Last updated on November 26, 2023
Podcast 0005; Season 01, Episode 05; April 24, 2018
The “unwritten curriculum” of social interactions penalizes autistic students and others with differences in the classroom setting. Teachers are trained to foster active and engaged communities, valuing peer interactions, and class participation. The emphasis on social skills draws attention to the defining characteristic of autism: social communication deficits.
Lu Randall of the Autism Connection of PA joins us again to discuss these challenges faced by autistics and how training helps teachers, parents, and peers appreciate autistic differences.
Transcript (lightly edited)
Welcome to The Autistic Me Podcast.
I’m Christopher Scott Wyatt, and today I’m talking with Lu Randall, Executive Director of Autism Connection of PA. If you want to learn more about the Autism Connection, you can visit autismofpa.org.
For today’s topic, we’re going to talk about school, education, and autism, because, unfortunately, school is not always an educational place for autistics whether they are children or adults on the spectrum.
Scott: Lu, you’ve been working a lot lately with schools and doing training of staff and faculty — and not just at the K-12 level, but even at community colleges and college-level trade schools. What are some of the misconceptions that teachers and administrators have about autism before you talk to them?
Lu Randall: So teachers and administrators, when I talk to them, often will say [00:01:00] after about half an hour, “Why didn’t anybody tell me this before?” They really want to do well by people. They’re in it for the mission and they want to help people with differences and disabilities. But autism can be somewhat of a mysterious type of condition, instead of conditions. Not always a disability, it’s a difference. I think, as a society we’ve done a pretty terrible job of taking what we know from the research, which is really instructive. You can actually see the way autism works in the brain differently than a brain that doesn’t have autism. If it’s not in People Magazine or on some talk show on TV, people don’t know about it and it’s really somewhat frustrating I think.
But I also enjoy my role as a connector. The Autism Connection is named that for a reason: we can connect people to information and get out and talk and teach people with things like images from National Institute of Health studies that we’ve had around now for 15 years that show, for instance, that people with autism have extra nerve cells in their brains and [00:02:00] actually have extra thought pathways. That’s pretty fascinating. It can be a great tool for that person in certain careers and hobbies and stuff like that.
But it’s sort of a mysterious thing that we’ve got to get out and teach people.
Scott: When you are talking with educators, as the parent of two foster children with special needs — a term that already poses problems in itself special needs or disabilities, there’s no really good way to describe it so I like that you said autism is a difference, I’ve noticed that the teachers make certain assumptions of what is or isn’t possible.
Lu Randall: Right. Yeah. They’ve been taught something. I know when I was in college, and this is like back in the 80s, I think my entire autism education was “The child with autism is in a world of his own…” And that was it. Like it was a sentence.
I don’t know if this has come incredibly far. I know if I ask teachers, “Did you study autism in [00:03:00] college?” they’ll say “We did a paper on that” basically or maybe read a book. It’s not their fault. I think they’re sort of sold a bill of goods by colleges and universities that they’ll get out and teach and deal with testing and have people sitting in rows.
We’re at tables. Maybe that’s the progress there.
What they think about autism is whatever they’ve heard or picked up along the way. I find most people more afraid to do the wrong thing and they’re very concerned about doing the wrong thing. So they maybe won’t do much different at all until somebody comes along and says, “Here. This kid learns through fictional novels about space travel, so let’s try to teach him sentence structure using those novels.” And once they’re given the key to that person or some information, they light up and they’re so excited to have a pathway to go.
I’m walking into these buildings a lot of time with facing people that are afraid to use the wrong words with me, even. They know some [00:04:00] autistic students, and even have worked well with them in the past, but they’ll try the same approach with a new person and it won’t work and that’s confusing — and frustrating. Once we start to tell people, “Here’s the brain with autism, it takes in way too much sensory information because there’s way too many nerve cells in the covering of the brain,” they can figure out what they want to do in their room that way. They can do light covers like we have in our office and filter out fluorescence. They could seat the child near a window and turn off all the lights in the room. They can figure out there’s a fan blowing, so turn that off while that child’s there, that student is there.
