Forging and living in community is hard work. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either not aware of the suffering or hard work of other members in their community which is ongoing on their behalf, or just plain inexperienced. But this labour can also be part of the joy and beauty of it, a kind of craft taken up in the interest of establishing and maintaining spaces of loving mutual care for one another.

While people often view church as a form of consumerised therapy, e.g. something that is undemanding (or only so demanding as to avoid revealing your shortcomings) and meets a person’s (able-bodied) needs implicitly, there are other examples in recent years of reflection on ecclesia which focusses on areas where there is hard work to be done and towards the ways that we might sharpen the tools we bring to community-as-craft:

  • confronting racism and the need for forms of repentance and reconciliation as white ethno-nationalism has crept into particular instances of Christian self-identity
  • confronting institutional and interpersonal forms of misogyny and exclusion of women
  • addressing the ways that elitism and class (un)consciousness, in the form of wealth, literacy, or social status can subvert worship
  • unpacking the phenomenon of spiritual abuse and the ways that other more adjacent forms of trauma should be drawn into our reflection on life together
  • …and finally, assessing the ways that we have created spaces where the disabled God is unwelcome

As a theologian who occupies a small slice of these intersectional categories, I am wary of the ways that in some of these fields, reflection can come in speculative forms rather than arising from lived experience or wisdom. I’m working on a book, God is Weird where I’ll unpack some of my own analysis as an autistic theologian and Christian ethicist and I’ve also begun setting up an ethnographic project around autistic spirituality. These projects won’t be complete for some years now, I expect, so in the meantime I thought it might be helpful to put down a series of posts on what resources I’ve found (some of them are written, but not all!), areas where I see opportunities for practitioners to change their approaches, and ways that our core theological and doctrinal thinking might need to change in light of the forms of exclusion of privilege which have narrowed theological reflection in the 20th century.

It is worth emphasising that the task here is quite severe: Christians have been at the forefront of conversion therapy and eugenics movements which have sought to eradicate and hide autistic lives, usually achieved through breathtaking levels of interpersonal violence. So while there is joy abounding in a neurodivergent theology, this is very much not a cheery lighthearted conversation. For this post, I’m going to frame out some of the parameters that I think might be salient for autistic church for the sake of later reflection where I’ll unpack them, so here goes:

(1) Queering church: the starting point for all of this has to be an accounting for weirdness and unconventionality in forms of Christian life and worship, doctrine and collectivity. I note that sometimes neurodivergent (“ND”) thinkers might try to avoid getting caught up in debates around sexual orientation and attempt more covert or disentangled ways to engage this subject, but after a long season of covert work as a theologian, I’ve really begun to question the wisdown of such an approach. Queerness has always been about wider concerns beyond sexual orientation, but also “unconventional” sexual orientation and gender identity have always been a co-occuring feature of ND lives and bodies. As a result, I tend to view adjacent queering projects as complementary. Following on from this, there are some hard questions we need to ask in opening up a conversation about queering church for ND neighbours:

  • Why do we obsessively focus on categories of normality and flee from reflection on embodied difference?
  • Why have Christians led movements to eradicate or convert forms of embodied difference (like down syndrome or autism)? It is really important to reckon with the intensity of violence that some Christian communities have sustained towards disabled members of their communities. Christians were at the forefront of the eugenics movement in the 20th century and still are via the proxy of genetic research into “causes” of autism and gene therapies in the 21st century. But in other contexts, it is equally the case that conservative Christians have been at the forefront of pushing for access to behavioural therapies (like ABA) which seek to convert (I’m not exaggerating when I suggest we shoud substitute language here of “torture”) autistic children and young adults into concealing conspicuous behaviours. I know of many ND children who were pressed into narratives of “normal” behaviour as part of sunday school teaching. I know of no disavowal of ABA by any Christian denomination. As Laura MacGregor and Allen G. Jorgenson observe in one recent journal article, especially for parents and carers of children with disabilities, for a variety of reasons, churches feel “unsafe” with the consequence that those families “[withdraw] entirely from church”.
  • While the first-hand accounts of caregivers form an important body of knowledge which we should take very seriously in our reflection on the ways that churches exclude disabled persons, there is a hazard here in thaet these accounts of caregiver suffering and burnout can displace first-person accounts of chuch. I observe that much of the underwriting support for ABA and eugenics charities like Autism Speaks tends to be led by caregivers desperate for support which can ultimately cause further harm and marginalisation of those persons they are caring for. Why have we tended to focus on the (very real, to be fair) suffering of able-bodied caregivers and ignored the trauma and stolen agency of care-receivers?
  • I have also observed that conversations about accommodations and support start off very easy and meet hard limits very quickly. Too often, after a brief burst of enthusiasm (again, perhaps not appreciating the full scale of work that may be involved), we often tend to drift eventually towards a framing of conversations about forms of accommodation, conversations about rights and entitlements as a zero-sum game, emphasising limits to what is “practical” and in sharper cases supporting rearguard action to centre and celebrate privileged people who are ceding those “rights” for the sake of another person (e.g.  men’s rights, or white experiences of “racism”).

(2) There is an urgent need to centre embodied diversity as we reflect on life together. We’ve done a bit of thinking (thanks in no small part to the legacy of Nancy Eiesland) around accessibilty for wheelchair users in the built environment, but there are many other forms of inaccessiblity that don’t get attention, including some straight-forward aspects of ND embodied experience like sensory sensitivities around sound, light, texture and food. How do we worship corporately in ways that start from the assumption that auditory, visual, and sensorimotor differences are going to abound? Formulaic approaches to worship music aren’t likely to work. And how can we create pathways for people to share their negative experiences without fear of marginalisation, shame or sanction? Two autistic people in the same church can have conflicting experiences: loud music can produce suffering for some people whilst intense bodily vibration can generate deep joy for another. This is a paradox we haven’t spent much time exploring. In a similar way, we’ve done a bit of work to accommodate some forms of hearing impairment with AV equipment, but other forms of neurological difference like central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) or just plain autistic cognition can lead to challenges around pace and flow of auditory information: a 30 minute long eloquent sermon may be a brilliant canvas for some people but a blank page for many others. Should the sermon or song really be the centerpiece of a church service? There are interesting questions about the love feast and other forms of liturgical meals which seem to have fallen off the radar as we seek to emulate para-ecclesial genres of oratory and performance.

(3) There is an obsession, especially within Protestant forms of worship on speech and oratory. This can often crowd out silence. Or worse-still this preference can lead to a commodification of silence, where it becomes seen as especially holy (mindfulness workshop anyone?) rather than part of someone’s mundane everyday experience. ND church needs to be able to accommodate and celebrate persons who are non-verbal or non-speaking (even if this is occasional rather than persistent as is often the case with masking autistic people). This is more common than you expect, especially given the ways we can tend to use invalidated pseudo-social scientific instruments like the Myers-Briggs tests to badge non-communication as a personality trait (and thus not requiring my energy as attention as a prolific communicator). We also need to reflect on ways of accommodating different forms of speech, which may involve gesture, sounds, or echolalia. I was particularly struck by the account by Eli Clare (Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure) of having shaking and erratic body motions as a form of embodiment whcih can be celebrated. Think about the number of places across a worship service where perfection is upheld (even if not achieved) as a pursuit: music production, scholarly and eloquent but accessible sermons, clever spontaneous announcements. Would it feel perfectly normal if a person with cerebal palsy delivered a sermon in your church? So often we assume that effective communication is the problem of the communicator. But what if listening was sanctified as a challenging liturgical practice?

