On Neurodivergence and Pedagogy: Request for Reflection

This blog is going to be a bit of cheat I guess because I am going to use this space to link you to things that I think you should read that I wrote previously or that other's have shared. So not so much a cheat, because spent the evenings this week editing a 7000 word chapter on academic integrity and accessibility, and the majority of the work week doing final preparations for summer camp for instructors that I'm facilitating next week, so this is more like upholding and modelling constructivist pedagogy and open sharing (also I am really really tired folks). 

I have been thinking a lot this week about the massive gap in conversations and supports when it comes to what we say or provide instructors and staff members to support neurodivergent learners or neurodivergent colleagues. The fact that the word neurodivergent comes up as a spelling error here, suggests how little we talk about this in terms of actual framing of pedagogy or how to support in higher education workspaces.

I asked a question on Twitter this week and the responses have been something that I truly hope everyone in HigherEd will take to time to read:

Hi disability Twitter looking for your best threads on ND experience in HigherEd. I want to highlight the pedagogical and systemic gaps that are ableist to ND students, instructors, and staff

— Ann Gagné, PhD (@AnnGagne) July 12, 2022

So please read this thread, expand on the responses, reflect on what is being shared in the threads collected here. This is really important as folk prep courses for fall. In this thread you will also see some handbooks from Canadian universities created by accessibility services to support instructors. They are great handbooks and we a thousand percent do not have anything like this at my school and it is something that I have been working on for fall because it is sad that we don't. 

It is also important to think about the procedures and communication support that is available (or not) to support your neurodivergent colleagues. For this piece, I want to suggest returning to a post I wrote on writing and assessment in March because in that blog I wrote about the importance of thinking outside standard or normative communication frameworks like standard English. Not everyone communicates in the same way, and when there is an assumption that everyone will communicate or react in the same way, that is an ableist and inequitable assumption. Most of academe is run on these inequitable communicative assumptions. 

So my ask this week is think about how you communicate with folk and how you may assume that folk will communicate back in the same way and what you can do to change that assumption. If you are an educator with courses in the fall or winter, what are one or two things that you will put in place in your course that specifically reflection on the neurodivergent students in your class. Share these with us on Twitter or as a comment here. And don't say there are no neurodivergent learners in your class because you haven't received the paper work. They are there, trust me.