So they can apply what they learn versus some prescriptive thing that comes from book that says, “This is how you teach autistic people.” Because you know, and I’m speaking to you right now across the table, you’re not a recipe and there’s no cookbook for you. Everybody’s different.
Scott: At the high school, and even sometimes at the middle school level, I hear teachers say [00:05:00] things like, “I’m waiting to discover what Johnny or Susie’s special gift is.” I hear this a lot from teachers when I speak to schools, that they are waiting for that splinter skill to appear, whether it’s music or math or something and it seems to be difficult to break the stereotype that autistics are socially impaired but there’s always some sort of magical skill hiding beneath the surface.
Lu Randall: That’s a lot of pressure to live up to you, huh?
Scott: Yeah. It can be.
Lu Randall: So, I’ve known you for a while and you know, I’m kidding when I’m joking around and sometimes that’s actually autism cultural thing — to let somebody know that you’re joking — because I find autistic people to be very truthful and direct and so they probably expect that from other people. We use sarcasm in society pretty badly when we’re dealing with people that think literally, just as a side note there.
Yeah, I think that [00:06:00] people, a lot of times in schools, assume that people are emotionally disconnected if they are autistic and the reality is part of their brains and the brain stems can be a little bit different, or small, and that’s what controls people’s facial muscles. Just because you can’t show me on your face what I interpret as happy, sad, mad, scared, whatever, does not mean that you’re not feeling that. Right? I mean….
Scott: It’s one of the things that not only I have heard but several autistics have reported back to me. I had a professor who said I needed to smile. And when we were doing Christmas and holiday cards, the photographer kept saying, “Please smile!” And I said, “I am smiling.” My wife had to explain, “He thinks he’s smiling. This is his smile.”
Lu Randall: Right. We do special, quieter, sensory-friendly visits with Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny and this year the photographer said to one of our kids, “Can you say cheese?” And [00:07:00] he’s autistic, so he said, “Yes.” You know, that’s a very literal interpretation of that question.
I’ve worked with kids and I made every mistake in the book when I worked with people when I was younger, such as having kids practice with a mirror. “Show me mad face” and I’ll get like a gritted teeth kind of thing. “Show me your happy face.” It’s the same face. Because people are intentionally trying to make their facial muscles move in an unnatural way, so in schools how that works against people is that people assume that autistic people don’t have feelings or the same feelings… just because they can’t move their muscles the same way. That’s a big mistake and an error in assumptions.
Scott: One of the things I still come across, especially with our young children, is an older teacher saying, “You need to look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Lu Randall: Right? So the brain with autism can do one thing at a time pretty well. And that’s awesome if you’re an [00:08:00] astrophysicist, researcher, or if you’re making brownies, or whatever, or playing with toys, right? But trying to do two things at once can be difficult. So a lot of the time… I will always tell teachers or other kids at school —because we do a lot of autism acceptance work with peers — if you’re talking to a person with autism and you see their ear it usually means that they’re listening to you.
In American culture, at least, we interpret that as being ignored and so we have to sort out our feelings and as the non-autistic person set aside my cultural expectations and deal with my autistic friends the way that they deserve to be treated, which is: if I’m talking to you, I might see your ear. I am really always aware, like right now even as I’m talking to you in this interview, I try not to make a lot of eye contact with people because I think it’s demanding and I think it throws off the conversation when I’m working with people who are autistic.
Scott: When a teacher in today’s [00:09:00] education programs is exposed to autism, they are taught that we need to engage socially more and social engagement is part of the pedagogy in a lot of programs. And so what happens is the autistic student struggles oddly enough with social engagement. So the report card comes home and says, “Susie likes to play alone.” Or “Missy is not engaging with peers in parallel play. She’s doing her own thing.” And so there are these penalties that teachers in their minds are trying to help the child become social, because we are a very social culture, and at the same time this is penalizing the student who would otherwise be very successful.
