Contemplating teacher talk through a critical autism studies lens

Abstract

This chapter begins with a digital story made as part of the Re•Storying Autism in Education project by Nick Hodge. These short first-person multimedia videos about autism and education offer new ways of knowing, and trouble, disrupt and reform the dominant cultural scripts of autism such as autism as biomedical disorder, brain difference and insidious child stealer (Douglas et al. 2019). Hodge’s digital story invites us to reflect on and problematise everyday examples of teacher talk. Critical Autism Studies is employed as a methodological tool to analyse how in classroom chatter the apparently mundane and ordinary in fact conceal and reproduce dominant disabling discourses that deny autistic children personhood and position them as other and problem. Statements, such as ‘careful she’s a biter’ and ‘he’s one of our special needs’ swirl around children and then land and may be absorbed. The danger is they may become internalised as the structures of who children come to think they are and form the boundaries of who they may come to be. We asked for examples of teacher talk that autistic people have experienced and which they feel harmed their sense of who they are on Twitter. We employ CAS to identify the disabling structures that permit and sustain such teacher-talk. In doing so, we extend its reach beyond the theoretical to propose new ways of talking to and about children in class that validate and empower rather than reduce and deny. Keywords: Critical Autism Studies, multimedia storytelling, teacher-talk