Open Society

Ethics is a vital part of research.  It is about ensuring we do no harm to those we serve. As researchers, teams are there to serve the autistic communities.  Not to hurt and insult them. Autistic people are not there to serve researchers as a convenient sample or a way to advance their careers. I'm part of these communities.  As a proud parent of a fantastic autistic son.  As an autistic person myself.  As a researcher.  As a consultant and lecturer in this field, including to the NHS in various roles. I am so sad to see some research teams behaving in these frankly callous ways.  I wish the example above was rare.  It is not. Every day, for me, it is such an honour to do what I can to uphold the lovely autistic people I am delighted to share life with.  My family, my friends, my colleagues, the general autistic public on social media.  Their honesty, integrity, determination, courage and friendship are worth more than words can say. We are not "ASD cases".   We are your friends. We are your research colleagues.  We are your neighbours.  We are your fellow NHS workers.  We are artists, and musicians.  We are faith leaders and authors.  We are parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters. We are worth every bit as much as every other human on this planet.  Our way of interacting, our emerging cultures and ways of being, are worth their place.   Those that need support have been asking for things that actually matter to us.  There is more research than you could shake a journal at, on this subject. Instead, we get paper after paper describing us like we're some form of disease to be eradicated. I won't despair of research, as I see so many good people emerging.  People who put us front and centre of research into our own lives.  People who treat us as valued colleagues.  As equals, not as laboratory specimens.  People who are our allies.  People who are autistic and working at the top levels of new thinking, new theories, new understandings.  I am honoured to work with several such teams. I would very much like some researchers to stop hiding behind one another, and behind dehumanising words.  To have the courage to re-evaluate their thinking and their beliefs.  To have the curiosity to read those new narratives, to meet autistic teams and really collaborate, really understand. If you cannot gaze upon us and see our worth, our love, our caring, our whole humanity, this is not the field you should be in. This is our future.  Our lives.  Our present.  Our history.  Our community. You are not called to erase us, as researchers. You are called to earn our trust, and share in our future, with love.

My first objection to gratitude as an across-the-board stance, then, is that it’s disproportionate, unearned, and therefore inauthentic. Even if training oneself to be constantly grateful really did boost what psychologists call subjective well-being, I’m not sure that’s a sufficient reason. As the psychological researcher Ed Deci put it, “When people want only happiness, they can actually undermine their own development because the quest for happiness can lead them to suppress other aspects of their experience. . . .The true meaning of being alive is not just to feel happy, but to experience the full range of human emotions.” Making children express gratitude they don’t feel, meanwhile, just like forcing them to apologize when they’re not sorry, mostly teaches them insincerity. Subjecting them to exercises in which they must manufacture gratitude — and, yes, some schools, in the name of “positive psychology,” really do make kids cough up lists of things for which they’re grateful — strikes me as deeply wrongheaded.

Usually the actions taken are punitive and it's more centered around alienation, taking the problem away, literally ignoring the problem and taking it away from this situation. And he talks about how this doesn't help anybody. It literally just ignores the problem. And if restorative justice has brought an awareness of the limits and negative byproducts of punishment and real accountability involves facing up to what the person has done instead of just taking them away from the problem.

Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop introduced us to the metaphor of books as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. She said, “books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”

If books can be mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, so too is the curriculum. As a mirror, the curriculum should reflect to each child an image of their authentic self as an agentic learner. Through the sliding glass door of the curriculum, the child should be invited to delve deep into a history that affirms and honors their ancestors and the lineage they inherited. The window of the curriculum should portray a future you are welcomed to participate in through engagement as a citizen who belongs to the community. Educational colonization ensures that the curriculum mirror does not reflect marginalized children, the sliding glass door is filled with lies and historical misrepresentations, and the window to the future is blocked.

Joy comes from the love and freedom to take risks. Only through the freedom to engage in uninterrupted true play can joy manifest.

Joy, engagement, and reflection are the keys to liberation for both children and teachers. Through the freedom to take risks knowing they are loved, the children are liberated from deficit orientations, and adult imposed limitations on what play should look like. While liberated, they exhibit a type of confidence that only develops through freedom and love.

He is right something terrible is happening, it’s educational colonization.

Children arrive bright and inquisitive to an institution that trains them to be quiet and obedient. Normed to white middle class values, schooling attempts to force all children to conform to these narrow expectations. Those who do are rewarded with good grades, praise, and accolades while those who don’t are labeled as at-risk, disruptive, and troublemakers. Both are denied their freedom. Both are left to survive and not thrive. And the educators who enact educational colonization, consciously and unconsciously are denied their freedom and also left to survive.

The freedom to learn and the freedom to teach threaten educational colonization.

Educational colonization means forcing teachers to deny children their agency, their freedom which in turn robs them of their agency and their freedom. When teachers are free to teach they can harness the power of observing children to learn from them. When teachers are free to teach they can prioritize creating nurturing relationships with children, their families, and the community. When teachers are free to teach they have sufficient time to support authentic learning experiences and create relevant and engaging curriculum. When teachers are free to teach they become partners in unleashing the potential of every child entrusted in their care. When children are free to learn, teachers are free to teach.

This freedom will impact every aspect of education. The freedom to teach and learn means leads to authentic worthwhile assessments instead of standardized testing that comes from the schooling colonization project. The freedom to learn and teach supports moving from knowledge competition to knowledge documentation. The freedom to learn and teach means we can measure what really matters and center learner driven assessments. The freedom to learn and teach supports learning through multiple perspectives. When education becomes the practice of freedom, all systems that impede freedom are rejected.

We have seen what happens when schooling is used as a method of colonization. We know what conformity to the current system means for the future. Our only option is to center freedom in our schools. Borrowing from James Baldwin, I leave you with this revision, “If the concept of education has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If education cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of it.”

Truth is our ride to get to the world where thriving is the norm. We teach truth so we may thrive.

he demand for a liberating educational system must begin in the early years. Early childhood education and care must embrace liberatory and emancipatory pedagogies that center the abolition of oppression in all forms. We are meant to thrive. To live lives full of joy, happiness, dreams, hopes, and peace. We thrive through self love, love of our people, and freedom to live.

Paulo Freire said, “education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which mean and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of the world.”

However, now I have come to understand that education designed to suppress freedom is the boundary. This type of education is a form of colonization.

For those oppressed by educational colonization we must learn the historical roots of this boundary so that we may unshackle ourselves from the chains of colonization.

Coupled with the rise in white nationalist propaganda and domestic racist terrorist attacks, educational colonization works to further the dehumanization of marginalized people.