- Temple Grandin, The Way I See It
March 13-19 was ‘Neurodiversity Celebration Week’. We were proud to join in the celebrations at my school.
There is an analogy I have often heard, which asks you to imagine a bike race in which your bike, uniquely, has a flat tyre. Nevertheless, you are expected to achieve roughly the same pace as the other riders and to cross the finish line at approximately the same time. In the end, someone will of course cross first and there will be the top ten finishers as usual, but unless you cross the line at least among the main pack, you are singled out. Though you have worked significantly harder than anyone else, you are told that you simply didn't try hard enough, you didn't prepare well enough, you didn't listen with proper attention to the advice you were given. It is used to describe how it feels to be neurodiverse in one of the many ways for which that word is now an umbrella term – ADHD for example, or Autism Spectrum or Dyslexia among the most common. The rules of the race, just like the nature of school, of work and of life are not designed around these kinds of differences and therefore few allowances are made for people who find it hard to fall into line with one way – the accepted way – of thinking and working.
It is not a bad analogy I suppose in many ways and it illustrates an important point. However, it does contain some flaws that the work of Neurodiversity Celebration Week has tried hard to illustrate. A flat tyre, for example, is a visible issue–a deficit–and easily resolved through one simple, one-off intervention; that is not what neurodiversity is like. To understand how it feels to have a different way of looking at things and a different set of skills, like visual rather than verbal thinking, one must imagine the bike in the analogy having not a flaw, but rather an array of additional features that are not immediately apparent and not automatically valued. For example, the rider might have a different, creative way of getting to the finish line but the rules say no: the race must be run along this standardised route, using this equipment only and following these rules, no other methods are allowed. The measurement of your success will be against these criteria only and if you venture outside of them, you are not being successful and you don't get that winning feeling. Ever. Neurodiversity Celebration Week has been an effort, which I hope to some degree happens every week in good schools, to highlight to students, teachers and parents that neurodiversity is far more often a strength to be celebrated than it is an inadequacy to be fixed.
One fairly potent myth about schools, and I still hear it from time to time in my own office, is the idea that when parents are advised in Primary Schools to have their child assessed by an Educational Psychologist, that schools will use the results as "an excuse to kick my child out". I could dispel the rumour in one way by telling you that it is sometimes true that Primary Schools might need to advise parents that theirs is not best equipped for their child and indeed sometimes that happens when the recommendations provided by an Educational Psychologist are too specialised for a specific school to provide. However, what is also true is that there are, right now, many many students succeeding beautifully in Middle and High Schools who were assessed by an Educational Psychologist when they were in Primary. The old slogan "labels disable" comes up in conversations as well (though thankfully less and less these days); what we know as teachers is that the child is still the same child after their assessment that they were before it; a "label" or diagnosis does not define the child for us, it simply helps us to prioritise things for them. As teachers, we are very much like the GP who has a lot of general knowledge and heaps of strategies and who sometimes needs to refer to a specialist for more specific, immediately useful advice.
If you haven’t already seen it, take some time to listen to Temple Grandin because the term "neurodivergent", used now as a general term in this arena, began with autism spectrum work. This TED Talk on how the world needs all kinds of minds is one I would recommend.
In the end, neurodiversity is about a spectrum but the spectrum doesn’t proceed to the right from a notional zero on the left. There is no defined “norm” but, if there were, it would be in the middle (and would represent zero people I should add); different ways of thinking and seeing and learning go in both directions from there. In many ways neurodiversity (at least with a lower case ‘n’) is everyone.
Have a great week ahead,
Brian (ADHD and proud!)
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