Facilities Planning for Neurological Pluralism
Just stopping by to share some thoughts related to facilities, since it's on the news blog.
- Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism
- A Triptych of Triptychs for Designing for Neurological Pluralism
- “Timeless Learning” on the Biodiversity and Terroir of Learning
I'm a fan of what Albemarle County Schools is doing. Their book, Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, describes how they rebuilt for multi-age flow.
Designing to maximize flow has impacted our work to modernize district facilities. It's essential to moving teachers away from the dominant teaching wall that defines American‐ built schools. We see flow happening in a newly built multiage elementary space designed as a home of opportunity for 120 K–5 learners and six teachers.
Source: Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
They started a new tech school, Albemarle Tech, very much in line with what I advocate from my neurodiversity, social model of disability, design for real life, and humane tech perspectives. It's aligned with how tech workers work. Hang out with us sometime to see how we flow: sprawled across couches and floors, using backchannels, forming and dissolving breakout sessions, diving into quiet rooms to do some deep zone work, bringing in people from around the world via text, audio, and video as we tap expertise outside the room.
I'm Twitter mutuals with the three authors of Timeless Learning, I'm happy to say. They're really cool. I learned a lot from their blog posts, books, talks, and Twitter discussions. They even connected me with their student disability advisory board—student-led and #OwnVoices. They pay attention to the disability and #ActuallyAutistic communities, which means a lot to us. They even use identity first language, which gets you enormous good will among autistic and disabled people. I lead off my piece on IFL with a quote from their innovation and tech director.
The first DSISDChat was about acknowledging the elephants in the room. Albemarle acknowledged the elephants and did something about them.
I also like Alexandra Lange’s The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids.
I discovered it via Audrey Watters (who's right every time she warns about behaviorism and ed-tech).
Accessibility isn't optional. The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by a diagnosis. Albemarle seems to have actualized contemporary progressive education compatible with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. Steal what they’re doing.
Finally, get autistic people and wheelchair users to flow patrol facilities. Hire autistic and disabled people. We live in and design for the edges. We’re the canaries.
Autists are like the canary in the coal mine of mainstream society. We are amongst the first who are affected by pathologically hyper-competitive cultures.
Source: What society can learn from autistic culture | Autistic Collaboration
Autistic man Freestone Wilson suggested in the 1990s that autistic people are functioning as the “miners’ canaries” of civilisation. When the air in the mine is poisoned we do not prevent canaries being born in case they suffer from the poison and upset us: we clean the air or close the mine.