Kindness Savant Will Pixelate, Chapter 2 — Maximum Universal

In December of 2015 I was fortunate to have been invited to visit Shanghai to speak at a United Nations workshop titled Information for All — Accessible Knowledge, Information and Communication for Persons with Disabilities in Asia and the Pacific. I travelled with colleague and friend Greg Alchin, a specialist in Universal Design for Learning, to the Sunshine Rehabilitation Centre in the suburb district of Songjiang for a fascinating week of discussions with policy leaders and government officials on the use of technology to foster increased accessibility across society. Particularly, most all the conversations travelled quickly towards the idea of expanding the discussion beyond disability and to rather consider a Post-Disability space where Universal Design was at the heart of all societal constructs.

In essence this very much reflects what the United Nations Convention of the Right of Persons with Disability have established as the international standard by which we conceptualise disability, by way of engaging the Social Model. That is, rather than seeing disability through a Medical Model of disability that maybe ascribe a person with a diagnosed disability as being inherently different to what is otherwise considered a normal or healthy model of a human individual, a Social Model of disability rather places the emphasis on the social environment as being the dominant factor that creates disability for people. A good example of this is a recent one a colleague of mine was sharing in relation to work she is doing with Indigenous communities in regional Australia in providing educational outreach services to children on the autism spectrum. The Indigenous families she was working with were surprised when school reported that their children had a disability, for when the child was at home and with family they were not observed to be disabled, they functioned within the family and the community with no impairment. It was only when the child started going to school that they received a diagnosis of autism and came under the sphere of disability support and Special Education. In this way, it was the environmental culture and structure of the school that established that the child was not performing in a manner that was seen as normal in relation to the standard for how children might normally present.

This is not to say that the school invented the autism diagnosis for the child out of thin air — the same would apply if the child had Cerebral Palsy and required significant physical support, for example. The home environment and community might be set up to be fully accessible so that the child does not consider the idea of disability, however were the child to visit a supermarket or the airport or any other space not as accessibly considered, the idea of disability would become more pronounced as they approach barriers to how freely they are able to do what they would like to do. In this way, I challenge the idea that any individual is actually capable of not being considered to have a disability when placed in an environment that does not fully foster accessibility. Those of us who might consider that we do not have a disability would do well to consider all the times we have become frustrated at visiting a shopping centre or a hotel or any given public or private space and complained about how poorly designed something was, how the aisles are too narrow or the counter is too high or the information on the screen is scrolling too quickly, how the information presented at the front desk is too confusing, how they didn’t take enough time to explain how it all works. We don’t necessarily think, If only I was able to read faster or if I was taller, instead we recognise the design deficit and we call it out for being so inaccessible.

This is not a philosophical trick for trying to deny the reality or the impact of a need such as autism. What it is an argument for however is to see children not as being able or disabled, but simply to see all children as children who have individual needs without a comparison to some semblance of what is normal or what a successful model school student should look like. It is an argument for asking how is this classroom, and ultimately how is this society, accessible to all children and to the learning needs of all. This is what a Post-Disability consideration is focused on, a recognition that there is not one human out there who is less a representation of perfect humanity than anybody else. Hence I believe the role of Special Education should not be to simply provide support to those children who do not fit into the Mainstream Education framework, but rather Special Education should stand tall as a model for what all Education should be, it is a framework of questioning and diagnosing need and creating individualised programs and supports to establish conditions under which all children can develop to the best of their abilities. Special Education could be referred to as Education Version 2.0, it is the upgraded version of the sort of 1.0 Mainstream Education that still might not be completely caught up on differentiation and the tenets of Universal Design for Learning. This is not to cast shade unfairly on Mainstream Education or to hold all Special Education classes up as models of Universal Design by any means. Rather, it is about highlighting what is necessary to consider when a child walks into any classroom. A child on the autism spectrum should not be considered disabled when they enter a classroom, they should be considered as a child with individual needs that need to be identified and considered and for the educator to be able to have a dialogue about the range of appropriate learning conditions that can allow this child to flourish.