Lu Randall: I’m kind of laughing while we’re talking about this because I think about flipping the report card over and saying that every single student in the room should be better at working independently and studying and reading for two hours straight. Would people learn better that way? [00:10:00] Maybe. Probably. So we need to look at the whole culture of that.
So I love when schools — and more and more this is happening — they’ll have me come in. Like yesterday, I went to a fairly large school district south of Pittsburgh and talked to a superintendent, assistant superintendent, and principal. That rarely happens where I get to do a top-down training. I’m going to go back and I’m going to talk to kids at different grade levels about the brain, about possible careers related to this, about how hidden disabilities could be depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, whatever. How the brain works. Show them the science, the pictures, and let them figure out how to better engage with their peers who might have differences that they can’t really see and how that’s just how the world is. I mean nature makes all kinds of creatures differently.
So when do a full-school kind of work, and the third visit there will be with parent night. Anybody can come to that: parents of kids with differences, parents of those kids friends, [00:11:00] whatever.
We want to look at the whole school culture and teachers, of course, but to get the message out that there are differences and they are hidden or a little bit mysterious until we talk about them and this affects everybody in all kinds of ways.
And these are not lectures like, “Be nice to people who are different.” This is just about the reality of that person’s brain. I start with, “Look, I have glasses. My eyes are part of my brain and my brain is different and you can see that on me.” But and then we kind of launch into the rest of the talk.
Scott: One of the challenges with training teachers about autism and other differences is funding. Let’s be honest, schools… when they are cutting, they cut music, art, and special education. Not always in that order, either. But those are where the cuts occur. How can we encourage schools to understand that the training we do on natural accommodations — like more natural light in [00:12:00] classrooms, like quiet spaces for students in corners of classrooms — how can we explain to them that these don’t always cost them money. They can open the blinds. And that even a small investment in this training can pay dividends on test scores and learning environments and retention for all students. Not just the autistic student.
Lu Randall: I always go in and talk about Universal Design which is things like opening blinds, which are things that support anybody’s brain to learn better and anybody’s brain includes the teacher in the room or the paraprofessionals whoever’s in the room.
So, again, I hate to sound scientific but a lot of this is fact-based I have to teach people facts. I can’t just say “do this because I say so” or “it should be better” but now we’ve got so much brain science around vision and how that works and how if you teach somebody one thing like reading, then you break that up with art right afterward so the brain can incubate and the information sinks in. You don’t add more [00:13:00] reading all day long for different subjects. So there’s a lot of science behind that. And this all works for the autistic brain, too. We just have to sort of tell people how. And again it’s not really fair to them, the teachers, they haven’t learned this before.
I always walk in saying like, “You have no rhyme or reason to know this stuff. So don’t feel like you shouldn’t ask a question because colleges and universities are doing a fairly bad job across the board teaching people that when you get out there to be an educator, you’re going to run to lots of people with differences, including things like feeding tubes and seizure disorders and all kinds of medical issues.” I think teachers have a lot on their plate in that respect.
Scott: Recently I was dealing with a teacher situation where she was running game shows which required buzzers and, you know, buzzing in your team gets points. And I understand that this was meant to encourage a fun learning environment — active, engaged — but one of the [00:14:00] students with a neurological limitation wasn’t able to participate because he can’t hit a buzzer in the right way and he speaks slowly so he can’t race to give the answer.
Lu Randall: Right.
Scott: And so what happens is the student with the neurological challenge, in this case a palsy, is highlighted because the teacher says, “Oh, well, you can be the scorekeeper or you can do some other role.” How do we explain to teachers that inclusion of all disabilities and all differences helps everybody and will help them in the future tolerate and accommodate differences without bringing attention to them in a way that…
Lu Randall: As an individual. Yeah in a negative way.