There’s more I’m sure, including thinking about how we can confront and dismantle ablist hierarchies, but that’s a good start for now. More from me on this in weeks to come!

Another love letter to curious neurotypical allies

Another way that autism is often pathologised relates to characterisations of us as having a limited number of interests (sometimes described as “monotropism”), having “weak central coherence,” or as being inflexible or rigid around activities and conversations. More recently, autistic people have taken the reins of research and started to characterise this aspect of our cognition in different ways, particularly around the importance thinking through and tending to flow states and inertia. There is also some pretty interesting research emerging around cognitive difference around “predictive coding”.

Of course we can flip the pathologisation, asking why non-autistic people have to be so flighty, swapping from one topic to the next and correspondingly slow to complete tasks and notice connections across different domains. Of course this is just as unfair, but it highlights the ways that different forms of cognition are really just that: different.

We all experience times when we hit mental friction, e.g. trying to think through a problem in a way that just isn’t working, to such a degree that all your mental gears grind to a halt and you need to regroup. My ideal way of working through something is to work on tasks or topics, one at a time. I really want to understand and consolidate something (even if just provisionally, to highlight what has been left undone, to highlight what gaps in knowledge have been identified, what work might remain, etc.) before I move on. And I really like to set things up properly, getting the ambiance right, ensuring the right tools are ready, and the stage is set for effective work. For a simple thing like washing dishes, I want to make sure I’ve got a nice clear space for drying, a good soundtrack playing, and enough time set aside so that once I’ve begun, I can reasonably expect to finish the washing in one go. The upside of this is that once I’ve got things moving, I can go very fast – faster than most. But constantly stopping and starting, interrupting flow and having to hit the brakes and stop that inertia, can be really uncomfortable. That discomfort can be mitigated, when I anticipate I’m going to be interrupted, I’ll split tasks up into sub-groups, folding just the kids laundry and leaving towels for another day, or washing silverware and plates and stopping before I get to the pots.

It’s hard to convey the bodily sensation of having inertia stopped abrubtly, but it’s important to stress that it’s way beyond what you might think of as normal levels of uncomfortable annoyance. If I’m trapped in a situation where we are constantly stopping and starting, failing to take time to set up and define parameters, leaving things unfinished and never consolidating conversations or marking progress before moving on, it can feel like being forced to hold my breath or being exposed to loud music for hours at a time: uncomfortable, veering towards tortuous or traumatic. Poorly designed academic workshops can sometimes be like this or a dinner party with expectations that we all engage in small talk about topics that none of us actually care about (yes, ND folx are often not big fans of small talk). Again, I have ways of mitigating this – taking on the task of note-taker for a conversation and trying to consolidate the conversation for our small group; being the person at the party who gently invites “deep” conversations to those who are interested.

What I’d like you to know more about, however, is the degree to which our societies are attuned to non-autistic ways of working and being in the world. It’s not that (as often many people seem to assume) we’ve reached a nirvana where everyone can just do things at their own pace, but that people just don’t notice how they’re being given priority around the horizons that we set for default deadlines and planning, how often we change the accepted approach to a given form of practice, etc.

In my perfect world, I’d be able to focus days around specific forms of activity: maybe teaching classes on Monday and Tuesday, conducting research on Wednesday, holding meetings on Thursday morning and marking exams in the afternoon, etc. But that isn’t how things work out: my teaching activities are spread across the week and there are rules to enforce this kind of work scheduling. When I’ve requested a different approach, I’ve been told this would disadvantage other colleagues and is against “the rules”. My requests are characterised as special pleading or even suspicious. When I’ve asked for the terms of a meeting to be defined ahead of time, perhaps even collaboratively, colleagues can sometimes be defensive: “Why can’t we do this in a ‘relational’ way and just have a conversation? Why do you always need to email so much?”

The upside of this is that at the start of each day, I need to think my way through the number of interactions and tasks I’m going to be drawn into, and I try to consolidate for myself as much as possible. I calculate the people I need to work with who won’t be willing or able to accommodate a different pattern from their own. Those become the “triage” events that require special levels of energy and planning. Then I need to try and consolidate the rest of the time as best as I can, but it’s often the case that the triaging takes up *all* the time. The sad thing about this is that being flexible and accommodating of different patterns doesn’t just help autistic people like me – there are many other non-ND folx who need a bit of time to get “into gear” and might want to set up collaboratively designed ways of working to get around other invisible challenges.

If you’d like to learn more, I highly recommend:

One of the key reasons I’m reluctant to share with others about being autistic relates to the way that communication by autistic people has been relentlessly pathologised. Even now, the key way that autism is defined in diagnostic manuals and social research primarily foregrounds, as one research article puts it is that: “autism manifests in communication difficulties, challenges with social interactions, and a restricted range of interests”. I don’t know a single autistic person who would foreground those things are the primary driver of their personal alterity and lived experience. They are challenges, but those aren’t the defining features of being autistic. But that’s the stereotype out there which is continually repeated by non-autistic researchers. This is foregrounded for those autists in Higher Education who declare a disability at work as we’re categorised in the following way by the Higher Education Statistics Agency: “A social/communication impairment such as Asperger’s syndrome / other autistic spectrum disorder.”

The upshot of this is that I have an abiding fear that when sharing about my neurodivergence with others, that person will subconsciously begin to find signs of disorder in every social interaction we have after that discovery. This has happened in the past and it’ll continue to happen in the future. And there are corrolaries which also make me wince, like when people speak really loudly or slowly to immigrants in spite of their clear English language proficiency. It’s very hard to surmount the challenges inherent in a relationship where someone is condescending because they have an implicit sense of personal superiority. And we all experience insecurity in ways that drives us to inhabit these spaces of superiority more often than we’d like to acknowledge.

So I’d like you to know about this worry I have.

But, there’s another piece in here that’s worth us considering. In the face of these odd diagnostic framings, I always want to ask: don’t we all have problems with social communication? Isn’t this a key part of being a living creature? Doesn’t every creature experience conflict as it occurs in any healthy relationship? There are whole fields of study, like philosophical hermeneutics, post-humanism and critical animal studies, which seek to confront the fascinating aspects of building understanding and the causes of misunderstanding in communication.

So rather than try to pretend you don’t notice when I’ve clearly missed your point, or I’ve read your reaction to something as more severe than you intended it to be, why not lean in to the awareness that you have trouble communicating sometimes too, that when you’re feeling tired and badgered by the world you might not have extra bandwidth for interpreting cues, mediating confusion or faciliting the process of bridging misunderstanding?

I’m fascinated by the ways that we hold culturally encoded double-standards around communication. In many cases, facilitating understanding by a listener or reader is taken to be a hallmark of skilled communication. This is undoubtedly the case, as I’ve learned from a lifetime of cross-cultural communication and teaching, which is often about troubleshooting how effectively you’ve been understood and learning to anticipate and surmount barriers. But if we’re being honest here, I think it’s worth acknowledging that being well-understood can also be a feature of having a homogenous social life and inhabiting hierarchies. It’s much more likely that, for most of us, we think of ourselves as easily understood and understanding people simply because we don’t spend that much time outside our comfort zone, staying within close-knit circles of people who share our experience, cultural background, social class, and particular competencies. There are forms of deference which are built into relationships where we are expected to mask misunderstanding and protect fragile egos.

