Neurodivergent students bring varied strengths, needs, and ways of thinking to our classrooms. In this episode, Sarah Silverman joins us to discuss teaching strategies that reduce access friction, increase tolerance for error, and create more inclusive learning experiences for everyone.
Sarah is an educator and faculty developer focusing on neurodiversity, disability studies, and inclusive instructional design. She currently teaches disability studies at multiple institutions. Sarah is the author of Classroom Mindscapes: An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators, which will be released later this month as part of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series at the University of Oklahoma Press.
Show Notes
- Silverman, Sarah (2026). Classroom Mindscapes: An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators. Oklahoma University Press
- Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press Fort Worth.
- Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT)
- Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. University of Michigan Press.
- Pusateri, Jennifer L. (2026). A Practical Guide to Teaching Neurodivergent College Students. Harvard Education Press.
- Jennifer Pusateri (2026). Teaching Neurodivergent College Students. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 446. May 20
- Costa, K. (2026). An Educator’s Guide to ADHD. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Karen Costa (2026). An Educator’s Guide to ADHD. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 429.
- Autreat
Transcript
John: Neurodivergent students bring varied strengths, needs, and ways of thinking to our classrooms. In this episode, we explore teaching strategies that reduce access friction, increase tolerance for error, and create more inclusive learning experiences for everyone.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Sarah Silverman. Sarah is an educator and faculty developer focusing on neurodiversity, disability studies, and inclusive instructional design. She currently teaches disability studies at multiple institutions. Sarah is the author of Classroom Mindscapes: An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators, which will be released later this month as part of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series at the University of Oklahoma Press. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here.
John: We’re really happy to finally have you on. I follow you on LinkedIn and other places, so it’s nice to actually have a chance to talk to you.
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.
John: Today’s teas are:… Sarah, are you drinking any tea with us?
Sarah: So, I’m not literally drinking tea at the moment, but I’ve had multiple cups of tea over the past 12 to 18 hours or something. I have to admit I’m more of a coffee person, but I would say it’s more like a 60-40 split of like total consumption towards coffee.
Rebecca: All right. Well, I like that you play on both teams.
Sarah: Yeah, I do play on both teams, [LAUGHTER] and I have to give a shout out to my mom and grandmother who are both big tea fans as well. So if they happen to listen to this, that’s where I got my love of tea from.
Rebecca: Wonderful. My grandmother was a big tea drinker as well.
John: Mine too. Whenever my brother and I were ill as a child, we always had tea we were supposed to drink to cure is somehow… and eventually it worked.
Sarah: Yeah, I think there’s something to that. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Tea is actually one of the very few things that I don’t like when I’m sick. I only like it when I’m very well. I have English breakfast today, John.
John: And I have ginger peach green tea today.
Rebecca: Nice. So, Sarah, we invited you here today to discuss Classroom Mindscapes. Can you talk a little bit about how this book project came about?
Sarah: Sure. So this book project came about, I would say, because of a number of intersecting and kind of colliding interests of mine. So, it helps to say a little bit about my own background, which is that I got my PhD in a STEM field, in biology. It was actually the field of entomology, which is the study of insects. So that’s a fun fact about me. But while I was doing that, I worked at the Teaching and Learning Center that was on the UC Davis campus, the Center for Educational Effectiveness, and I eventually went into that field and worked at a couple of similar places after that. So I became someone who focuses on teaching and faculty development, and I also had another area of interest, which is disability studies, which I was teaching in and researching, and also connecting to some of my own life experiences with neurodiversity. And one of the things I started noticing a couple of years ago is that there’s a huge amount of interest in the subject of neurodiversity in higher education, but not a lot of specific knowledge of the history and context. And I had taught mostly undergrad classes for a while, one part of them was exploring the history of neurodiversity and what this concept meant, and where it came from, and what its relevance is in the larger disability conversation. And I began to think to myself, I think that college teachers would really get a lot out of having a concise overview of this and having some ideas about how they might apply this knowledge to their classroom teaching. So yeah, I think that’s a little bit about how it came about.
