Open Society

'It is loss of a previously imagined trajectory leading to a previously imagined future.'

How a racist, classist lie is threatening an entire generation.

PROSPECTS - A dangerous trap exists for educators and education policy makers: the learning loss. This trap comes with a large amount of data and with sophisticated projection methods. It presents...

Monash Bioethics Review - It is a common refrain amongst phenomenologists, disability theorists, and feminist legal theorists that medical practice pays insufficient attention to people’s...

npj Science of Learning - Beware the myth: learning styles affect parents’, children’s, and teachers’ thinking about children’s academic potential

Autism is diagnosed according to atypical social-communication and repetitive behaviors. However, autistic individuals are also distinctive in the high variability of specific abilities such as learning. Having been characterized as experiencing great difficulty with learning, autistics have also be …

If your child is autistic, then they are more likely to have additional anxiety, social, communication and sensory processing difficulties.

Many support schemes in current autism clinical services for children and young people are based on notions of neuro-normativity with a behavioural emphasis. Such neuro-disorder approaches gradually undermine a person, restrain authentic self-expression, and fail to address the impact of a hostile world on autistic wellbeing. Furthermore, such approaches obscure attention from a fundamental challenge to conceptualise an alternative humanistic informed framework of care for staff working with diagnosed or undiagnosed autistic children and young people. In this paper, we offer an appreciation of the lifeworld-led model of care by Todres et al., (2009). We discuss how mental health practitioners can adopt an experience sensitive framework of healthcare by incorporating the eight dimensions of care into practice. This neuroinclusive approach creates a culture of respect, honours the sovereignty of the person, prioritises personalisation of care based on collaborative decision-making, and enables practitioners to support wellbeing from an existential, humanistic view, grounded in acceptance of autistic diversity of being. Without a fundamental shift towards such neurodivergence-affirming support with practitioners being willing to transform their understanding, real progress cannot happen to prevent poor mental health outcomes for autistic people across the lifespan. This shift is needed to change practice across research, clinical, and educational contexts.

I feel that the equity versus equality ‘debate’ (Baily & Holmarsdottir, 2015; Bird, 2018) is more than pertinent when any discussion about autistic inclusion takes place. The idea that all...

The recent dissemination of selective research findings related to reading privileges a narrow body of reading scholarship and a singular, unproven solution—teaching phonics. We offer a research-base...

Marley’s single Punk Reggae Party put a name to an underground phenomenon – the coming together of the punks and the Rastas at the height of 70s social unrest. That era may be over, but the punky reggae spirit still lives and breathes

Formative Posts are things that other people have written …

Nick Covington & Michael Weingarth call for a moratorium on using "The Science of Learning" to describe one aspect of how the brain works in relation to the multiple goals of school. Published by Human Restoration Project, a 501(c)3 organization restoring humanity to education.

Autistic Adults Are Not Okay is the title of Victoria Tanner's first book, which she hopes will bring visibility to struggling autistic adults

Pro-cure autistics and the neurodiversity paradigm

“Can't sleep. Need to. But too disturbed. Have read the articles. Have not watched the video - can't handle it right now. And won't share it. Just shaken. If there had been no video we all know exactly how this would have went down. This was cold-blooded and deliberate murder along

Parenting and Healthy Lifestyle

Understanding the policing and incarceration of neurodivergence.

The historian espoused grand ambitions to dismantle American racism, but the crisis at his research center suggests that he always had a more limited view of change.

We understand that Autism is a neurotype with strengths as well as challenges. We support individuals in building regulation, finding 'their people' and finding Autism-friendly environments. We are familiar with the PDA profile and work in a trauma-informed manner with PDAers.

Someone decided this was going to be Autistic History Month.  I had another contribution I was going to write.  In fact, it’s already almost written.  But I ended up writing this instead.  At first…

Written by Dr Sarah @autisticdoc “I have many Autistic clients who are doctors,” said the psychologist, during my diagnostic assessment. […]

A Room Called Earth and other autistic narratives challenge the false pathological stories society tells about our neurotype.

Explore this post and more from the AutisticPride community

It is an undeniable fact that the landscape of early childhood has changed dramatically since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.