Stim Theory and Stim-Friendly Pedagogy
Dr. Phillip Martinez Cortes,
Arizona State University
Approaches to Stimming:
Example of a clinical definition that indirectly discusses stimming:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5): “Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities” that can include “stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor stereotypies, lining up toys or flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases)” (50).
Affirmative, non-pathological treatment of stimming:
Stimming also provides the autist an inassimilable, individualized practice through which they can in fact re-organize the information of their environment into communicative, symbolic action.
Brief Overview of Presentation
Some Theories on Stimming
Nick Walker (Neuroqueer Heresies, 2021): “In addition to serving to regulate or integrate sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and emotional experience, stimming can also function as a way of exploring and relating to the sensory world, and as a means of accessing…a wide range of cognitive and emotional capacities” (107).
Remi Yergeau (Authoring Autism, 2018): “autistic configurations, in all of their diversity and singularity, might be harnessed schematically” and stims can act as “rhetorical schemes…of coming to knowledge through habit, compulsion, or echoing” (202, 204).
Jason Nolan and Melanie McBride (“Embodied Semiosis,” 2015): “The physical and sensory behaviour of autistic self-stimulation (i.e. ‘stimming’) is an expression of embodied autistic semiosis that communicates sensory significations otherwise pathologized within neurotypical semiotic domains” (1070).
Stimming:
Pathological > Affirmative, anti-pathological
meaningless repetition > re-organization of information
stigmatized behavior > inassimilable, alternative knowledge
Explaining their own stimming:
Remi Yergeau: “When I make hand movements, even when those movements go unnarrated in all of their indecipherable nonverbal glory, I am still a participating body. My gestures impact my persona and utterances; they hold dear even if unknowable meaning; they are present and resistantly elliptic” (Authoring Autism, 2018, pg. 173).
Mel Baggs: “Failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit. But failure to learn my language is seen as so natural that people like me are officially described as mysterious and puzzling rather than anybody admitting that it is themselves who are confused” (“In My Language,” 2007)
Stimming in the Classroom
Autistic Stims treated as Pedagogical and Learning Practices:
Echolalia
Monologue
System-Building
Echolalia
According to the DSM-V: echolalia is “repeating the last word or phrase” and is an example of a “complex verbal tic” (82).
2 Kinds of Echolalia when Analyzing Literature
Summary/Paraphrase
Intensive Close Reading
Example of Formula for Echolalic Close Reading
Textual Analysis Steps (Version One):
When analyzing a passage you should do these things:
A. Immediately after quoting a passage, focus on 2-3 specific words/concrete details/patterns and explain how these details work, as though you are explaining how the component mechanisms and gears of a system works. Explain how these details work for, say, 3-4 sentences.
B. Then, spend 2-3 sentences concluding the significance of why your earlier explanation is relevant to understanding your thesis.
Textual Analysis formula (Version Two):
A formula you can try following is:
>The words a and b from this quoted passage imply c. The implication of c suggests ___(your interpretative claim)___. The meanings of a and b also demonstrate ___(your interpretative claim)____.
Monologue and System-Building
Monologue (or extensive, voluble speech)
System-Building (which includes the organization of information into orderly pieces of knowledge such as catalogues, encyclopedic entries, taxonomies, and inventories)
Monologue and System-Building
Monologue: Recitation of Background Sheets
System-Building: Background Sheets and Inventory of Shared Google Document
Conclusions
Stims:
Repeatable, reorganization of knowledge
Inassimilable
Spaces of Inclusion
Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013.
Baggs, Mel. “In my language.” 2007. 5 July 2024. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc.
Mitchell, Kristin. “Stimming and Autism: Are They Related?” WebMD, 2024. 2 July 2024.
Nolan, Jason and Melanie McBride. “Embodied Semiosis: Autistic ‘Stimming’ as Sensory Praxis.” International Handbook of Semiosis. Ed. Peter Pericles Trifonas. Netherlands: Springer, 2015. 1069-1078.
Rodas, Julia Miele. Autistic Disturbances : Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. University of Michigan Press, 2018.
Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Fort Worth, TX: Autonomous Press, 2021.
Yergeau, Remi. Authoring Autism : On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke University Press, 2018.
Yergeau, Remi. “I Stim, Therefore I Am.” 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2QSvPIDXwA&t=16s. 5 July 2024.