Rebecca: That’s a great story
John: For faculty who are somewhat new to this topic, because as you mentioned, there hasn’t been much discussion of this in higher ed until really recently. How do you define neurodiversity, and how does it differ from the concept of neurodivergence?
Sarah: Yes, sure. I’d be happy to talk about that. I guess this is a good opening note for the whole conversation. Since this is kind of an area of special interest of mine, I have a number of details in the book that people might be interested in, and I’ll give good overviews during our conversation, and if you come away from this saying I really want to know more about that, then yeah, definitely check out my book. It has even more detail, more references, different things like that. So anyway, neurodiversity, we could say, describes the fact of cognitive variation in the human population. So it’s a form of variation, and we have many types of diversity or variation in the human population. So all three of us certainly vary in height. We probably have many other things that we vary in, and similarly, cognition varies between all people. And I’ll go with neurodivergence next. Neurodivergence is a concept that came out of the autistic self-advocacy community, and then became broader, which describes people whose cognition does not align with societal norms or what’s typically understood as normal cognition in society, and sometimes also normal behavior or communication in society. So, someone who’s neurodivergent may have one or more traits that, in a given context, distinguish them as different from the majority of people. And like I said, this is a concept that originally came out of autistic people’s self-advocacy, and neurodiversity also came out of that movement. One thing that people often ask me is: “Is neurodiversity real such a neutral idea?” like okay, you know, humans all vary in cognition, or is it more of a positive spin on this idea? And I think both are true in a sense. It can be used in a very neutral way, just the fact of variation. But the context it comes out of is specific enough to give it a slightly different valence, which is that when autistic people first came together in these communities, primarily online in the mid- to late-1990s, autism was one of the most highly stigmatized diagnoses out there, and this community was searching for a way to think about themselves, to talk about themselves that was not entirely based on deficit and considered more strongly what strengths autistic people may have, how they could lead good lives with appropriate support and acceptance, and so neurodiversity did in some ways emerge in that context as a positive spin on human cognitive variation.
Rebecca: So that seems like a nice segue into one of the things that we often hear are some misconceptions about neurodivergent students. Can you talk a little bit about what some of those misconceptions might be?
Sarah: Sure. Yeah, I can tell you some of the ones that I think are the most common or the most notable. First of all, you may have noticed in my previous definition that I didn’t say neurodivergent people have one of these five diagnosed disabilities, or something like that. So neurodivergence is a concept that exists somewhat in contrast to, but at least alongside, the medical diagnostic model of cognitive variation. So it’s true that a lot of faculty may meet, or teach, or work with students who have a specific diagnosis, such as autism or ADHD, learning disability, or dyslexia, but not all neurodivergent students are going to have such a diagnosis, or even be like theoretically eligible for one if they were to pursue a process. So neurodivergence is much more of a kind of a sociological contextual concept than a medical one, and so it is entirely possible that faculty may work with neurodivergent students who don’t really have any sort of medical diagnosis, and because of that, they also may not be always eligible or interested in academic accommodation. So I think that’s a very common understanding or maybe misunderstanding that everyone who’s neurodivergent will have or will require accommodation. I think alongside that, it’s a pretty common misconception that all neurodivergent students have academic difficulties. That’s not absolutely true. It may be more true for some groups of neurodivergent students than others, but a lot of people who are neurodivergent who are in college now, they may have either developed really good coping mechanisms with great support during their K to 12 journey, their neurodivergence also may not manifest in ways that make the academic environment difficult for them. It may be that they are able to exist well within an academic environment, maybe they experience more social challenges or barriers than academic ones. So not all neurodivergent students require accommodations or will struggle academically. Another really common assumption that sometimes people make is that neurodivergent students either cannot work in groups or won’t be very successful in groups, and I think that sometimes becomes a bit of a self-reinforcing loop where faculty will kind of make this assumption and then not design or offer group activities in a way that is going to be inclusive of a lot of different participants, and then sometimes that results in people kind of asking, “Can I be exempted? Can I use my accommodations to not participate in this group assignment?” And so that’s one thing that I would really love to see people rethink, which is this misconception that neurodivergent students have difficulty working with other people as a general rule, and that’s kind of absolute. I think that that’s a pretty bad misconception. Lastly, I think one misconception that I hear a lot as well is that if somebody is noticeably neurodivergent, then that automatically requires some sort of response from the instructor. One of the most common questions I’ll get in my consulting or faculty development work is, “There’s somebody in my class who I think might be neurodivergent. What should I do?” And my first response is usually, “You certainly don’t have to do anything. As far as I understand, everybody who is admitted to your institution is welcome to take your class.” But if what you’re really saying is, “I’m not having success interacting or communicating with a student in my class,” or “I can see that they’re struggling with something,” or that they’re not getting as much out of interactions with their peers as I hope they would. Well, then, yeah, we can work through that. We can come up with some ideas for how to speak to the student and how to find out what they do need. But yeah, it’s not in any way [LAUGHTER] something that needs to be responded to just because you’ve noticed that somebody might be neurodivergent in your class. Those are a couple that have come up a lot in my work.