What I really want to see is how a person performs when they’re thrown into a situation where they’re expected to communicate with people you don’t share much with. You can see this at work when people travel outside their home country for the first time, take an unexpected career transition, or move to a new place. Suddenly a person realises that their communication competencies do not arise from skills, experience and training, that those capabilities are more fragile than they’d expected and that there’s some hard work ahead. Moreover, when we are thrown into that kind of situation, we’re confronted with the sides of ourselves that emerge when we’re under stress: you may be impatient, sharp, slow to react, etc. and this compounds the embarrasment and difficulties of surmounting misunderstanding.

Some of the best teachers I’ve worked with are people who have placed themselves in situations of language and cultural diversity and developed forms of grace and patience for themselves and others which are the gateway to understanding. Some of the most skilled and empathetic communicators I know are neurodivergent people. Imagine how it might transform our organisations and families if we were more honest about how we’ve experienced breakdowns in communication, and more forensic about the aspects of our culture which drive us to conceal or hurry past misunderstanding in favour of quick and decisive action.

As a long-time immigrant to a few countries, one thing we’ve gotten fairly proficient at is moving house in complex ways: securing visas, houses on another continent, banking with no credit history, etc etc. One of the most complex, and easily mistaken parts of the process is moving your goods overseas, and the stakes are quite high. Shipping by air can easily run into the thousands of £££ for just a few large items. As the freightos blog suggests, shipping less than 45kg by air can cost at least $34/kg whereas getting beyond 300kg gets all the way down to $5/kg, and if you use ocean freight this gets much lower. The current rate to ship an entire euro-pallet (800mm x 1200mm at 1m high) which will fit 24 small u-haul moving boxes from USSEA (the freight terminal in Seattle) to GBLGP (London) is around $250-300 so around $12.50/box which is around the same price as a single 45kg box sent by air. To ship an [ENTIRE 20 foot container](https://www.icontainers.com/help/20-foot-container/) runs around $3200 right now (as of Jan 2024). That 20′ container measures 6.10m long x 2.44m wide x 2.59m high, so it will hold a bit more than 960 of those small boxes, running you around $3.30 a box. The key difference here is the timing. Ocean freight can tend to run about 4-6 weeks to send items, whereas air frieght can be a week or less. But what are you in such a hurry for, really?

In this brief post, I’m going to provide a bit of a rundown on how things work and how to get the best deal for shipping your belongings. This can be achieved, if you are patient, by sea freight, that is, loading your boxes into a shipping container which is shipped by sea.

The first thing to observe is that when you’re working at pallet / container level, the size isn’t quite so high stakes. You could easily pay the same to ship 5-6 boxes by plane that you might spend to ship an entire 1m3 pallet of boxes as freight. So while I’m not going to encourage you to send your car or large furniture, it’s worth pausing giving away all your worldly goods. However, it’s also worth wondering how much you really care about belongings? Heirloom furniture, dishes, and Christmas ornaments all might have a particular sentimental value, and I can understand that completely. But what about your everyday dishes? Mattresses, couches and furniture? It’s likely you can sell or donate these things locally before moving and then when you arrive in your new home find replacements in charity shops or via online platforms like freecycle or freegle. This has worked well for us – and again, with a bit of patience and time you can furnish a whole house for very little expense, provided you don’t mind a bit of vintage and the charm of mismatched housewares.

So let’s say you’ve gotten down to your core belongings that are precious, unique, or useful enough to justify shipping (for me this involves pretty much all clothing which is rather hard to find in appropriate sizes). And let’s assume this is something like 20-30 boxes which will fit into 1-2 cubic meters of palletised shipping.

The next thing you need to appreciate is the process of logistics. Shipping involves a huge number of steps, which each need to be managed and insured separately. I’d estimate that at least half of the cost of freight will go to middlemen, er, logistics managers and freight forwarders, who coordinate across the many steps of gathering boxes from your home, taking them to the local logistics center, getting these pallets on a truck to the local seaport, arranging their safe passage on a boat, unloading at the sea port on the other side etc etc. Each of these steps is likely to be with a completely independent company, or at least a well-compartmentalised subsidiary within a large corporation. In any case, you need to be sure that every step will be tracked, accountable, insured, and documented. If your head feels ready to explode, then you should keep things simple. If you have the ability to drive your goods in a borrowed van to the seaport, then you may be able to skip a few steps and save yourself a lot of money.

It’s worth noting that seaports are not the same as airports, and sometimes the major seaports are hundreds of miles away from what you may think is a major airport. There are also major and minor seaports, and in most cases best to go for shipping to a major seaport and finishing the last leg with freight via truck, van, or your own car. You can look up UK seaports here: https://uk-ports.org/uk-ports-map/.

The key thing you need to get wise about here is “Incoterms”. According to freightOS: “Freight incoterms (International Commercial Terms) are the standard terms used in sales contracts for importing and exporting”. There are 11 different kinds of incoterms, which range from the bare bones service of FOB “Free On Board” where the shipper will literally deposit the items on a container ship (not recommended) to the nearly fullly covered EXW “Ex Works” where someone will pick up your goods at your premise and cover loading and insurance the whole way through. My advice is to try and reduce the number of hops in the journey, e.g. bring to the seaport, rather than try to work with lower tier incoterms. What you don’t want is to find out that you were supposed to show up in a distant city to unload something or that your goods were dropped on the curb uninsured somewhere you didn’t expect.

The next key logistic relates to the amount of cargo you’re shipping. For Ocean Freight there are basically two different sizes: LCL and FCL. LCL stands for “less than container load” and FCL is “full container load”. Essentially, the key thing here is whether you’re going to fill an entire shipping container, which run at 20 feet or 40 feet long. In some cases, if you’re past filling half a shipping container, you may as well just go FCL which is ususally billed at a flat rate, as the cost differeces aren’t going to be substantial with an LCL load charged per kg and cubic meter as I’ve highlighted on the first page above.

My advice is to figure out how many boxes you want to ship, round up by 20% and then start to collect quotes from shippers. And, again, I’d recommend you go with a provider who will handle insurance and customs costs bundled with the freight. I’ve found the tools at FreightOS to be pretty useful in getting estimates. FreightFinders will also give you access to a variety of shippers. Good luck with your move!

Over the past two years, there have been some significant challenges that educators in Universities have had to confront, in many cases driven by top-down policy initiatives. There are a few different places where impacts have been seen – but one area I’d like to highlight in this post lies in assessment. The stakes are already quite high for practitioners striving to engage in the craft of pedagogy, as I’ve recently posted, because quantifying student achievement in a homogenous way (e.g. grading) is bound to cause problems. When we try to signal achievement in meaningful ways whilst working with forms of feedback that reduce something complex, layered, and multi-modal like human communication, we are bound to experience tensions and shortcomings. This is HARD work. But let’s assume we’re stuck with grading systems and don’t have access to more creative and collaborative options. If we accept this as our lot, then we need to work with these systems to mitigate their failures, especially in inflexibility (feedback to students around assessed work will inevitably hit up against limits and edge conditions) and opacity (our communication back to students in feedback is just as complex as their communication to us in their essays!). So at the very least, I think, we need to include flexibility in our approach, because humans just aren’t all the same, and our experiences and styles of learning are often radically different. Difference, in my view is best engaged in a relational way, and by extension is best managed at a local level. But can we actually do this in practice? There are some external factors intervening which educators in Universities need to be aware of as we try to develop careful and responsible policy around marking.

The policy landscape has shifted in the background over the past three years in the UK in ways that many academics (including myself) won’t have noticed. I’d like to break this down at some length as it helps to explain why we’ve gotten where we are just now (many readers may experience an “ah, so that’s why….!” moment) and unpack some of the parameters around how I think the educational landscape is being changed around assessment.

