What is your definition of neurodiversity?
Does “neurodiversity-affirming environment” mean that these classes+environments are specifically for neurodivergent people?
If we are all engaged in a an activity in a class–a musical activity, for example–shouldn’t everyone be expected to be doing the same thing at the same time? If my child’s attention is wandering, shouldn’t it be continually brought back to the activity of the group?
Why advertise your activities as “neurodiversity-affirming?” Why not just meet people’s needs without making a big deal about it?
What is your definition of neurodiversity?
We use the term neurodiversity as an acknowledgement that everyone has unique sensory, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional characteristics that are worthy of recognition and accommodation, and that are part of the beautiful variety of human experience and expression.
Does “neurodiversity-affirming environment” mean that these classes+environments are specifically for neurodivergent people?
No. These classes are appropriate for everyone. The frame “neurodiversity” is a way of moving away from a stigmatizing binary–”neurotypical” and “neurodivergent,”–toward a recognition of a whole and beautiful range of sensory, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional experiences and dispositions. It’s when we recognize the needs of a neurodiverse community–when we allow for the fact that each person has a unique combination of sensory experiences, cognitive characteristics, behavioral tendencies, and emotional processing styles–and adjust our activities in an inclusive way, everyone’s experience is better. Embracing individual experience makes our collective experience broader and more nuanced.
If we are all engaged in a an activity in a class–a musical activity, for example–shouldn’t everyone be expected to be doing the same thing at the same time? If my child’s attention is wandering, shouldn’t it be continually brought back to the activity of the group?
Conventional wisdom would seem to suggest that we should have certain expectations within a learning environment such as a music class–that we should all be doing the same thing at the same time. Music is a good field of activity to illustrate the value of allowing for different attentional dispositions to “do their thing.” If we are gathered in a cooperative group, and most of us are singing and moving in a certain way, there is a certain character to our expression, and there can be a certain beauty in having everyone cooperate in that certain limited way.
But if we broaden our view to include the wonderful variety of human musical expression, and acknowledge the importance of “play,” (or creative experimentation, as it might be called in the adult realm), we can see how allowing for attentional wandering can have beautiful outcomes. If we think of the wonderful range of tones an timbres available to an orchestra, for example, we might see how someone banging on a wall or a piece of furniture might create a novel sound that enhances the expressive range of the group of singer-movers. We might see that a certain kind of movement that might seem out-of-place might be considered role-play, adding a theatrical element to the expression happening in the room.
We might recognize behaviors such as collecting and organizing objects as being another way of interacting with patterns in a space–while some are interacting with temporal patterns with tonal characteristics, some might recognize visual or spatial patterns that correspond to the sound patterns they are experiencing–have you ever heard the poignant aphorism “I call architecture frozen music?”
So, in a certain type of inclusive environment, all of these dispositions and expressive styles might be recognized, affirmed, nurtured, and allowed to blossom, right before our eyes. We can begin to recognize that, while there is a certain beauty in conformity and limited field of expression, there is also an opportunity to access a whole variety of ranges of expression, and in doing so, we recognize and affirm the people expressing themselves in unique ways.
Why advertise your activities as “neurodiversity-affirming?” Why not just meet people’s needs without making a big deal about it?
This is a great question, worthy of a nuanced answer. As we learn more about human variation, we find that ideas and attitudes once widely-accepted don’t allow for inclusion of the wide variety of human characteristics. For example, it was once widely believed that left-handedness was an aberration, and that learning environments should be organized around discouraging people from a young age from allowing their left hand to become dominant. We now recognize that left-handedness is just a natural variation that is expressed within a certain percentage of the population. People’s quality of life is greatly enhanced when they are allowed to function in the way that their brain and nervous system is naturally organized.
It is becoming clearer with time that traits characterized as “disorders” of “syndromes” are actually part of a natural range of human variation, and that these characterizations are culturally-specific rather than scientifically sound. Isn’t it ironic that a culture that so highly values adherence to rigid time structures such as the work week or the academic schedule would characterize a preference for routine as part of a disordered state? Isn’t it odd that a highly mechanized society, with functional roles that rely on strict repetition for efficiency and consistency of output, would stigmatize an individuals’s repetitive behaviors and regulation strategies?
In a time when the activities of our cooperative society threaten the very environment that we exist within, why is it considered aberrant to feel anxiety, rather than an expression of awareness and wisdom? And in such a society, why isn’t refusal to cooperate or engage seen as another expression of wisdom? And in a culture that supposedly values authenticity, why is it that there are such strict codes of social, cognitive, and emotional behaviors that are considered as within a normal range for healthy person?
These types of questions have always been part of the conversation within philosophy and folklore, and, luckily, they are becoming part of the conversation in the scientific and therapeutic communities as well. Unfortunately, we are also living in a time when people in positions of power in the government are using highly stigmatizing language and attitudes and putting forward an agenda that makes it unsafe for many people to simply be who they are. Calls for a “national autism registry,” and saying that autism is caused by vaccines or chemicals in the water and that it can be cured are clearly harmful, especially when one recognizes that people with “autistic” traits have been around throughout human history, and in many cases have contributed greatly to the beauty of human expression in almost every field of human endeavor.
And the “attentional disengagement” predispositions, such as ADHD and executive function disorder, are starting to be recognized as highly adaptive and successful strategies in certain contexts: sometimes disengaging and shifting focus is exactly what is needed to meet the demands of a rapidly-changing situation, and recognizing this takes away the some of the stigma that can be applied to people with these characteristics. What is seen as a lack of attention can be recognized as a shift to a different field of awareness. What is thought of as a disorder or a deficit in certain environments can be seen to be a strength and an asset in others.
In this light, we can begin to abandon certain questions: “How does one get this person to conform to certain cultural expectations?” or “How do I make this person more productive within certain highly-structured environments?” We can begin to ask more relevant questions: “What is this person experiencing?” “What value is there in recognizing this person’s experience?” “How does recognizing this person’s experience broaden my own?” “What environments does a person with these characteristics thrive in, if not in the highly-structured environments that we are acculturated to as a society?”
Recognizing the uniqueness and the value of every person’s experience broadens our understanding of our world, if we allow ourselves the space to see the world for a moment through another person’s eyes. So, again, recognizing and accommodating the rich variety of human expression and characteristics makes everyone’s experience in an environment better. So, why not advertise the fact?