Rebecca: That’s a really good summary, Sarah. Thanks.
John: And you noted that not all neurodivergent students need accommodations, but some would benefit from those. But they don’t always request accommodations. Why might some neurodivergent students not seek accommodations? And for those students, how might faculty invite them to relay information so that we can address any needs that they have.
Sarah: So I guess I’ll say that first of all, accommodations are a very important tool in many circumstances. They’re obviously legally required in cases where they’re where students are eligible for them, but there’s a lot of areas… I wrote about a couple in my book… that I’ll just summarize quickly. So one reason may be that a person just fears some sort of adverse judgment because of the stigma of their disability. For example, maybe a student’s been judged negatively in the past because of their learning disability during their previous educational experiences, and they might think that was a negative thing in my life. I wonder if I can avoid that by not disclosing a disability to anybody and seeing how I do on my own, something like that. Another, and this I think is going to be increasingly common because we do know that diagnostic rates are going up for many of these diagnoses, is that the knowledge of the disability or form of neurodivergence, it might be new, or the person doesn’t have yet sufficient information about what they will need, and so they may not yet be sure how to advocate for themselves through the disability office. Though that could also apply to advocating for themselves directly to their instructor. For example, I met a student recently who told me that they are neurodivergent and that they recently went through the ADHD diagnostic process, but they just didn’t know what it meant for their academic life, [LAUGHTER] if anything. And so they said, “I know that you mentioned being interested in neurodiversity, so I thought I’d come and chat about it, but I really don’t know how it’s going to impact things. And they said, “Maybe next semester or the one after, after I have some time to process, I’ll meet with disability services to see.” That’s another. There’s also often additional burden in disclosing a disability and going through the accommodations process in terms of time. It takes a lot of time and energy. They may not feel that they want to spend their limited time [LAUGHTER] on this, as time is limited for everyone. And it also may be the case that somebody knows that they’re neurodivergent and just simply has no diagnosis or anything that would qualify them for accommodations. But even so, they may need some kind of flexibility or may benefit from some sort of flexibility. So I think that kind of covers a whole range of reasons someone might not be in contact with a disability office and request accommodations. So yeah, the second part of your question: How might an instructor signal openness to hearing about somebody’s needs or preferences? So, I can tell you a little bit about what I do, which is a little bit colored by my own personal story. Not everybody will be able to do this or will feel comfortable doing it, but I do talk a lot about my own neurodivergence when I teach, and I kind of use that as a segue to suggest to students that they are welcome to talk to me about any access needs or anything that’s going well or not well for them in the course, so I’ll often just kind of model like, “Okay, here’s a little bit about me as a teacher and a learner. Here are some of my own access needs, and just the same way I’m sharing this information with you, if you would like to share similar information with me, it doesn’t have to be about disability or neurodivergence specifically, but anything about what you need to be successful learning in the course, if there are any kind of red zones of like things that you really don’t do well with or would like to avoid.” Another really good one that I try to offer my students is I ask them to tell me how they want to be communicated with and how they want to receive feedback on their assignments, and they’re welcome to change it if that changes. But for example, instead of waiting for someone to hand me an accommodation letter that says I need all communication and feedback in writing, I ask people, “Can you tell me how you would best receive this information?” And I try to provide it to them in that way. I think if you’re not kind of willing to do any kind of self-disclosure or model the sharing of your own access needs, but you are interested in the neurodiversity of your class, it could always be something that you say like, “I’ve been learning more about neurodiversity, either like I read a book or I went to a talk, and I’m really excited about learning more about all of you. If there’s anything that you want to share about like how you’ll learn best in this class or things that I should and shouldn’t do to support you, here’s how you can do that,” and I think that that makes a lot of sense to maybe separate a little bit from the disability accommodation statement that we usually have to put on the syllabus. Just because I never want to step on the toes of the disability services folks, they often, for good reason, have their own specific language that they like to use, and I don’t want to in any way kind of like complicate what it is that they offer, but to also talk more about what I can offer as the instructor, as in like being open to hearing, being open to flexibility, being open to modeling the sharing of access needs. That’s kind of how I approach it.