Part 1: A brief history of OfS interventions around Assessment in Universities

Over the past decade in the UK, there have been massive shifts in the way that government relates to Universities: shifting from a fairly hands-off mode under the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) which was finally disbanded in 2018 towards a much more interventionist model driven through two new units: the Office for Students (OfS) and United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI). Over the past ten years, and leading up to the formation of the OfS, government bodies involved in oversight and regulation of Higher Educatio have taken a much more interventionist stance on a variety of fronts within education, and assessment has been a particular target. This is in many ways a resurgence of the “Quality Wars” which have been on and off in Britain for several decades. Returning to recent history, from 2018 until 2021, Universities were regulated under The UK Quality Code for Higher Education (often called simply “the Quality Code”). This was generated in partnership with academic bodies and well regarded on an international level as a set of principles for setting standards in academic practice at Universities.

The Higher Education and Research Act which was passed by Parliament in 2017 initiated a process of review which eventually led to the launch on 17 November 2020 of a “Consultation on regulating quality and standards in higher education“. This process underwrote the drafting by OfS of a set of new policies, intended to replace the Quality Code, which were disseminated to the public alongside a lot of unqualified (and I daresay irresponsible) commentary around confronting “low quality courses” (WONKHE summary). The new policies were shared and feedback was drawn in from 20 July 2021 to 27 September 2021 (PDF here). There were serious questions about the intention of this process from the start (cf. this piece for WONKHE by David Kernohan and Jim Dickinson). Why for example, describe a process as consultative without meaningful involvement from students (much less educators) in the process of policy design? After that consultation, OfS produced a (largely dismissive) response to feedback from those two groups (PDF here). The conditions in that code came into force on 1 May 2022, just over a year ago. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of how that public dialogue has unfolded, I recommend you read the various waves of analysis by interpreters on WONKHE which I’ve highlighted above.

These policies revolve around five long-standing “key conditions”: titled “B1”-“B5”, which are the following:

Condition B1: The provider must deliver well-designed courses that provide a high quality academic experience for all students and enable a student’s achievement to be reliably assessed.
Condition B2: The provider must provide all students, from admission through to completion, with the support that they need to succeed in and benefit from higher education.
Condition B3: The provider must deliver successful outcomes for all of its students, which are recognised and valued by employers and/or enable further study.
Condition B4: The provider must ensure that qualifications awarded to students hold their value
at the point of qualification and over time, in line with sector recognised standards.
Condition B5: The provider must deliver courses that meet the academic standards as they are described in the Framework for Higher Education Qualification (FHEQ) at Level 4 or higher.

These are seem to me like fairly reasonable things to aspire to in providing higher education. And while one might object to the back and forth of the policy process and the underlying instability this produces for students and academic staff in the sector alike, the actual headline suggestions seem quite unobjectionable.

However OfS process has pressed far beyond headline guidance and unpacked these in what seem to be forensic yet problematic ways in subsequent communication. The consultation documents acknowledge this agenda: “The main change from the current conditions is that the proposals include more detail about the matters that would fall within the scope of each condition and how these would be interpreted”. So the process didn’t just reshape the principles, but also indicated a shift from broad principles and quality monitoring towards much more explicit and specific policy delineation. This dialectic between specific rules and broad principles is a perennial point of debate between ethicists (like myself), and as you’ll find in my publications, I tend to prefer a principled approach, not least because it allows for a more relational and flexible approach to policy which can accommodate diversity and pluralistic communities (as I’ve highlighted above). Rules are better at controlling people, but they also run the risk of causing oppression and undermining the relationships in which education functions.

Back to the discussion at hand. It’s worth emphasising that the OfS is not playing around here: the potential consequences for a University which is found to be in breach of any of these conditions might be a refusal by OfS to validate their degrees and basically cancel graduation for that institution. Also fines. Expensive scary fines.

So what’s in the details? There are little landmines throughout the details here, as one might expect. I’d like to focus on the development of criteria for how “a student’s achievement to be reliably assessed” (condition B4). In the 2021.24 document, OfS provides further detail of the requirements entailed by B4:

B4.2 Without prejudice to the scope of B4.1, the provider must ensure that:

a. students are assessed effectively;
b. Each assessment is valid and reliable;
c. academic regulations are designed to ensure that relevant awards are credible; and
d. relevant awards granted to students are credible at the point of being granted and when compared to those granted previously.

They explain B.4.2.a in more detail a bit further on:

c. “assessed effectively” means assessed in a challenging and appropriately comprehensive way, by reference to the subject matter of the higher education course, and includes but is not limited to:

i. providing stretch and rigour consistent with the level of the course;
ii. testing relevant skills;
iii. requiring technical proficiency in the use of the English language; and
iv. assessments being designed in a way that minimises the opportunities for academic misconduct and facilitates the detection of such misconduct where it does occur.

In case this wasn’t clear enough, OfS provides even further guidance down the page, and colleagues may begin to notice here some of the drivers of policy which has been depoyed over the past two years by cautious University VCs and management eager not to fall afoul in the ways that their universities manage education and risk scary consequences:

50. In relation to “assessed effectively”, the following is an illustrative non-exhaustive list of examples to demonstrate the approach the OfS may take to the interpretation of this condition… “Marking criteria for assessments that do not penalise a lack of proficiency in the use of written English in an assessment for which the OfS, employers and taxpayers, would reasonably expect such proficiency, would be likely to be of concern. Students are not penalised for poor technical proficiency in written English. For example, for assessments that would reasonably be expected to take the form of written work in English and for which the OfS, employers and taxpayers, would reasonably expect such proficiency, the provider’s assessment policy and practices do not penalise poor spelling, punctuation or grammar, such that students are awarded marks that do not reflect a reasonable view of their performance of these skills.”

As you can see, we’ve gone from broadly unoffensive headline principles to some quite odd particulars very quickly in the OfS process. There are a number of strange things here: why single out “technical proficiency in the use of the English language” at all given how such things are already intrinsic to most degree programmes, especially within the humanities? If there are problematic actors in HE, it seems much more sensible to confront that on a specific level rather than deploy a redundant policy. But also, the emphasis here is not on measuring student achievement, but on penalising a lack of proficiency. There’s no interest here of celebrating a surplus of profiency. It’s also uncomfortable to find language here, reaching beyond student experience towards “the OfS, employers and taxpayers”. Many readers will be able to imagine a thousand different ways this could have been written (or not at all), less agressively, more constructively, etc. But let’s set aside these uncomfortable quirks for a moment and ponder together what exactly this all might look like in practice.

Part 2: Why does it matter?

One might come to the end of this and say something like, “yes, I wish this was worded more carefully and sensitively, but there’s nothing wrong with this policy in practice. And why not have more specific versions of our policy, much less these ones? Don’t we want our students to be effective communicators?” There are two key problems here which are complex and deserve our attention, not least because the victims are already on the margins of HE:

Problem 1: ambiguity and overcompliance

From a policy perspective, this is all a bit confusing. On one hand, it has the aspect of really highly specified policy. But on the other hand, even after reading all the guidance, it all seems quite murky. This issue with highly-specified policy which is nonetheless unclear on implementation details, is a recurring problem in the sector. The same issues apply to immigration policy in higher education, with providers often stretching far beyond the “letter of the law” in reaction to ambiguity which is intrinsic to policy demands.

