to a plan of their own. Short exchanges appear in the chat while signs and pathways begin to emerge across the landscape. Later, someone takes responsibility for supplying building materials, while another person handles technical functions. Not everyone talks equally much or works in the same place. Still, something shared begins to take shape. Behind the avatars…
In the first recorded video lecture of my new training program to become a trainer in neurodiversity and inclusion with the Positive Psychology Guild in the UK, one idea stayed with me. Reece Coker was discussing the medical and social models of disability and neurodivergence and raised a difficulty that becomes increasingly apparent the more closely we look at different neurocognitive profiles: Where exactly does one end and another begin? ADHD and autism overlap in some areas, dyslexia can occur alongside other forms of neurodivergent information processing, giftedness can involve characteristics that may be interpreted very differently from the outside,…
I have been working with learning environments, the future of learning, and the question of what conditions help people learn well for many years. Universal Design for Learning and neurodiversity are much more recent frameworks for me. I have only been engaging with them more deeply over the past few months. What I discovered fairly quickly was that many things I had been doing for years, based on my pedagogical beliefs and the way I think about learning, aligned surprisingly well with these approaches. The terminology and models were new to me; many of the underlying ideas were not. When…
Sometimes we know how to do something and still find it almost inaccessible in a particular moment. A learner may solve a task without much difficulty one day and sit in front of a similar one the next as if the route towards it had disappeared. Someone who usually expresses themselves easily may struggle to find words under stress. Another person may normally be good at planning, making decisions, or keeping track of several things and suddenly realise that one more small demand is too much. These experiences are hardly unusual. Yet in education, we often treat abilities as though…
If we invited thirty people for dinner, most of us would probably not assume that everybody would want or be able to eat exactly the same dish. There might be allergies and intolerances, some people might be vegetarian or vegan, and others simply dislike particular foods. We would rarely interpret any of this as a personal failure. If someone cannot eat the casserole, very few of us would conclude that they need to become better at coping with casserole. From casserole to buffet Katie Novak uses a similar dinner-party analogy to explain Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In her example,…
The strongest connection to my own educational practice emerged during the course when we discussed learning environments. One idea from the longitudinal Australian study of autistic students stayed with me in particular: participation means much more than simply being physically present in a school or learning environment. Transitions, anxiety, sensory load, noise, and environmental demands all affect whether someone can actually participate. At first, that may sound obvious. The more important question is where responsibility is located. If a room is noisy, routines are unpredictable, or communication happens in only one particular way, we can ask learners to develop strategies…
The material on trauma was one of the most powerful parts of the course for me. What stayed with me most was how closely traumatic experiences can be connected to ordinary social and educational situations. In the context of ADHD, Kerry J. Heckman discusses repeated criticism, bullying, academic and social struggles, being reprimanded by adults, and the long-term effects these experiences can have on self-esteem. Lauren Gravitz shows something similar in relation to autism. Exclusion, abuse, sensory overwhelm, and experiences that may appear relatively minor from a neurotypical perspective can still have a lasting traumatic impact. This changed how I…
I was already familiar with the concept of neurodiversity before taking this course. Still, my understanding of it shifted over the past several weeks. This was not because the basic idea of neurological diversity was new to me. What became much clearer was what happens when we actually use that diversity as a starting point for how we think. The Neurodiversity Paradigm first changes where we locate a problem. Many traditional models describe differences in behavior, communication, learning, or regulation primarily as characteristics of an individual person. At first, that can seem reasonable. After all, it is a particular person…