Rebecca: One of the things that sometimes can be really helpful, I think, for first-year students in particular is actually just describing what the process of going to the disability services office is because it’s different from what they experienced in high school. And so, there’s often such a giant learning curve, and it’s not obvious. Many of them might actually think that their accommodations that they had in high school are just going to kind of carry on, and that somehow that’s continuing in the way that it did through high school.
Sarah: Yeah, I think a lot of college faculty are unlikely to be familiar with this big transition unless they’ve dealt with it themselves or with their kids or someone that they know. But in the K to 12 system, it’s usually the district or the school that’s responsible for identifying students with disabilities and making sure that they’re receiving appropriate services and accommodations, and the responsibility completely shifts to the student themselves in higher education. So their institution is not responsible for identifying them or determining what they need. They have to do all of that advocacy work themselves, and so, of course, certainly they may bring documentation from their high school experience to help support the process, but it’s not a straight through line, I guess you could say, from K-12 to college, and I know that’s why a lot of people who work with neurodivergent young people focus a lot on this transition to independent self advocacy at the college level because it is a pretty major transition.
John: You describe teaching in the neurodiversity paradigm as defined in your book. What distinguishes this approach from other inclusive teaching practices?
Sarah: So I describe like my approach to neurodiversity as teaching in the neurodiversity paradigm. In some ways, to specifically identify my approach as relevant to all students and instructors rather than only about neurodivergent students, and so it’s worth just talking a little bit about what the neurodiversity paradigm is, and then kind of how I apply it to teaching. So the neurodiversity paradigm is kind of like a philosophical approach to neurodiversity that was developed by Nick Walker, who wrote the book Neuroqueer Heresies which is like a pretty foundational text about neurodiversity. But in my book, you can read a paraphrase of it. The basic idea is that human cognitive variation is overall a positive thing. That doesn’t mean that every form of variation is desired or positive for an individual person, but the fact that human cognition varies quite a bit is generally a positive, and that there isn’t a single best or right type of human mind, and there isn’t a single best way to think, behave, or communicate. That’s kind of how I paraphrase it. And so, the way that I try to apply this to teaching is to ask the question: What if we really committed to this in our teaching of saying that there isn’t a single best way to think, behave, or communicate, and what would that do to a lot of our assumptions about how we design courses, how we interact with students, the behavior that we expect of students, all of that sort of thing? So when I talk about teaching in the neurodiversity paradigm, there’s two other concepts that I think are really integral. One is the idea of tolerance for error. This is actually a feature of universal design, not UDL, but the architectural version of universal design. And tolerance for error is really about any kind of design that minimizes adverse consequences for mistakes. So one of the built environment things is that you can pull the lever up or push it down to open a door, or also like when you enter a password or something, it doesn’t automatically lock you out if you type it wrong one time. And I think that this is really useful in my kind of neurodiversity paradigm idea, it’s a really useful thing to apply to the classroom as well. A lot of my experience as a student, I would say, is of a lot of misunderstandings that ended up being viewed by my professor as a not meeting learning outcomes, or even laziness, or things like that. And I think that adopting the idea of tolerance for error might help bring a little bit more humility to misunderstandings and miscommunications that often occur between students and instructors, whether the people involved are neurodivergent or not. So I have a lot of examples of how tolerance for error could work in the book, and then my last concept that I think is really useful is that of access friction, which I’ve also written a lot about in some other venues, access friction is any situation in which there’s a conflict of access needs, and I think this is really relevant to teaching in the neurodiversity paradigm because, first of all, neurodivergence is a kind of concept about how some people’s cognition differs from what the assumed norm is. Not all neurodivergent people have the exact same needs or strengths or challenges, and far from it. Even within a group of all neurodivergent people, there’s probably going to be a conflict of needs that emerges in some way. I think a really common one that I see in the teaching environment is I have taught a lot of autistic students who prefer written communication and are much more successful with written communication. And then I’ve had some