How does one assess English language proficiency (for the “taxpayers”, of course)? Well, there are basically two ways to interpret this guidance. The first option is to take it at face value and do the specific things they mention, e.g. include in our processes of assessment specific checks penalising people when they show they are not sufficiently proficient in spelling and grammar. As I’ve said above, these things are already widely practiced in the sector, so one couldn’t help but begin to wonder, is there somethign else I’m missing here? There’s an important phrase in the text above where the guidance explains what “assessed effectively” means. Did you see it? It’s the part which says “includes but is not limited to”. So is one right to assume that these very (even weirdly) specific examples are the policy? Or is this just a sort of initiation into a pattern of behaviour that educators are being pressed into? So here we have seemingly highly specified policy with loads more detail than previous policy guidance had in it, associated with really scary and dire consequences for people who breach these new policies, and some intimations that we need to develop regimes for surveillance to punish wrongdoers but even at the end it’s clear that “there’s more…” without specifying what exactly that means. In organisations where there are administrative staff whose job is to mitigate risk, when situations of ambiguity arise, the resulting policy response will veer to the side of caution, especially if there are fears of serious consequences looming if one is cast into the limelight for falling afoul of a policy. So in some cases, organisations do just what they’re told. But in many cases organisations reply to policy in extreme ways – this has been the case in response to prevent policy on campuses, immigration and right-to-work checks, even response to GDPR policy is implemented in ways that on closer look are unnecessarily extreme. So at the very least, when you’re faced with a situation like this, there is an increase in the hazard that the resulting implmentations or responses to a policy demand may reach much further than they need to.

Problem 2: linguistic competency

Things get even murkier when you start to really try and work out the details. Marking spelling accuracy is dead easy, and students ought to know better as they can easily access dictionaries and spell checks. We do penalise sloppy work in terms of misspelling, I know this is the case from years of practice as an educator, and also an an external examiner for a variety of Universities. The same is true of punctuation. The rules are highly standardised and easy to access. But what about grammar? On one hand, verb tense is pretty important to get right. And there are guides which can check this. From years of reading, I can spot bad grammar almost automatically on the page in a variety of ways. But what exactly does it look like to be maximally proficient in English language usage? What exactly are the rules we follow that make communication effective? This is where things get murky.

There are a number of examples where some people might point to the formality of prose as an important standard, my students every year ask me if they should use personal pronouns, “I think that…” versus “One might think that…”. And my answer is always, “it depends”. Formal language can be helpful, but sometimes it can be impersonal and inaccessible, even a bit stiff. Another example is the use of complex terms. Does proficiency in English language rest on the use of five syllable words? Or is the most compelling prose driven by neat sparse vocabulary? And even more pointedly, what about the use of slang, vernacular, pidgin, or creole terms and idioms? Are those kinds of language casual? Formal? Technical? I can think of many cases where scholars and poets I admire forced me to think through a particular vernacular or regional lens with their writing in English and this elevated their arguments. And as someone who has lived in a number of different English-speaking nations and regional cultures (USA, Canada, Scotland, England and Wales) I can attest to the ways that idiomatic English can vary wildly, both within elite and non-elite cultures.

Once we get past the basics of spelling and grammar, it gets really tricky to actually say what the rules are, and explain how and when they should be broken. Ultimately, good prose just feels right. We can judge its effectiveness through affect and intuition. But also, our judgement relies upon sympathy with the writer: I work hard to understand a poet’s use of vernacular, metaphor, etc. because I trust that they have something to teach me. Another reader could just as easily pick up the poem and conclude that it is obscure and poorly written. I don’t mean to suggest that there are no standards, but that they are not easily accessible and that teaching them is complex and requires a lot of recursive effort. And successful judgement like this only becomes accessible at the mature end of a learning journey and not checkpoints in the early stages. And can we really say that there is such a thing as “Standard English” (SE)? Even within my own department, and in specific taught modules, I can point to a variety of contextually meaningful differences around how to use language to communicate towards certain ends. And if we were to go for the lowest common denominator, is there any way we could say this is more than simply writing mechanics like proper spelling?

There are also ways that working with this kind of intuitive sensibility leads us to rely on personal familiarity – things which “feel right” as an implicit proxy alongside the more rigorous and obvious formal rubrics which establish conventional grammar and spelling. For all these reasons, the measurement of language competency is a hotly conteted topic among specialists in linguistics. At the very least, it is generally taken to be the case that measuring this effectively is extremely difficult, even for highly trained specialists and best not attempted by amateurs (like me, as I have a PhD but am not a scholar in linguistics).

So it’s hard. And potentially it’s pretty likely that any intelligent person, even University faculty, will make mistakes in assessing language competency – at the very least mistaking written communication that “feels familiar” as proficient. But why is this such a big deal?

The hazard here sharpens even further when we apprecaite how, in spite of our best efforts, the aesthetics of student feedback processes can collude with forms of racialised, class-encoded, ablist, and enculturated privilege. Linguistic racism and misogny is widely recognised as an issue in workplaces, impacting customer relationships, undermining team communication, and widening inequality in hiring processes. This has been investigated in some specific case studies into the ways that vernacular language can be stigmatised and used as the basis for discrimination and negatively impact academic outcomes. In particular, studies at Universities have found lower levels of achievement for Black students when compared to their counterparts who are racialised as white. This in turn has been linked, albeit only in part, to the stigmatisation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) over so-called Standard English (SE). Seen in this way, forms of ethnic identity embedded in language patterns defeat the anti-bias intentions of anonymous marking and create a context for inequality in marking. A wide range of solutions have been proposed in pedagogical literature, including (particularly among proponents of student-centred learning) forms of teaching which encourage the reading and use of vernacular speech as a prelude to critical engagement with vernacular culture more broadly. Given the amazing levels of diversity that we enjoy in our Universities, it would be well worth engaging in a corporate discussion around how we engage and celebrate vernacular (if indeed we do), and conversely, how we can mitigate discomfort by other students and staff who are unaccustomed to deviations from Standard English (SE). However, setting aside this more proactive aspiration, it seems to me to mark a step in the opposite direction to introduce punitive measures for markers who find lacking English language proficiency, particularly without any specific guidance as to how vernacular language might be handled, and how evidence of research and understanding might be affirmed in ways which are separate from language flow. All human cognition mobilises bias, so it’s not enough to aspire to an unattainable “unbiased” state of mind, but rather essential to acknowledge and understand in an ongoing way how our biases, especially implicit ones, mobilise forms of privilege in our teaching and research.

In my teaching, I introduce students to the importance of local and culturally inflected forms of knowledge in responding to public policy challenges like climate change. We also discuss how cultural fluency and dynamism can serve as a transferrable skill, enabling our students to support workplaces which want to reach new audiences and develop forms of end-user engagement which are culturally relevant. In particular, within Theology and Religious Studies we discuss the importance of vernacular culture as tools for community development, we introduce students the ways that feminist scholars and poets deploy informal language, like contractions, and use creole and vernacular vocabulary as a way of challenging unjust hierarchies and emphasising the social good of diversity in practice. I even hope that my students may come to deploy those tools themselves in their written communication, thinking about the ways that forms of communication transmit not just information but personal and social values. I fear that education policy in Britain may prefer to pay lip service to the goods of diversity, whilst failing to provide support and infrastructure to underpin these kinds of learning.

Part 3: What should we do?