The difficulty with this simple statement is the same difficulty that a person with a vision impairment faces when walking into an art gallery - if the environment is not set up for vision accessibility, no amount of well wishing will allow the individual to enjoy the visual artworks on display. This is how I feel about so many of our current classroom environments - a child on the autism spectrum enters the classroom and yet, even with fantastic educators with all the best intentions in the world, the current structures and expectations of the system are just not always in alignment with what the child needs to be successful. And not just for children on the autism spectrum, of course. You look around most any classroom, from preschool through to high school and university, and it is not difficult to consider that we are providing a less than universally successful and certainly a less imaginative version of education across our systems than we should be capable of coming up with. Why not dream a little, why not imagine a school experience that operates only an hour or two a week inside formal classroom walls, with other periods across the week spent in the community with mentors and families providing a range of developmental experiences that connect with big picture goals for the future. Why not imagine and enact classroom structures beyond rows and columns of chairs and turning to page twenty seven in the textbook. Just because the trains run on time it doesn’t mean we’re getting anywhere.

The difficulties associated with some of these themes we’re discussing is to my mind one of the inherent difficulties associated with Inclusion at this time. When I conduct Educational Outreach consultative visits, which involve attending to schools and conducting observations on students on the spectrum, consulting with families and teachers and working collaboratively to put plans together to best support the educational success of the student on the spectrum, most all of the visits are to Mainstream Schools who are worried about the challenging behaviours of a student on the spectrum, or about whether they are doing enough to enable to success of a student on the spectrum in the school environment. And so, we all work together to introduce new strategies and processes to address the individual needs of the child. Sometimes we are successful, and sometimes we are not. The times that we are successful, we get a sense it is because all the autism education evidence informed practices that we have in our tool box have all hit the targets they were aiming for - the visual timetables helped provide the student with structure and allowed them to pace themselves and anticipate the expectations across the day, the Social Stories allowed the student to learn, implement and generalise a range of successful social strategies that they were previously lacking, the utilisation of Special Interests relating to what the student is passionate about allowed them a more connected experience with the classroom, and so on. And the times that we are not successful, when all of the above and more have been implemented perfectly, when family and staff and external professionals are all talking together and hitting all the right notes but still the student in focus is just having a terribly unpleasant and unsuccessful time of trying to make it through a school day, I wonder to myself if the child is not here at school too early - perhaps in a couple of hundred years schools will have taken on a different form, and this student would be able to find success alongside all the other children. This is what educational Inclusion is seeking, to provide classrooms where all children can find success. Except we aren’t there yet, as shown by the astonishing rising numbers of students being home schooled, of families and schools battling each other over disability discrimination laws, and by the perpetually changing tides of perspectives on Inclusion and the value of Specialised settings and what the presence of choice means in relation to whether an Inclusive society has a need for other options outside of the Universal Mainstream.

The thing is, Inclusion surely needs to be the goal, it is surely the ideology that respects the rights and the human value of everybody to the utmost degree. But with respect to the previous discussion points in this chapter, and to borrow language from the world of accessibility, too often inclusion can be seen as a process of bolting Special Education on to the side of Mainstream Education. It is as if the perception is that Mainstream Education is just fine the way things are, it’s fine with the number of students it has in each class, the number of teachers out the front of the room, the physical layout of the rooms, the timetables, the playgrounds, it’s all in good order - but then, a student enters the room who doesn’t quite fit the model of what we expect a Mainstream student to be like, they’re doing all sorts of things that the status quo of students are not doing, they are subsequently observed to have Special Needs, and then the Special Education practices relating to the needs of this child need to be introduced and bolted on to the Mainstream classroom and then implemented so the child can find success. This bolting on process might mean introducing a teacher’s aide, it might mean bolting on a new emotional regulation or social skills program, it might mean bolting on a new home and school communication book to monitor positive behaviour support practices. The difficulty here is, when we bolt on an accessible solution to a product that was not previously designed to be accessible, it is often a poor substitute for what the real solution is - scrapping the old product, and redesigning it anew to be fully accessible. The deeper question here, of course, is whether it is possible to change existing Mainstream Education classrooms to be environments that are capable of supporting every student who enters, regardless of the individual profile of needs they present with. To ensure the success of Inclusion we need to consider whether the answer is going to be an ongoing process of tinkering with the system, adding this and subtracting that, sanding the edges and re-modeling the interior, to adapt to the ever changing demographics of varied learners we have in our communities, or is the answer rather going to be a complete halt to what is currently going on in our schools, allowing us to take the time to step back as a society and say, It is time to start again, We can do this better, Let us redesign education. This catch cry is by no means just relegated to the musings of Special Educators - it is in the same key as the revolutionary messages being shared nightly on Twitter between teachers who are seeking to reimagine the role of technology in schools, to reimagine creativity and well being and the value of being at school at all. And so it always should be, we need disquiet to progress - the question is whether we progress by rearranging the desks in the classroom, or whether we progress by reimagining the inherent human value in being able to truly reach all learners.