students with learning disabilities and specifically dyslexia who struggle a lot with written communication and greatly prefer verbal communication or visual aids or other media. And so those are two neurodivergent students who have contrasting access needs or preferences, or what would be ideal for them. So I also think a lot about how access friction can occur between students and instructors. Instructors themselves often have access needs or constraints on their time or their capacity, and this can also conflict with what students sometimes need. So I say overall, if I had to summarize, all of my teaching in the neurodiversity paradigm ideas are about negotiating difference and understanding between students and students, and students and instructors, rather than viewing neurodivergent students as a group that has challenges that need to be remedied. But it’s kind of a broader picture of recognizing that people do have really different needs and understandings, and that the negotiation of those is to be expected rather than this kind of shock to the system when it has to happen.
Rebecca: One of the things that I’m thinking about as you’re describing both kind of reducing access friction and also increasing error tolerance is what are some of the common ways that folks might approach teaching or teaching strategies that folks use that might be adapted a bit to reduce that friction or to allow for more error?
Sarah: So when we talk about what we’re up to, [LAUGHTER] definitely more about my new access friction work, just as a little preview. So especially for tolerance for error, I like to think a lot about trying to avoid situations in which either format or audience or any kind of one factor can tank the grade or the achievement of the learning outcomes, and there’s no kind of recourse for that. I think that, oftentimes, that can be done with design. I really appreciate approaches like TILT, transparency in learning and teaching. So intentional ways of making sure that the expectations are communicated, or that students have opportunity to clarify them as much as is needed or as is feasible. On the other hand, I think that tolerance for error can often also be achieved on the instructor’s side after the error. I have a really good example of this. I write about it in the book. So a story was told in a kind of research article about the experiences of autistic students, that a student submitted a lab report and they had kind of tried to meet all the expectations of the instructor, but ultimately they got not such a good grade, or they got marked down or feedback in some way that they had misunderstood the audience. So the instructor wanted them to write a scientific lab report to the audience of somebody who does not know anything about the experiment and is going to get all the information they need, and apparently maybe they hadn’t communicated that as clearly to the students. This autistic student who was the subject of the discussion in the article had basically written the lab report with no background information, and when asked, the student said, “Well, I think the most obvious audience of this is my instructor, and he assigned the lab, [LAUGHTER] so he knows all of the background information, and that doesn’t need to be repeated. And in certain spaces that I’ve seen this anecdote discussed, this was viewed as a deficit in perspective taking for the student, so to kind of incorrectly understand that the lab report should be written for a general audience, and to make the mistaken assumption that the audience is the instructor. I think this is an area where tolerance for error could be applied, to kind of say the student actually did recognize an audience quite correctly, in a sense. There was an overlay of the writing instruction here that the instructor did have a different idea of what they were hoping for, but to put it very bluntly, I don’t think anyone did anything wrong. And to suggest that this is going to have a very adverse consequence on the student’s grade, I think that’s like where I would try to apply tolerance for error. It was a difference of understanding that’s reasonable, maybe difficult to have avoided in the first place, and I would want to get away from the idea that that needs to be punished in grade form in some way. And, I don’t know, there’s a number of different responses I could make. If I were the instructor, I would probably go back to the idea of teaching in the neurodiversity paradigm, to just kind of sit and ponder. That’s not how I thought about it, and that’s not how I thought I communicated it. But I do see how they interpreted it, and what could be the positives in that? What could this student be bringing to the assignment that I didn’t anticipate? What strength did they demonstrate by interpreting it in this way, if any? And how do I carry that forward? The answer might be different for every instructor, and someone also might turn around and say, “Okay, I just have to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. I really need them to write for a general audience with appropriate background information.” But what do you do with that incident? Do you say, “Okay, that person wasn’t able to take perspective,” or do you say, “What did they demonstrate in terms of their understanding of the whole assignment.”