One thing I, and this is just off the top of my head, but anytime I’ve seen in a school an accommodation — and it might be that the student goes and uses a laptop to answer their questions — that on that day there are five kids that do that and that just usually happens to be the person who has this accommodation in [00:15:00] their plan. So let’s just say like in that instance, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if that’s the kid that wrote all the questions, that had all the answers, and was the person with another team of, you know, three or four other kids, who had like the secret sauce kind of thing to that so that they are special but in a good way and also it’s not just them it’s just a set of people that they’re on a team. It’s just a different task.
Because, really, in reality, that person’s going to go to parties in their neighborhood or whatever and they’re going to have sort of these issues. But how do you appreciate your difference and make that sort of help you stand out in a positive way, because we’re all different.
Scott: You’ve also done some work as I said with colleges and vocational training. One of the things that I have heard the teacher say is, “Well, your son or daughter is autistic. They really should go into math or computers because that’s what I heard Temple Grandin say” or “…that’s what I heard some of the other leading autistic self-advocates say.” [00:16:00] And this is a point of contention I have, sometimes, with the self-advocates making those claims. I understand there are savants and certainly gifted people, but I know many autistics and their gifts aren’t in those areas.
Lu Randall: Right? I do too. I think it’s awesome. um helped start a school in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, 20 years ago, and one of the kids there who was autistic would dress in dark Goth clothes and he wanted to be a florist… And that was his gig and it was so cool because it was just what he wanted to do. And he did that for events and as a career.
What I found more when I talk to more people who are autistic, I really find it great that there’s a lot of people I know that studied something that they were not good at.
So I have a friend who studies communication because her main issue was communication and to me that’s sort of like the awesome part of autism logic that the rest of should probably learn from. Like, why would you study something you are already good at?
[00:17:00] It kind of makes me laugh.
Sometimes I think about this. I was out teaching a class for people that worked with people with needs and this guy, he worked for the county, and he raised his hand and said, “Full disclosure. Right now, I’ll tell you that I was diagnosed with PDD-NOS, which is autism basically.” And I said, “Would you help me teach this class? Do you mind?” And he said, “As long as I don’t have to turn around and look at people.”
And he had studied psychology and sociology, working with groups because he was bad at it. I thought that was brilliant. And that’s what ended up being his career. It was helping people in groups because he knew how they felt if they had a disability or a difference.
He just had more ability to talk, but he said when, “I’m home, I’m flapping my hands. I’m rocking back and forth to unwind and I’m camouflaging right now, but I studied all this stuff because I was bad at.”
I think that’s brilliant. People should study what they want. Study or focus on what they want to do not just fall into the stereotype.
Scott: So you would say that to a [00:18:00] teacher with autistic students. So let the students fail. To let them try the thing they’re not good at and not protect or over-protect them.
Lu Randall: I think that’s true for all students. I mean I’m a parent and my kids get to hear this. I did call a fourth-grade teacher once and said, “My son just started working on his New Mexico project last night. Please do not give him anything more than you think he deserves.” And she said I was the first person that called to say, “Give my kid kind of a bad grade.” Because that’s what grade school is about, I think.
I think failing at some level is healthy because it teaches some resilience. What I don’t want to see is — and I really really hate this thinking — “We knew he was going to fail when he came into this new building of seventh grade and we just wanted to see where.” Because if you know somebody’s going to fail, and they have a disability, and they have an IEP, and they’re coming in with it, it’s really the school. If that person fails, that’s an F for the school. It’s not a really an F for that person because why would you set someone up on purpose that way?
[00:19:00]
Scott: You’re listening to The Autistic Me. I’m Christopher Scott Wyatt, and I’m talking to Lu Randall of the Autism Connection. We’re going to follow up this with a second episode on the challenges of autism and the 504 and IEP plans. Strategies that parents need to know about.
This has been The Autistic Me. I’m Christopher Scott Wyatt, and I look forward to our next meeting.
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