The OfS has created a really unfortunate challenge here, ultimately risking the recolonisation of education (contradicting our glossy brochures which advertise our de-colonising work). I gather from reading the OfS response to the policy consultation that there was quite a lot of unhappiness about the policy. This included, as the report indicates,

  • Suggestions that it was not appropriate for the OfS, as a principles-based regulator, to prescribe how a provider should assess a student’s language proficiency beyond the course learning outcomes, and whether it was possible ‘to infer what employers’ and taxpayers’ specific expectations might be in any particular circumstance.
  • Views that English language proficiency receives disproportionate attention in the proposed guidance, with respondents questioning whether it is a priority for non-UK partners or appropriate for all TNE courses.
  • Disabled students or students for whom English is a second language may be disproportionately affected by an approach that expect proficiency in the English language as a relevant skill. For example, one respondent commented that the ‘focus on proficiency in written English has potential implications for institutional approaches to inclusive assessment, which are designed to ensure that students with specific disabilities are not disadvantaged during assessments, and to thereby comply with the Equality Act’.
  • The level of English proficiency required would be better considered on a subject or course basis, based on academic judgement about whether mistakes in written English are material or not.

I’ll let you read their resposes (starting on page 25)

It has become clear to me that protest is not an option. There is simply too little will within the sector leaders to respond to OfS, at least overtly, with refusal to comply and a demand for more sensitive education policy (I would be delighted to be corrected if I’m wrong about this). So there are a two different models of compliance that seem viable, within some specific conditions, to me:

(1) Affirm ways that assessment criteria and feedback already achieve these demands. This is true of all the the teaching contexts where I’ve ever worked or assessed as an external examiner in the UK, so ultimately a viable option, though I accept that there may be some contexts where this isn’t the case. I don’t see any reason why these can’t be handled on a case-by-case basis.

(2) Make very specific additions to marking criteria. It may be that there are some cases where it becomes clear that spelling and grammar haven’t been part of assessing student work. If that’s the case, then the least harmful and hazardous way to achieve compliance here is to be highly specified: “spelling and grammar”. Reaching beyond this in any particular way will enhance the risk and dynamics of bias in assessment.

It’s worth noting that the latter option might be chosen not because there are clear lapses in educational design, but out of a desire to be seen as “doing something”. There may be a fear lurking here (which I’ve alluded to above) driven by the dynamics of over-complicance, that we need to do something visibe in response to the “new” demand to avoid surveillance and punishment. I’ll note here my reservations as an ethicist with any engagements with policy that are arbitrary. There will always be problematic and unfoeseen implications lurking downstream as our use of arbitary policy begins to accumulate and iterate. And these consequences often tend to impact persons (both educators and students) who are already marginalised in other ways.

My anxieties here around bias in marking align with some other work I’m running in parallel with some stellar colleagues around stereotype threat and implicit bias. I’ll be writing more in months ahead about these projects and what I think we can do to proactively address the harmful impacts these phenomena have on students and teachers more broadly in our teaching practice. I’m also working with colleagues to find ways to more proactively celebrate linguistic diversity in our teaching in higher education and will share more about this work as it unfolds. But it’s worth stressing at this point that it is irresponsible to implement harmful and risky policy (even in the current atmosphere) with the expectation that we (or others) will mitigate those problems after the fact with bias training. This is highlighted well in a recent piece by Jeffrey To in Aeon.

I’d be very glad to hear what colleagues have attempted and how educators are responding to these challenges across the sector and hope you’ll share from your experience in the comments.

Image of an hourglass half buried in the ground

In recent years, the British government has been pushing Universities to implement workload allocation models tracking staff time. This is at least notionally, about providing transparency and accountability around public spending around higher education. I fear, however, that it is more about promulgating a disengenuous model of “lazy academics” sitting around using government money and the need to control us more carefully. The origins and impact of this narrative as well as some helpful refutation from actual realiity are covered extensively in Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia (blog post book review from LSE linked here). But that is the reality that we’re under. And, truth be told, many academics have embraced these systems with open arms in hopes that they will proivide a utilitiarian tool for reducing their overwork and inequalities within the sector around workload. My observation so far is that they have increased and worsened these problems and privatised suffering by concealing it behind impersonal systems which can’t be confronted or held accountable. I’ll accept that there are likely exceptions to this and would be glad to hear if anyone has experienced systemic improvements in justice within their academic workplace as a result.

But this has led to a shift in the model by which academic workload is measured – from forms of work to time units. It used to be the case that we’d talk about sitting on a certain number of committees, teaching a certain number of modules, etc. but now all of these are converted into specific homogenised time units (“WAM Points”). I’ve worked in other sectors where workload is managed in this way so it’s nothing new to me, but I had thought for a moment that I’d escaped it, so have found this resurgence personally discouraging.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, in particular as I work in increasingly overt collaborations with other neurodivergent colleagues, and I’ve observed that this shift in workload management, surveillance and sanction has hit ND staff particularly hard. Given my research over the past decade has focussed on the philosophy and theology of time, I’ve hit upon some speculative conclusions I’d like to test out about time experience and this policy shift. In particular, I wonder whether neurodivergent people experience time in more variable and intense ways than non-ND.

Post-Taylorist scholars in business and organisational studies have begun to observe that time is not homogenous. And in really obvious ways our embodied experience of normal tasks is certainly not this way. Think of how you can sit a read a novel and the hours pass unnoticed, where in contrast you might find when completing an onerous task that the time passes with aching slowness. This is also the case with joyous work, however, as the bodily impacts of exercise are quite different from relaxation. Our hour of deeply pleasurable sprinting is still accounted differently in our bodies from an hour of walking. So too it must be at work: different kinds of activities have different levels of physiological demand on us. In some (limited) cases, workplace studies scholars (and even managers!) have built “recovery time” into specific kinds of tasks on the basis of this awareness. But it’s not just the tasks themselves, but also the “between times” and in other cases, scholars of work have noticed that “idle time” is a common and necessary feature of work providing padding around difficult tasks and opportunities for creative and non-linear thinking around problems. So too workplaces, especially in tech have emphasised unstructured time as part of a normal working week. It’s important to emphasise that for academics, at least in my experience, the block allocation we get for research time is NOT this kind of thing, as we spend most of the year being pressed for demands around production and that time is probably the most pressured of any I experience. Have a look at the ways that sabbaticals are handled now – we’re expected to write an extensive application detailing all the specific tasks we will complete and achievements we will attain, and are pressed relentlessly to report on this when that time has concluded to confirm that we have completed the list we have offered.

All of this things are true for any person who occupies a human body. But I think these things are far more intense for autistic people where flow and pace are far more intrinsic to executive function, working at tasks in a kind of self-generated sequence can be essential. I mention this a bit in a previous blog post where I talk about a “day in the life“. The tragic thing about this is that when they aren’t subject to trauma, coercion or control, when engaging their passions (like pretty much every academic I’ve ever met) autistic people will pursue tasks with unusual tenacity. So trying to account for our work in a mechanistic way is oppressive, but also unnecessary as we’re likely putting in long and strange hours to complete our work above and beyond, simply for “love of the game”.

This has some really concrete ramifications for workload management, however, as it foregrounds the ways that individual tasks can have quite different demands on people, especially in the case of neurodivergence. And these models deliberately disallow inflecting time burdens in different ways for different people. The expectation is usually that some things will be hard and others will be easier, but this really mobilises the ablist “superpower” narrative in unhelpful ways, e.g. if you are slowed down in one area, you must have a superpower to compensate for another area so you can “keep up”.

In a similar way, having recovery and buffer time is even more necessary, as we adapt to group work patterns which are unadapted and hostile. It was once the case that I could mask and conceal my own disabilities by offloading tasks that took me far longer, or were demanded in moments when I didn’t have energy or ability to complete them, into spare time. But increasingly our models exclude spare time as a general rule, require work on short notice and rapid deadlines, and I’ve found that there’s simply no place to put those things temporally.

The key point here is that if we can talk about and negotiate our shared workload together around tasks and abilities, things are quite different. But when we work with impersonal homogenised time, the guaranteed result will be oppressive for specific (perhaps all) people.