John: So transparency in expectations is really important. But when instructors are vague, they should allow students to interpret it in a reasonable way in that case.
Sarah: Right, yeah, that’s one way of putting it. And I’ve written a little bit about this on my blog. But if you are a neurodivergent instructor, I think that the whole concept of transparency, it can be a little bit tricky because one of the base experiences I think of being neurodivergent is that people often interpret what you say in a really different way than what you’re expecting and I’m often taking extra lengths to kind of explain specifically what I mean to other people and so I have less of an expectation, I guess, as an instructor that people will understand what I’m saying or what I want the first time, and I expect a lot of clarification. And I’ve also come to realize over time that people sometimes have completely other factors or information that are affecting their understanding that I don’t have access to, and I can’t change. This is an example that I think I wrote about in the book, but it kind of demonstrates this. I had said to students in a class where they had a discussion board assignment: you don’t need to write in the formal academic style, and you don’t need to use APA citation. That’s not the point of this assignment. The point is something else, to discuss or to offer your own opinion on the readings. But then, even after I had said this a lot of times, I saw some students were still doing it. They were still writing a formal introduction sentence. They were still doing parenthetical citations in the APA reference formatting. I kept thinking about it, and I eventually asked some of them, and I was like, “But did you hear or did you remember that I said you didn’t need to do that?” And they said, “Yeah, but all of our other professors do require it. So it was hard to imagine that you were serious about this, basically.” [LAUGHTER] And that happened with another assignment as well. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I thought that through, and I said, “Well, they’re right about the fact that this institution does prioritize a certain kind of consistency about policies throughout different courses. This just happened to be one area where I didn’t do the same thing as their instructors, and maybe their prior experiences they had never had an instructor say you can choose what to do in some of these ways, and it felt like the most conservative thing to do to say, “Ah okay, I’ll just do it the way that the other instructors were doing it,” so I didn’t know that that’s how they were thinking about it. Obviously, no one was harmed in the course of this. [LAUGHTER] It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s just one illustration. I find it endlessly interesting to figure out, okay, how did you interpret that, and why? And that helps me update how I communicate in the future.
Rebecca: You provided a few different examples of what to do after something was misinterpreted or just differently interpreted. Can you talk a little bit about some of the proactive strategies instructors can do to put some structures in place that are friendly to a wide variety of audience members?
Sarah: So, if you do end up reading the book, you’ll find out that I kind of am not a big fan of saying, “Okay, well, there’s these clear strategies that are definitely going to work.” I tend to phrase things into the buckets of like an area to check. Like, here’s a certain phenomenon in the classroom where you might want to check out the design and what’s going on here a little bit more closely. And one of the models of that that I really like is the idea of a kairotic space, and Margaret Price introduced me to that term in her book, Mad at School. And chirotic is a way of saying something that is very dependent on time in a certain sense, because kairos is the like classical rhetorical concept of being at the right time, and she kind of defines kairotic spaces in the classroom as either things that are rapidly unfolding, or highly social, or high stakes, or potentially all at the same time, and I think that those types of activities are really good places to do further analysis of how they might be impacting neurodivergent students or groups that contain neurodivergent and neurotypical students. So any activity that is designed to be highly social or where the highly social element is considered a benefit of it, this may not work the same way for all students, including maybe some neurodivergent students. And it might be interesting to think about building in options for that kind of situation that is highly social. For example, if you’re imagining it will be fun for students to spontaneously meet with a group of their peers and to share about themselves, or share what they did over the weekend, or share where they come from, to kind of think about: okay, might there be a range of prompts that people can answer, might there be a range of formats in which they could answer? Could they share something in text form or not in a verbal form? Could people opt to do that in just a pair of two rather than a group of four or five? Could somebody opt to do that in a quieter space instead of in a space where everybody’s talking all at the same time. I think another area to check that’s somewhat similar is any kind of very rapidly unfolding activity where either something is timed, like there’s timers going off and cutting people off, or where people have a very limited amount of time to answer a question or do a task. The reason that I mention this in the context of neurodivergence specifically