Last updated on November 26, 2023
Atypical students are, at least according to current data, attracted to the STEM fields. Neurodiverse individuals feel safer in those academic and professional fields with concrete questions and problems, with clear approaches to best answers. Autism is, by definition, a concrete form of processing information and a communication disorder.
We think differently and we have difficulty explaining that nuance and the “How would someone else feel?” explorations do not register easily. I can’t imagine how someone else feels. It must be explained to me. How we approach the concepts of audience and code switching in our classrooms is problematic for a growing number of students in our courses. The neurodiverse can and do analyze an audience, as long as they have demographic data on which to base an analysis. I need an identifiable audience with quantifiable characteristics: age, gender, education levels, socioeconomic data, et cetera.
Twenty percent of college-ready high school students are identified by the Office of Special Education programs (OSEP) as disabled (2014). We cannot treat accommodations as alternatives and back-ups to our lessons overall pedagogies. We must integrate and make natural adjustments that do not isolate or alienate students.
Educators must allow and celebrate different creative and problem-solving processes. Let students find the processes that work for them. Invite them to share those processes, discuss them, and improve them.
In our writing courses, please do not demand, “Everyone must have a Harvard outline for each paper.” Why? I outline. My way. I also use notecards (real ones) that I move around a floor. Why can’t that be valid? I had a professor let me take a photo of my notecards for the pre-writing grade. Silly, but I did it.
Some specifics I mention when speaking to faculty and administrators about accommodations for neurodiverse students include:
1) Work with Disability Services to have contingency lessons and exercises for the blind, deaf, mobility-challenged, and so on, in every course but especially in general education courses. If your lessons fail to meet the needs of a group with a visible disability, they won’t work will for invisible disabilities either.
2) Have alternatives to in-class group work. Don’t even start with the argument that it is essential and part of your pedagogy. You immediately create a problem for those communicating by alternative means or with verbal communication deficits. I speak slowly and it takes me time to hear people. Now, you’ve told me that my slower and awkward interactions are a problem. It can be as simple as moving groups to online.
Again, imagine the obvious disabilities and would your groups or class discussion format invite full and equal participation. Probably not. Research shows that the people most likely to speak are the least likely to recognize cues from people with special needs. We don’t like more than half-second delay in conversations. People talk over me constantly because they get impatient. Even my wife does this.
Everything I suggest is based on the idea that inclusion should be integrated, not an awkward adaptation for the unexpected disabled student.
3) Recognize that though many of us, myself included, like a broad liberal arts education, that’s not the reality for most adults or students. Sorry, it simply isn’t. We need to step back and examine data and evidence, not feel-good articles posted to social media. This leads me to suggest tracking for writing courses, including first-year composition (FYC) and required upper-division courses. Put similar majors together, roughly, and focus on the genre conventions within their fields. MLA for the humanities majors. APA for the science and data majors. Studies find groupings of personalities, too, within professions. It makes sense that a marketing major and programmer will have different social strategies.
All those articles about “liberal arts majors in the tech industry” are misleading. Look at where those leaders went to school. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc. I took the time once to list all the names appearing to five of those articles and where they attended college. A Harvard grad in philosophy (they teach analytic, math-based philosophy) would be prized at any data-driven company. (Also, many of these people had multiple degrees in diverse disciplines. A literature major with a master’s degree in econometrics, for example, was a COO listed in an article.)
Tracking by interest would make writing courses less oppressive. This feeds into the next point:
4) Watch how we talk about other majors and other disciplines. To devalue any field is incorrect and upsetting to students. We imagine somehow that we teach critical thinking, we teach fallacies and logical reasoning. You cannot develop operating system kernels without logic. In fact, the best book on fallacies I own was written by a CMU computer scientist because AI has to correct for logical errors. (It’s an illustrated “children’s book” that began in response to upper-division CS students: An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi.)
Observing writing courses, I’ve heard too many demeaning comments about STEM being without a soul. I wish that was hyperbole. It goes to the idea that science is amoral, which we know isn’t the case. There are amoral and immoral people in every field. Plenty of scientists are motivated to research out of compassion. Stop discounting that.
To tell someone who struggles with empathy that she or he is a lesser person is wrong. That’s abusive. Ironic, I realize. Again, we need to appreciate not everyone is a natural empath, and audience analysis and so on occur in different ways for such thinkers.