A HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO INCLUSIVE EDUCATION: LESSONS FROM SCI-FI FOR AUTISTIC LEARNING

RYAN B COLLIS, OCT, BA, BSCH, BED, BSCH, MA

PHD CANDIDATE, YORK UNIVERSITY

0000-0001-6144-2345

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

HTTPS://WWW.PATREON.COM/POSTS/POLITICALLY-47007907

EXISTING ISSUES IN AUTISM RESEARCH

BREAKING NEWS!

Pasciuto, F., Cava, A., & Falzone, A. (2023). The Potential Use of Sex Robots in Adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders: A Theoretical Framework. Brain Sciences, 13(6), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13060954

Sex Robots!

COMMUNITY BASED PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH

• The counter to these concerns are methodologies that use community based participatory research (CBRP) or similar participant-led research.
• CBPR involves working with participants as partners, and improves the quality of the research, advances social justice, treats the lived experience of members of the community as expertise, makes research results more accessible to the community, and avoids unwanted stereotypes and interventions (Dettmering & Hodzic, 2024).
• While teachers and caregivers undoubtedly have insight into their interactions with autistic students, it is ultimately the students who are the experts on what it means to be an autistic student (Callon, 1986; Collins & Evans, 2002).

PROBLEMS WITH EXISTING METHODS

• It is necessary to reassess standard methods of data collection when using them with a population they were not designed for.
• Due to the different styles of communication preferred by autistic people, many traditional methods of information gathering are less effective.
• For example, open-ended questions and ranking type questions are often stressful for autistics to navigate, as are questions with any ambiguity.
• The intent, like Gaver et al. (1999), is to lead a discussion toward unexpected ideas without dominating it.

ENTER WORLD BUILDING

• The use of world building and speculative storytelling provides space to “navigate and catalyze change” (Tomin & Collis, 2024, p. 262) by giving participants the “imaginative space to play with possible radical changes in their future-oriented storywork while simultaneously basing their fictional projections on issues concerning them in the present” (Tomin & Collis, 2024, p. 255).

WHAT IF? / IF ONLY? / IF THIS GOES ON … ?

• Neil Gaiman’s questions What if? / If only? / If this goes on … ? are “arguably, the very questions educators all ponder, fret over, contemplate, and debate in relation to the present educational contexts in which we work, let alone a world of education yet to come” (Conrad & Wiebe 2022 p. 5).
• These questions are the starting prompts for speculative world building.

SOCIOTECHNICAL IMAGINARIES

• Fischer and Mehnert (2021) see images of the future as “part of our social reality embedded in intersubjectively shared, socially and culturally prefigured meanings” (p. 27) and link them to Jasanoff’s (2015) concept of sociotechnical imaginaries: “‘collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures’ (or of resistance against the undesirable) that are ‘animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 19).”

INTENSIFICATION, EXTRAPOLATION, AND MUTATION

• Wolf-Meyer (2019) considers “three forms of future historiography” (p. 19) as ways to expose current problems and devise future possibilities.
• Extrapolation is the transplantation of a force or institution into the future unchanged
• Intensification imagines the force or institution becoming increased or more pervasive and considering the ramifications
• Mutation alters the force or institution in unexpected or unpredictable ways and considers how people and societies react

PARTICIPANTS

• Four autistic adults were recruited for this doctoral research project:
• a 20-year-old non-speaking Indigenous male,
• a 20-year-old white female,
• a 29-year-old white male, and
• a 28-year-old white female.

METHODOLOGY

• Initial frameworks:
• Structured world building protocols of Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers (Hergenrader, 2018)
• Speculation-based framework of Fischer & Mehnert (2021),
• Fischer & Mehnert (2021) weave their framework from threads of Critical Futures Studies (CFS), Technology Assessment (TA), and Science and Technology Studies (STS), and position it as a tool that allows for the study of how future imaginaries influence both the future-present (when then becomes now) and current social realities.

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METHODOLOGY

• They began by deciding what genres they wanted to use as guides in the design of the world and chose “slice of life/coming of age” and “dystopia” as stylistic guidelines.
• The focus would be on a family or a single school, looking at individual people and their families’ lives, with the action occurring at school, home, parks, youth centers, and the Metaverse.
• The timeline of their work would focus on the period from 2050 to 2070, and they created a set of ‘historical’ events to take the world from the present of 2023 to the starting point of 2050 and the creating of the autistic nation, which might involve the annexation of PEI.