is that a lot of neurodivergent people process certain kinds of information at slower or sometimes faster speeds, depending on what it is. For example, like there’s a number of autistic people who process verbal information more slowly, and I think people with certain kinds of learning disabilities may also process some kinds of information more slowly, and so kind of building flexibility into how much time people have for something, whether they can have time at home to process the information that’s going to be needed within the class session, or transition it into a different format that works well for them. I think that’s really great, and then I think as well to consider whether some of these types of activities have to be as high stakes as you originally think. I call this sometimes highly layered activities where something is both highly social and rapidly unfolding and high stakes all at the same time, when it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. So the idea of giving students experience with working as a team with other students, it doesn’t have to be 50% of their grade [LAUGHTER] or 30% of their grade to get that experience. Working collaboratively doesn’t have to be with four or five other people; it could be with one other person. And to kind of think like, how can you pull different levers to make something into more of a learning and practice experience than a high-stakes everything that’s hard all combined at the same time. I think that that could be an area to further investigate if you are teaching neurodivergent students or you’re interested in responding to neurodiversity more in your practice. So I know that’s not like a checklist, but a checklist perspective doesn’t align with how I think so much. So those are just like some areas that I would investigate further.
John: So there are some areas where things that work well for some students won’t work as well for other students, and I think what you’re saying is that we can’t just come up with these hard and fixed rules that’ll work for every group of students. We have to somehow negotiate these things. But one of the areas where there’s often some challenges for students that are neurodiverse is when classroom participation is part of the grade in some way, because some students are much more comfortable with some forms of classroom participation than others. What sort of strategies might work to provide a balance that would work for most of the students in terms of class participation?
Sarah: So I’m a big fan of offering multiple options for participation. I think that a reasonable person could differ from me in saying I want students to participate in certain ways, at least some of the time. I generally don’t mind if students exclusively participate via text or discussion board and if they don’t speak in class, some people do, and I think that it’s reasonable to say, okay, I want to build an environment in which people have structured on ramps, I call them, to participating in class verbally. But generally speaking, to say there’s multiple ways to participate, and those can be chosen from to a certain extent is a really great start, I think as well, beyond the kind of like counting up how many times people participate. You mentioned the idea of like faculty perceptions of student class participation. It may be interesting for faculty to expand what they perceive as successful class participation, and one category I hear a lot about when people talk about their neurodivergent students is actually what they refer to as quote too much participation versus not enough. It’s a pretty common story that I’ll hear, someone will say, “There’s a neurodivergent student in my class, and they raise their hand all the time, and I think that actually maybe there’s other students who would like to participate, but maybe they’re not taking the opportunity because this person talks a lot.” And I kind of go back to the neurodiversity paradigm ideas again as well, which is okay, like first, can we start by saying what strengths is this person demonstrating? What are they offering? Somebody told me at first. I was thinking about how to get this person to stop raising their hand, but then I realized I go to sleep at night wishing my students would participate more [LAUGHTER] and that they would be as passionate and engaged. So I think I have to start from there. If the balance of who’s speaking in my class isn’t quite working, to not start from the perspective of I don’t like how much this person is participating, but I’m really glad that they’re so enthusiastic, and I’m grateful for their presence. So now I want to think about how I can encourage the participation of everybody in the class. Maybe think about is there a way that I want to balance the voices that are present, the modality of the participation, all those sorts of things. I am also a big fan of creating opportunities to record and get out a lot of questions. So I am probably one of those people who participates like a little bit too much [LAUGHTER] sometimes. So like the idea of having a question parking lot so you can put as many questions in here as you want, and as the instructor, I will get to as many as I can. Maybe I’ll review and summarize them and respond to a couple at once, and above all, to talk explicitly about what you’re doing as a facilitator. Say, I’m trying to encourage as many people to participate in the following ways. I’m going to be facilitating the conversation by moving on from certain points because I have areas of content I want to cover. But just kind of externalizing that, I think, is also really great.
