Kindness Savant Will Pixelate, Chapter 1 — First Steps At Ease

There is a stroll palimpsest, a universe beneath the footpath. We walk hand in hand and look out at the built world in front and behind us. Lampposts, chipped concrete walls, clothes line string theory, birds on metal beams, windows, an illuminated sign advertising a food plaza. My daughter is four, and we employ all the folk physics ideas that we have at our collective disposal to investigate an understanding of how the basic systems around us work. How do windows work, how is glass made. How do you bolt a lamppost into the ground, where is the switch to turn it on. How does all of this constructed world around us operate. I can’t really tell you how a refrigerator works, but between us we can make a good estimation using what we know about how leaves fall and how the sound of thunder travels and how plastic toys bounce down wooden steps. There is an intuitive understanding that we all share about how the built world operates, and our children can be particularly astute with this intuition.

Renee Baillargeon has shown how infants have an innate knowledge for discriminating between two objects with a microscopic intensity of post-birth scientific reasoning that is surely the position at which all observation fueled knowledge is constructed. And, Simon Baron-Cohen has shown how children on the autism spectrum can have a particularly strong capacity for establishing an understanding of the cause and effects of the constructed world using innate engineering processes that tinker within the heart of the youthful mind. Folk psychology can be more tricky, to understand what others are thinking, feeling, expecting, and all the rest. And that’s ok, because the reason we’re walking around the city today isn’t just to focus on how the food plaza sign becomes illuminated, but rather it’s so I can learn more about the child beside me.

The phenomenologists got so much right, about how life and the inside of the mind can completely be understood by simply taking a walk around the block. You create your own truth by looking at the jigsaw daylight between the leaves and learning how to authentically frame and communicate what you’re processing and then to be able to listen to and realise what reality also looks like to someone else. This walk around the block with my daughter is foremost a process of getting to know all about her. Through maintaining a dialogue around interpreting how the world works, by sharing invented ideas about logical connections and how this interacts with that, through an illumination and a bending of the rules of our own naive physics, I am getting to know my daughter and how she thinks about the world, what is important to her, what her frame of reference is for reality, and what her dreams are.

This is what is most important as we continue down the street towards the corner where the schoolhouse stands, with a tall brick wall that necklaces the rise of the playground, tagged along its perimeter with a rainbow graffiti of invented names, painted linguistic plash, stencil art of children and balloons and monkeys, like the wall here is a canvas mouth overflowing with urban cardiac swoon. They say that that if you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism, but so too if you’ve met one child, you’ve met one child. Every individual is an unrepeatable stamp of solo humanity, and with this considered we need to respect the time required to properly get to know the individual children that we meet along our way.

I say to my daughter, Imagine if you don’t turn five this year, imagine if instead you jump from being four years old straight to twenty years old. And she says, But I won’t have the right appetite, I’ll be a twenty year old with the appetite of a seven year old, I’ll be thin, and I’ll be confused and walking down the street and I’ll have to ask someone, Where is my house, and they’ll say, You don’t own a house.

We round the corner of the block and head home with a little basket full of disjecta we’ve picked up from the ground, a few metal cogs, some curious seed pods, a couple of particularly veiny leaves, a coil of copper. We’ll put them under a microscope when we get home and see how there is so much more beneath the surface of things than we see upon first inspection, and how we sometimes just need the right lens, the right focus, and a little bit of time to see all the wonderfully complex and unexpected details that are fully revealed when you take a closer look.

To my mind, the first responsibility of every educator in the classroom is to get to know each individual child in their care as well as possible. We need to understand each child for the benefit of reasoning what their strengths and their needs are so as to properly understand the role that we are going to have in supporting this child’s education for the time they are with us. There can be an inverse assumption here at times, that it is rather our primary role to help children learn academic subject matter, but of course this is upside down: we can consider ourselves to truly be educators in so much as we are professionals specialised in learning about the individual children in our classrooms. Connecting the dots of content and learning how to think are wonderful consequences for children that happen after the main event, after we teach ourselves about who they are and all the complicating factors that impact upon them in composition of their daily realities.

This is a deceptively simple assumption, and one that can be lost in the platitudes of best intentions and fridge magnet philosophies: it is not that our role as educators is just to get to know who the children in our classrooms are because it seems like a nice, holistic thing to do, but rather it is because if we do not understand how our children work, then we do not understand how to educate them. This is true for all children, but as an educator who works primarily with children on the autism spectrum, let me say that it is a consideration that needs to sit at the forefront of any discussion about the educational needs of a child on the spectrum. Without a quality understanding of who the child is, we have nothing.

There are three key points of consideration that we engage a dialogue on with the children in our school. We want to know what makes our students happy, we want to know how they see themselves in relation to others so as to establish a sense and value of self, and we want to know how students want to be best supported at school. We use these key questions to inform what is called a One Page Profile, a simple document that captures this key information about our students that helps us to begin our education.

We start by using a One Page Profile with our students from the moment they prepare to enter our school for the first time. At our initial Individual Education Plan meeting where we work with our families and students on formulating key goals for us to start working on, we begin with a One Page Profile that has been previously sent home to be drafted with input from our student and their family, which our teachers then further discuss and add to so as to build an authentic representation of the key elements that represent our student. As much input from the student as possible is directly sought, and where this can be a challenge for some of our students, our educators have been using many innovative ways to engage this dialogue to accommodate the range of processing and communication needs our students have. Some of our teachers have begun creating One Page Profiles that are completely visual in nature, with iPad utilisation or by using laminated pictures of things that make our students happy, things that people like and admire about each of our students, and ways in which to best support our students. Some of our teachers make it a daily task to allow students to reflect upon their One Page Profiles and to edit and update them so they can present the most accurate version of themselves to those they work with in the school environment. Our students, from preschool through to high school, proudly display their One Page Profiles on the walls of their classrooms, as a foundational statement of rendering the educational space as one guided by an understanding of who all the participants are. To this end, our educators similarly complete One Page Profiles that they display alongside their students and share with each other across the school.