METHODOLOGY

• The metanarrative is the structured and expanded version of the story that began to coalesce in the framework stage.
• This is where the participants, on their own but with discussion and clarification via four meetings on Zoom and discussions in a discord group, created the locations, people, events, and objects that populate the world they created.
• This is done using first by populating Hergenrader’s (2018) categories of Historical Events, Governance, Economics, Social Relations, and Cultural Influences, then creating a catalogue of the important people, place, and things of this world.

METHODOLOGY

• At the conclusion of the original worldbuilding protocol, the participants had written 12,985 words.
• At the meeting where I intended to wrap-up the project, three of the participants asked if they could add fictional narratives to the world, in the style of the novel (not the movie!) World War Z (Brooks, 2006).
• This novel is written as a series of oral interviews after the zombie war that tell the story of this fictional conflict.
• This added another 7,851 words to the materials created, or a total of 65 single-spaced pages of material.

RESULTS

“Both Western and Indigenous knowledge are respected - maintaining their strong creative traditions in Orality and literature while embracing their new works in film and TV productions on streaming services and platforms. Protecting Mother Earth and the Sky Woman is of uttermost importance in ensuring the teachings are protected by the seven generations ahead of us. Both Indigenous Spirituality and non-religious stances are celebrated compared to years ago when Christianity was the dominant religion in our world. The use of Indigenous medicines like sage, cedar, sweetgrass is highly empathised for the curing of physical and mental diseases, as well as spending time in the tipi for Indigenous people while non-Indigenous people are encouraged to seek out social prescribing (sic) by encouraging them to be in immersed in the other cultures, go to social fires, and experience the natural environment around them.”

- From “Cultural Influences”

DISCUSSION

• Wolf-Meyer’s (2019) “intensification”
• The war in Ukraine draws in autistic hackers, leading to governmental fears
• This intensification of ableism, anti-autistic fears, and stereotyping of autistics as math/computer savants leads to forced testing, surveillance, and mandatory government service which ultimately leads to rebellion and the formation of a nation for autistic people and their allies.

DISCUSSION

• Social policing is used to identify dangerous threats to the “moral and economic health of the social body” to “create, incite, and instill moral panics over the invisibility of monsters — the unnatural, the immoral, the evil — amongst us” to deflect “attention from the powerful to the marginalized as the social source of human pain and suffering” (Rimke 2010 p. 5).
• The participants’ world reflects that, creating moral panic over the invisible threat hidden among the populace. There “the precondition for inclusion … in mainstream society requires their assimilation (via special education, rehabilitation, and assistive technology) or their complete annihilation (euthanasia, abortion of disabled fetuses)” (Erevelles, 2011, p. 33).

DISCUSSION

• The power of this methodology is in how the participants are empowered to envision intensified futures to address how present society makes them feel, alienates them, makes them feel fearful, etc.
• By abstracting their critiques of the education system, rather than using interviews or Likert Scales, this approach generates more thick description of their experiences and how they might have imagined things could have been.

CONCLUSION

• There are several advantages to using worldbuilding as a tool to learn from my participants. In addition to those described above, the process of building a world creates ‘thick descriptions’ of the future that discuss desirability and helps participants to reflect on existing assumptions (Fischer & Mehnert, 2021). The created world is a cultural artefact that reflects the ethnographic lens of its creators, allowing for “interpretation, discussion and reflection” as well as analysis as both “a participatory endeavor of self-reflection of those who took part in the worldbuilding as well as a more scholarly undertaking of analyzing the participants’ material” (Fischer & Mehnert, 2021, p. 31).

CONCLUSION

• Learning from autistic people is a more ethical, effective, and responsible way to conduct research.
• While classroom observations and interviews might provide more timely insights into the system, the limitations of a doctoral dissertation, the difficulty in receiving ethics approval from the university and the school board, COVID-19, and obtaining informed consent from minors made that impractical for this project.

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CONCLUSION

• Instead, autistic adults were asked to create a future where they felt autistic people could live their authentic lives – and they wrote of a world post-autistic revolt where the autistic population had created their own break-away nation-state. That alone is a powerful comment on how they feel the world sees them.

THANK YOU

Ryan B Collis, OCT, BA, BScH, BEd, BScH, MA

PhD Candidate, York University

0000-0001-6144-2345

https://www.mrcollis.ca/research

rbcollis@yorku.ca