My own way of moving forward in this space is to embrace the principles of Universal Design for Learning as a talisman for the goal of reaching all learners. The team at CAST, the Center for Applied Special Technology, are a key reference point here, and I heartily recommend reading ‘Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice’ as it provides tremendous guidelines for considering how to provide every student with multiple means of engagement, so as to make learning purposeful and stimulating, to provide multiple means of representation for students, so as to make sure that learners are able to engage with content in a number of different and suitable ways, and to provide multiple means for students to express what they know. In the following two chapters of this essay I’ll elaborate on how we do this in our school.

To my mind, to understand the principles of Universal Design for Learning is to also understand good autism pedagogy. There are many direct parallels between the current literature on evidence informed autism practices and the tenets of Universal Design. Lisa Combs, a special educator and autism coach, wrote a terrific article on just this notion, Opening the Classroom Door for Children with Autism. In it she extrapolates on the correlations between the instructional strategies recommended by the National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders and the principles recommended by CAST for the implementation of Universal Design for Learning. The connections between the two frameworks are clear and important to understand — the need in autism pedagogy to represent tasks concretely and visually aligns with the Universal Design notion of providing multiple means of representation, the autism instructional strategy of utilising the special interests of our students aligns with the Universal Design notion of providing multiple means of engagement, and so on. Further work elaborating these connections into shared pedagogical frameworks will be very valuable with a view to heighten the utility of these approaches, particularly as it helps to resolve a consideration that often arises when seeking to implement particularly autism educational practices in settings where all of the children are not on the autism spectrum. One of the ways we encourage the use of autism pedagogy strategies in classrooms is to say, This is not just going to benefit the child on the autism spectrum, This is just good teaching, This will help everybody. There is nobody in the classroom who will not benefit from explicit social skill instruction, or from the use of visual timetables, or the embedding of emotional regulation strategies, or the utility of special interests. Hence, there is a strategic and philosophical benefit in rendering these strategies not as simply belonging to autism pedagogy, but indeed as those that similarly align with the principles of Universal Design for Learning which, by the nature of its name and its function, applies universally to all students regardless of who they are or what diagnosis they do or don’t present with.

This is my way forward, for the students in our school for children on the autism spectrum, for the students with autism that I visit and work with across all educational settings and systems, to not wait for the overhaul revolution to occur and for an unheralded view of education and schooling to present itself, but to rather always hold in my head the considerations I’ve shared across this chapter — to understand that there is often a limit to what we can do with existing school structures, and that while the goal of Inclusion remains in sight and at times finds wonderful success, we must be careful about how we engage Inclusion, not by way of holding onto the best of intentions and bolting on a few Special Education tricks to the side of an otherwise unfortunately designed system, but by way of reconfiguring our perceptions on what Reaching All Learners really means, and what the inherent human value is of all students to be treated with the respect and optimism worthy of continually dreaming up innovative strategies to enable the success they need. Perhaps one day Special Education will just be Education, and the lessons learned from meeting the needs of some of our most at risk students will provide a reevaluation of all values to the daily practices of all educational settings, realising the goal of maximum universal inclusive success.