Last year I developed a resource called a School Instruction Manual (SIM), a document that students, teachers and family could collaborate on to provide a model of the school day and the school experience for a student, building on the Social Story and Comic Conversation work of Carol Gray to showcase weekly visual timetables, activities at school that students could look forward to, examples of social play that could be engaged across the day, and it also included a student’s One Page Profile. As a way of further extending the dialogue that rises from tools like this, so as to further work towards getting to know our students, our Hunter School uses a classroom resource and teaching strategy we call the Green Wall.

The Green Wall is an idea derived from the point at which the Zones of Regulation program and our Positive Behaviour Support strategies meet. With reference to the Zones of Regulation, an emotional regulation program developed by Leah Kuypers that uses four coloured zones to represent four different emotional states with associated regulatory strategies that help students understand and manage their behavioural responses to a spectrum of feelings, the Green Zone represents the emotional state in which you are most settled, happy and proximally positioned to learn. In Positive Behaviour Support, stages of behavioural challenge and response are represented sometimes as a pyramid with a large Green section down the bottom, representing the sort of strategies and practices you utilise to provide consistent support in order to manage all behaviours, a smaller middle Yellow section, representing more specific behaviour plans you would develop to support a particular level of behavioural need that can arise from time to time, and a tiny Red section at the top of the pyramid, representing very specific crisis support plans to address particularly challenging behaviours in need of immediate intervention. The Green section of this Positive Behaviour Support pyramid aligns perfectly with the Green Zone in the Zones of Regulation, in that they both represent a state in which proactive strategies are employed to maintain the most desired state of emotional and behavioural ease in the classroom. To this end, we have established what we term the Green Wall, a physical space on a wall in the classroom that is coloured green with material such as felt or paper, or for the adventurous it can take form as a Lego Green Wall, in which we can present a shared extrapolation of the three key prompts for our student One Page Profiles. This extrapolation on the Green Wall takes form as a collection of behavioural strategies, class rules, respectful agreements and considerations between all members of the classroom, and other inclusions that represent what everybody is hoping to get out of the classroom experience, and how everybody is going to best feel supported in the classroom. The Green Wall is both generalised as a collection of whole class strategies and statements, and it is also individualised to include each student’s One Page Profile contents. In a Lego Green Wall version of this strategy, each student may have an individually identified section of the wall that can be used to display all the things the student enjoys, things that represent their sense of self, and how they can be best supported in the classroom, all concretely visualised with Lego resources, working in with the philosophy and practice of Lego Serious Play. Below is a photo from one of our classrooms with green base plates tacked to the wall in order to create a Lego Green Wall with a range of affirmations and positive behaviour support strategies that align with Green Wall thinking that students can create individually or as part of whole group activities, finding Lego characters to represent the strategies in either a very explicit, concrete way, such as showing students food and drink they can have when they are starting to feel stressed out, or more metaphorical representations of strategies, such as a Lego character with a broom sweeping away negative thoughts. This process of helping students move from concrete to more abstract modes of strategic regulation is part of a framework I’ve established called Lego Constructive Thinking, which focuses on using Lego to help with student problem solving skills.

The photo above is of a Primary School classroom, which is of course a considerably different physical experience to the High School environment. The High School setting is characterised by many transitions across campus to different rooms occupied across the day by many different cohorts of student. As such, it can be difficult for some High Schools to implement Green Wall strategies effectively, in which case I recommend the implementation of a Mobile Green Wall. This is a resource that remodels the bones of the Green Wall strategy, with its visual projection of daily required behavioural strategies, agreed upon terms of respect and engagement between peers and other school participants, regulatory prompts and elements of individual One Page Profiles, and establishes this as a portable version that can be taken from class to class. It may be printed within a folder or a school diary, or it may be part of a document such as a School Instruction Manual (SIM) that students can take from class to class, or it may be a digital document portfolio on an iPad or laptop. Whatever form it takes, it needs to be something that is readily able to be included in the classroom dialogue between teacher and students, providing a functional way to remind about behavioural expectations, to provide regulatory strategies, and to further provide a window into understanding each individual student we meet and work with across every school day.

There are of course many other ways of getting to know our students. I’m thinking of strategies that creative educators use such as taking the time to spend a day in a student’s shoes, walking around the areas of the playground they spend time, following the same schedule, getting a sense for the very real phenomenological lived experience of what our individual students observe, feel and enact across the school day. The more in which we are able to engage this particular space of existential identification, in which we are able to really empathise and be observant to the spaces our students spend their days, the more we are able to achieve our goal of understanding who our students are and how they work in order for us to design functional learning experiences that are suitable to who our students are and for the tools that we can provide them as they flourish into the future. Regardless of the child, regardless of the spectrum or the behavioural challenges or otherwise, it is here that we need to start, our first step always in providing real education of actual value, is in getting to know the child.

With this as our cornerstone, we head now towards the second stage of a model for engaging autism pedagogy, which is to understand our children beyond the labels ascribed to them, to be philosophically broad shouldered enough to carry on a dialogue of Post-Disability and Universal Design for Learning, and to see beyond the current constraints of our society and our classrooms with a view that we may build a future beyond Special Education by considering that frameworks of Inclusion should not be a vision of the Mainstream World with Special Education bolted on to the side, but rather there needs to be wise consideration for the philosophical and pedagogical tenets that make Special Education the infinitely questioning source of humanistic truth I love it for. Onward.