Rebecca: It sounds to me like a lot of the strategies that fit into this neurodiversity-informed teaching approach could be really beneficial to all students. Is that the idea?
Sarah: Yeah, I think so. I think part of the way that I frame everything is that neurodiversity includes everybody, so it doesn’t include just neurodivergent people, and so a lot of the strategies that I introduce are aimed, I would say, a little bit less at things that specifically target neurodivergent students and more about coexistence and negotiation between large diverse groups of people. And that is not to suggest that there aren’t wonderful resources for supporting neurodivergent students. I think you’ve actually had some people on the podcast who have written really wonderfully about that. Specifically, Jennifer Pusateri just had a new book come out supporting neurodivergent students. Karen Costa’s book about ADHD learners was really great. There’s a couple books I have on my bookshelf about supporting autistic college students. Those are all really, really great. I think the approach I wanted to take a little bit more here was okay, but it’s never just one neurodivergent student or a group of all people with the same needs. It’s a pretty complex mix of people, including the instructor, and so that’s kind of the approach that I take more in the book.
Rebecca: I do think that’s something that we hear from faculty a lot is like, how do I balance all these like really different needs? So it’s certainly a resource that I think people are hungry for.
Sarah: Okay, that’s great to hear.
John: You’ve already hinted at this a little bit, but could you tell us about what’s next?
Sarah: So, as I hinted at earlier, I’m really interested in the concept of access friction, which is the conflict between different sets of access needs you could say. So, I’m working on a whole new book project just about access friction, and it will hopefully be published with the same press in the same series. So that’s exciting. And in that book, I’m really going to kind of explore and theorize and research instances of access friction in the classroom, a focus on higher ed pedagogy, and really think about the specific steps we can take to balance different needs in the classroom. So I’ll be answering or hoping to answer all sorts of interesting questions, such as: Is there an inclusive strategy or set of them that truly does include everybody? And even taking a little bit more of a curious and critical perspective on the idea of inclusive teaching strategies themselves, I think that what I’m hoping to do with further research on access friction is, in some ways, just give voice and give name to a phenomenon that I know that a lot of people have experienced [LAUGHTER] some time in their teaching journey, but not really knowing exactly what to do with. And I’m like really happy to be working more deeply on that topic, and I guess I should also say it’s very connected to neurodiversity for me because of the fact that neurodiversity and neurodivergence refers to a coalition of people, kind of a group of people who may share that their cognition differs a little bit or a lot from social norms or expectations of society, but not that everybody has the same needs.[LAUGHTER] And just going back to my interest in neurodiversity history, some of the first events that the autistic community put together-one was called Autreat, like retreat,[LAUGHTER] but autistics for retreat. So you can look back at some of the writings about that and just see some of these advocates noting that even in a retreat that was only for autistic people, they experienced significant disagreement and friction over how it should be run, how it could be accessible to all people, and so this has been a through line of Classroom Mindscapes, and so I’m hoping to just kind of expand on that a little bit more. And my other thing that’s next, I’ve been currently both leading and also just participating in a lot of discussion about instructor interest in lower tech teaching or taking technology away from classroom interactions, probably spurred by increasing AI use and penetration [LAUGHTER] of the whole teaching community. And so I’ve been really interested in how that can align with accessibility commitments and interest in accessibility.
John: As we were going through this, I was noting this is one of the few podcasts we have where AI did not come up right until then. [LAUGHTER]
Sarah: Well I had to get in in. Yeah.
John: But it did, yeah.
Rebecca: It always does. These sound like some really great projects. I’m looking forward to seeing where they lead.
Sarah: Yeah, thank you.
John: I’m looking forward to getting my copy of your book, which should be coming out later this month, and also looking forward to future conversations about access friction and other things. And in general, that’s just an incredibly good book series for people in higher ed.
Rebecca: Thank you so much for joining us.
Sarah: Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed meeting and talking with both of you.
John: Thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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