In recent years, one of the joys of my work at the University has been to convene a regular tutorial / support group for neurodivergent students. As part of the process of unmasking and reflection, I’ve come to confront so much about my own past learning in University which was a (lonely and terrifying) struggle, from sensory overload, challenges processing and hearing lectures, processing information in different ways, and navigating frequent meltdowns and overload. Chatting with students (who have far more self-awareness at this stage in their University journey, but are still trying to navigate these challenges!) has been really meaningful. Our discussions have also been quite interesting from a research perspective, as we delve into points of pedagogical friction and dysfunction which are a regular part of their experience and to try and troubleshoot how we might adjust, confront, or repair those areas of exclusion where our curriculum doesn’t always map onto the diversity of our learners. We have found some things which are (or might be if we could find suitable allies around educational policy, which is sometimes a quest unto itself) easily fixed with small hacks, in other cases, it’s really just a matter of being able to speak aloud about challenges even when there’s nothing to be done. But then there are some issues where we identify a challenge which is much harder to pin down. It’s often the sort of thing where you might be tempted to dismiss it out of hand, but when 7 or 8 people all seem to have the same experiences, that cooroboration helps to identify something that requires further investigation.

I’ve been chasing one of these for a couple years now which runs something like this: some of our students experience really “spiky” performance in marks they receive for assessments. When I say spiky, I mean in the same semester they might get one of the highest marks we’ve ever awarded for a particular class, and at the same time they might be just above a failing mark in another. In some cases this happens because, when you’re navigating a learning environment which is constantly stressful and traumatic, energy levels can suddenly drop and executive function can evaporate. But even if we bracket out instances where this has been the case, there are other situations where learners submit a raft of essays, all composed with the same level of energy and deposited with the same level of confidence and the results are highly idiosyncratic and unexpected. This was very much the case for me as a learner: I managed to push my way through (obviously) higher education, but it was always by the skin of my teeth, fretting about that one module or essay that I’d nearly failed whilst getting superlative results in others. Let me emphasise, the phenomenon that I’m highlighting here isn’t a matter of ability suddenly flagging, or finding an area where I was lacking understanding or expertise. Sometimes I’d hand in an essay where I felt like I was saying something really important and meaningful, and the marker would return it with feedback indicating that they clearly didn’t understand what I was trying to do. This was (and is) usually framed as a failure to achieve proficiency in written communication. Because it’s always our fault when someone can’t understand us, right?

Since then I’ve learned about the double-empathy problem, originally developed by Damien Milton (original paper here). Researchers into autusim have consistently pursued this hypothetical frame – that breakdown in communication and understanding must lie within some pathology of the autistic person. This has been framed around “theory of mind” – the condescending, theoretically and empirically problematic suggestion that autistic people lack the ability to empathise or understand the mental states of other people, also sometimes called “mind blindness”. This much more comprehensive pathologisation of autistic lives can be confused with alexithymia (something I experience, as I relate here: A day in the life of neurodivergence) which is a much more specific condition, and which has been tied to both hyposensitivity (getting too little information from reading other people) and hypersensitivity (getting an overwhelming flood of information about the states of other people from microexpressions and body cues, which can be hard to parse when you’re under stress). It’s also the case that there is a very high co-incidence of trauma, at the levels of CPTSD for autistic people, which has effects (which can be addressed therapeautically) in impairing our ability to read other people (e.g. through the constant triggering of our threat perception and response). (some) Researchers have begun to be much more cautious about engaging with older theories around theory of mind, especially after they have begun to take into account trauma-informed approaches to experimental psychology. Getting back to Milton’s work, in setting aside the tendency to pathologise autistic people, Damien hypothesised that this lack of understanding, when it occurs, might happen to a much wider range of people. That breakdown in communication might arise from forms of cognitive difference, and seen in this way, might occur in BOTH directions. Milton wondered if it might be possible that autistic people might experience less communication breakdown when communicating with other autists and conversely if it might be possible to set up experiments which verified this was occurring. This research is just starting to coalesce as a field of study, but my reading of the literature (for an example, see Muskett et al 2009) is that this hypothesis has been confirmed and this requires substantial revision to psychological theories of autism.

The reason I bring up double-empathy is to ask, whether in the course of teaching and learning, we may have two-way breakdowns in communication, where written communication is the goal of the learning process. Is it possible that faculty (both autistic and allistic) are conveying prompts inviting students to write an essay which can be misunderstood when bridging neurological difference? And similarly, is it possible that students are writing essays which might be received quite differently, and even marked quite differently, when read by staff who are autistic or allistic? To be clear, as I’ve related elsewhere in blogposts, I think that the much heavier burden here is on allistic staff as autistic staff will have had a lifetime of training (sometimes on the level of conversion therapy) in interpreting and understanding communication across neurological difference. The especial challenge here is whether the opposite is true. I fear that in some cases it is not.

For now the advice that I give to students arises from my own experience: your learning process around written communication, especially where it will be largely evaluated by standards which exclude the salience of neurodivergence, will be spiky. You will be misunderstood, and there are few pathways to open up converastion with lecturers about this experience in practice unless you are willing to pathologise yourself (e.g. “I was under great stress and my writing suffered”). There are no mechanisms for faculty to assess their relative incompetence in understanding different forms of communication. And I see policy directions in higher education which are driven towards increasingly homogenous and binary assessments of written communication (good English v. bad English) which has implications for a wide variety of student and not just neurodivergent ones. I tell students that their learning journey is going to have a longer arc than they expect. I found that my own writing didn’t “click” with audiences consistently until I had time to synthesise the many many horizons I was trying to integrate (and this sense that one needs to integrate everything is a common experience for autistic learners). It wasn’t possible for me to compartmentalise in the ways that many other writers and learners do, which ensures a level of success in their early stages of education. It’s likely that I’ve also found an audience which has been developed over time, with readers who understand my broader project, have sympathy for and interest in it, and are able to “jump in” and understand what I’m trying to achieve.

The question I’m holding for right now is whether there are ways we can adjust our processes of teaching to adapt to a wider range of written communication styles, and celebrate the fact that learning journeys are often quite different. It’s possible that we cannot achieve this kind of adaptation without some radical reconfigurations. I’ve tried much of the fine-tuning approaches already in my own practice and with collegaues, and have not found much in the way of effects. I think that calls to abolish grades are probably a key part of the discussion we need to have around how we can more effectively configure the coaching relationship with student writers. The core issue here relates to neurodiversity on campuses – aside from box ticking and PR exercises, how far are we willing to go to craft pedagogy which embraces diversity and doesn’t punish it?

Talk for UOB College of Arts & Law Mental Health Champions Network
14 November 2023

Background: Welcome! If you’ve come here for the first time, I’m very happy to have you. In case what you’ve read here or heard me share in a talk arouses your curiousity and you’d like to have a chat, I’ll just make a few brief requests of you here. As you’ll see, I’ve included quite a lot of links below amidst the text which I’ve vetted ahead of time. I’d be very grateful if you were able to take time to do a bit of reading and self-education before coming to me with questions. A good baseline might be to try and read at least two things I’ve referenced below before emailing or setting up a meeting and then we’ll even have something specific to open up a chat. Take note – I’ve also put up a variety of posts on this blog which reflect my stream-of-consciousness as I go about the work of academia in a variety of contexts over the past couple years. This is deliberate so that folks have a safe place for some learning-oriented voyeurism. I’ll emphasise that this is all exclusively my context and that it will not be even remotely similar to many other neurodivergent people, so take it all with a bit of a grain of salt. For one-to-one, I’d like to reserve my energy particularly for other ND folx and unpacking these details with friends whom I haven’t had a long disclosing conversation with yet. So if you’re an ally and we haven’t spent a lot of time together before, I’m delighted you’re here! But please do maybe start with reading and learning indirectly rather than going straight to the source. 🙂 I am very happy to offer training, reverse mentorship and one-to-one conversations, but I do need to balance my energy so I can’t respond to everything, so I may divert you to another colleague (we have a “speakers bureau” within the Staff ND group).

