poems of the neurodivergent experience

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However, it would be unfair and perhaps enraging to suggest this is an easy utopia to create. It’s easy to worry that permitting – or rather, encouraging – children to self-advocate and offering support on a universal-design basis without clinical diagnosis would make your classroom into a free-for-all. Crucially though, we just don’t know much about what a classroom that really delivered on the principles of the neurodiversity paradigm would look like. How much of the difficult behaviour teachers struggle with in class right now is motivated by children trying to hide their difficulties, or push adults away because they don’t feel they can be trusted? Opal Whiteley (1976). The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart. Adapted by Jane Boulton. Tioga Publishing Company. Recommended reading and listening from other neurodivergent writers and artists When the arthritis in my hands got worse a few years ago, I stopped being able to write by hand. When it suddenly got a lot worse last year, I worried about even being able to type. People helpfully told me about voice recognition software. “But the point of writing is so I don’t have to talk,” I told them.

Erin Ekins (2021). Queerly Autistic: The Ultimate Guide For LGBTQIA+ Teens On The Spectrum. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. About: Jon is both a contemporary Artist and researcher. He works in many differing media including sound, drawing and performance, often referencing his autism, synaesthesia and dyslexia, all interwoven with history, science, time and his past experiences. Below, I’ve included the references and reading from this post, and have extended this to include all the recommended reading from this series: from the interview with Karl Knights ( here) and the mini-interviews with six neurodivergent writers and artists ( here). This is compiled with the hope that it will be a useful resource for people wanting to read and hear more work by autistic and neurodivergent writers and artists. In fact, I never thought you could write poetry about these things at all – besides, I was too busy and self-conscious to write poetry as a teenager, struggling every day to just get through school and survive. Surveys have found that the majority of autistic people now prefer the identity-first term ‘(is) autistic’, while the general public, and family and friends tend to prefer the person-first term ‘with/has autism’ (Rhiannon, 2020, p23), Rhiannon prefers ‘(is) autistic’, and explains that because autistic people are ‘born wired differently’, ‘there is no separation of the person and the autism’ (2020, p25). So I will use the term ‘autistic writers’ and even ‘autistic writing’ to reflect this identity throughout the post. Strengths and differences in neurodivergence

If the neurodiversity paradigm is not well understood, there is a risk that this transformative idea not only fails to meet its full potential, but that active harm ensues. Mis-appropriating the acceptance agenda of the neurodiversity movement could mean denial of support to those who need it – in a similar way that insistence on a ‘colourblind’ approach prevents anti-racist actions. Tokenistic adoption of neurodiversity language without follow-through in terms of ideas neuters the paradigm and prevents real change. A film combining poetry and illustration exploring the disabled experience of being in the world during the Covid-19 pandemic. Focused on the act of going to the supermarket, AISLE will open up a discussion about the ways in which disabled people have been forced to relinquish their independence during this time. In my nature writing, in particular, I really feel like my experience of the world is shaped by sensitivity to noise and light. Leaning into this lets me write about my relationship with nature in a unique way that has fostered and deepened my love for it.

Chris Martin, a neurodivergent poet and editor-at-large for Multiverse, developed the idea for the series in his role as a teacher-writer with Unrestricted Interest (UI), an organization he cofounded seven years ago to help neurodivergent learners, particularly autistic students, express themselves through writing. Martin, whose book about his pioneering educational work, May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future (HarperOne), comes out in August, says UI expanded his capabilities as a listener and better illuminated “the reciprocity between poetry and neurodivergence.” I don’t really like seeing “autistic” and “inspire” in the same sentence. I’m inspired by good art whoever does it but I don’t want to see autistic people as “inspirational”. But. It’s very hard, particularly as an adult, to have permission to do this. From an early age I must have learned to mask my stims, which is to say, mask my autistic difference in daily life. So in that sense, my impulse to move and make performances was perhaps driven by a desire to unmask. An instinct that art might be a socially acceptable place for stimming my heart out, and exploring my neurodiverse way of being in a safe space. Beyond these basic facts, neurodiversity has socio-political implications for education. These implications have largely been described by autistic scholars but are now embraced far more widely. The neurodiversity paradigm has three main components – all consequences of the basic fact of neurodiversity as applied to society.

I started to judge myself for these responses and wished that I was different or more ‘normal’. But through writing poetry, I’ve learned to – at times – love how finely tuned and sensitive my senses are. Aitken, D. & Wang, L. (2021). Learning Difficulties and Exclusion from School. Salvesen Mindroom Research Briefing,number1.