By her own admission being autistic does not limit you, it just requires ‘the right circumstances’ – but it can be hard to find those environments if you don’t have a diagnosis and know about your condition. In my own experience, diagnosis has not limited me, it freed me. Ableism, in its many forms, is what limits me.

Source: Given Greta Thunberg’s Bullying, Is It Any Wonder So Few Women Share That They’re Autistic? | HuffPost UK

It turns out that allistic observers are at least as bad at reading autistic expressions as vice versa. Milton labels this the ‘double empathy problem’: any failure of autistic people to empathise effectively with the rest of the population is magnified by the routine failure of allistic people to understand what autistic people are actually feeling.

Source: Autism and Empathy – Oolong – Medium

Students’, educators’ and regulators’ critical resistance to edtech is likely to grow as we learn more about the ways it works, how it treats data, and in come cases how dysfunctional it is.

Increasingly, journalists are on to edtech, and are feeding into the growing sense of frustration and resistance by demonstrating these technologies don’t even fairly do what they claim to do.

So, there is a rising wave of edtech resistance from a wide variety of perspectives—from activists to students, journalists to regulators, and legal experts to ethicists.

Source: EdTech Resistance | code acts in education

Without a grounding in theory or knowledge or ethics or care, the Silicon Valley machine rewards stupid and dangerous ideas, propping up and propped up by ridiculous, self-serving men. There won’t ever be a reckoning if we’re nice.

Source: HEWN, No. 321

And quite commonly on Twitter, I’ve seen people call ABA “dog training for children.”

When I see that, I tend to go on Twitter rants in reply to it, because from everything I have read and seen of ABA, it is NOT “dog training” for children.

…I would never treat a dog that way.

Echolalic speech helps autistics, many of whom process language in a different part of the brain, to process the language they have heard and understand the meaning of the words.

Yet, ABA seeks to “extinguish” these things.

A good dog trainer doesn’t extinguish behaviours which improve the dog’s mental health and happiness. But an ABA practitioner may not think twice before doing this to a human child.

Dog trainers understand that dogs need to chew and bark and dig, but ABA therapists don’t understand that autistic children need to repeat words and sentences, flap their hands, and sit quietly rocking in a corner when things get too much. 

Source: Is ABA Really “Dog Training for Children”?  A Professional Dog Trainer Weighs In. | The Aspergian | A Neurodivergent Collective

Via: Is ABA Really “Dog Training for Children”?  A… – neurowonderful

See also: Persuasion and Operant Conditioning: The Influence of B. F. Skinner in Big Tech and Ed-tech

a behavior – even if it’s harmful – is never the problem to be solved. The problem we should solve is the problem the person experiences, which is the cause of the behavior.

Source: Summary – gentle teaching

Via:

The plutocrat-backed neoliberal technocracy is being manufactured at universities around the world, and its corrupt ideology is being laundered by publications and think tanks funded by these same, unethical billionaires. And plenty of folks look the other way because they’re more committed to being in networks with the “innovators” than they are in building a world that is caring and just.

Source: HEWN, No. 320