Reflections on ‘On the spectrum within art and design academic practice’
Now this one really spoke to me! As an autistic myself I felt immediately drawn to this text, especially the somewhat abstract accompanying graphs and visuals. The whole text reminded me of a camp joke my friends and I would make growing up, if somebody mentioned they were diagnosed with the now antiquated term ‘Aspergers’ we would retort ‘what? Handsome but autistic?’ as a reference toward the Nazi Dr and self-proclaimed ‘Positive Eugenisist’ Hans Asperger, who differentiated Aspergers and autistic individuals based on their perceived intelligence and looks.
My time teaching autistic students has frankly been a breeze, minus perhaps one, generally autistic students are engaged and keen to learn, especially once you break through to them by letting them discuss a favorite topic of theirs with you. I find reptiles are an especially potent icebreaker amongst us afflicted. However, the text didn’t explore the relationship with ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) and autism, which if you’re the unfortunate teacher, is an especially daunting venture.
One student of mine exhibited classic traits of ODD, he was extremely dominant in our social interactions and literally HAD to be correct, along with the natural desire to oppose any instructions given. This made teaching him, at times, a headache. The reality of this situation is you will not find any success in any conventional methods, the only path that bore any fruit in my case was self-depreciation. If I held steady and questioned my own logic in front of him, he’d have to jump in to correct me, which if placed perfectly would result in him relaying the instructions to me, correcting them,and then doing the required task ‘to show me how silly I had been’.
He ended up being a favorite student of mine, once I stopped taking it all so personally.
TLDR: Try talking around reptiles, it has an exceedingly high success rate! to hammer the message home here is a picture of my pet Diggy Doug the Ackie Monitor
Leave a Reply