Thanks so much to everyone for coming today, and to the network for the invitation to share today. I’m mindful that there are many friends here from whom I’ve learned so much, and with whom I’ve collaborated on student support, research projects, and had arguments about University policy. I’m think it’s probably the same for my co-presenter. I’ve never spoken publicly about my autism and this is for a variety of reasons, some of which I’ll get into below and others which my co-presenter is going to share a bit about. But just to open for the record: I’m a late dx autistic adult who doesn’t tick the stereotypical “on the spectrum” boxes, and it has taken me years to come to terms with this part of my identity, develop a disability identity, and today marks a bit of a “coming out” which, if I’m being honest, feels more than a little terrifying. We have a non-official staff neurodiversity network that I’m a part of. Though there are many ND folks here, it is totally expected that, like me, most of you wouldn’t have chosen to disclose that as a disability or even to pursue diagnosis which can be hard to access and traumatic. But the ND staff network is a fantastic safe space, and if you’re looking for one, we’d very much welcome you with open arms!

So, with that preamble out of the way, I thought it might be helpful to share with you a “day in the life of Jeremy” with some behind-the-scenes access that you wouldn’t ordinarily have. I’ve been trained from birth in masking – the work of concealing my unique traits at all costs, so you probably wouldn’t notice any of this without some insider knowledge. You might relate to some parts of this story, but maybe not some others. I’d say that diversity is all around us, and we often conceal our own differences. But I’d probably want to resist the suggestion that people sometimes make when they feel solidarity that “we’re all a bit autistic.” As you’ll see, there are some pretty unique and sharp edges to my experience and while I love solidarity from allies, I think it’s important to grapple with your own divergence in careful ways that don’t appropriate the struggles that my co-presenter and I have had in our day to day.

I attended a training a few months ago. It was on a topic that I’m quite passionate about and interested in, so I was excited to do some learning alongside interesting and interested colleagues. This workshop was also a bit unique in that I’d only recently decided to start “coming out” or “unmasking,” that is, sharing about my autism with specific people in contexts where it seemed safe and inconsequential to do so (for more on this see Devon Price, 2022 below). For this event, I ticked the box on the registration form regarding accessibility needs and wrote out my request to the facilitator to send me information about the plan for the day ahead of the session. Autistic brains tend to work on the basis of focal attention and inertia, so some types of workshop structure can feel really hostile if someone is jumping around topics really quickly and not taking time to do deep dives. The flip side of this is that once I’ve started working on a particular project, I can sustain unusual levels of focus and concentration. When daily activities and thought experiments can’t be consolidated, I’ll need to prepare myself in advance so my discomfort doesn’t derail the activity and I can find some useful outlet for the torrent of thoughts that will result. Starting a bunch of small unrelated or non-premeditated tasks in succession can take a lot of extra emotional and mental work for me, to an extent that (as I’ve been learning) being forced to do this can make me unwell. So I’ve learned to take steps to mitigate that impact where I can. If I can get a “preview” of coming attractions for a session I can make some plans around parts that I might sit out on, or doing some advance preparation so that I can prepare mentally quickly if we’re switching around a lot. I also wrote on the form that I’d be arriving early to check out the accessibility of the room. My autistic body-mind is pretty sensitive to sensory inputs, so smells, sounds, lighting, and room configuration can make the difference between a super “cozy” session or meeting where I feel comfortable and engaged, able to bring myself fully, and a session where I’m having to navigate levels of stress bordering on panic and only able to bring little fragments of myself. The facilitator never responded to my request, which I later realised was the result of a clerical error that wasn’t their fault and they’d never seen my request. But I wasn’t worried as I knew from experience that processes of accommodation are often an afterthought, designed by people who don’t understand what they’re accommodating, and can break down as no one is monitoring their usefulness or the impacts of their implementation. I had planned to arrive early and figured I could have a quick private conversation ahead of the start time.

Because this is Britain, trains were late and cancelled, so I arrived a half hour late. This meant walking into a room full of people who stared at me, not in an unfriendly way, but actually many friends who offered smiles of welcome, as I struggled to find a seat. It was an uncomfortably hot summer day, so the organisers had set up two large fans at the front which were blowing loudly. Given that I’m really not able to filter out white noise, this was not ideal. Actually, to be honest, fans are one of my worst sounds. The lighting in the room was also harsh, so I also felt blasted by visual and auditory noise. I can also struggle to process auditory information (this is called CAPD), especially when I’m under stress, so I’ve begun to experiment with headphones and live closed capitioning in meetings. But this is not easy to do discretely, and this felt like an experience best begun “off the radar”.

The seating was configured in a semi-circle so that we were all facing each other and uncomfortably close. As a larger adult I barely had enough elbow room to avoid bumping into the person next to me, so as I sat I was uncomfortably aware of my own presence and the proximity of others. For reasons that neuropsychologists don’t fully understand, autistic people can sometimes find direct eye contact uncomfortable. In my case, facial expressions and body language are another kind of noise that I’m soaking up, and sometimes this is exhiliarating and other times it can be uncomfortable and overwhelming. This alterity is very useful in some cases as I will tend to intuit the emotional state of each individual in a room based on posture cues and micro-expressions I just can’t really filter out. (note for interested parties: I’ve put up a separate post on the blog for those who might be curious around how to adapt to support folx who are aversive to staring or can sometimes find it overwhelming).

Feeling already overwhelmed and uncomfortable, I tried to sit a row back from the circle but the facilitator asked me to change seats so that I could “join the community” and sit in the circle. I was too disoriented and tired to put up a fight and a quick mental cost-benefit analysis told me that I’d not be able to discretely signal my need for accommodation without uncomfortable disclosure in front of strangers. So I moved and tried to deflect attention with a comment about how I’d “not wanted to disturb the group” with my late arrival. Determined to make the most of this session, I settled back into my seat and tried to discretely review the materials we’d been given which included a community “agreement”. As I settled into my seat, I winced from pain in my neck and lower back. This flares up occasionally as I have several prolapsed discs. I haven’t ever experienced a traumatic injury, but I’ve learned that “the body keeps the score”, and have noticed that the many neurodivergent members of my extended family all have injuries and chronic conditions related to the sustained holding of bodily tension. This is common for autistic people, with very high levels of co-occurring medical conditions (for more on co-occuring conditions and the bodily impacts of stress and trauma, I’d recommend reading Price, 2022 or van der Kolk 2014 listed below).

This was proving to be a bad day. But just to be clear, I experience at least one of these every month, at an all school away-day, cross-cutting research workshops, in my own lectures, project budget meetings, etc. etc. Sometimes meltdowns coalesce into longer term burnout. This is pretty common for Autistic folks.

The facilitator made some pretty concerning claims about mental health in the session, which I took down verbatim as I was already taking notes for the session. In talking about the ways that it can be hard to overcome personality disorder, they observed at one point: “some people have an investment in being unwell” and a bit later in the morning in sharing unqualified observations about schizophrenia that: “we don’t know whether, just living around someone [with schizophrenia] can have an impact…” Actually, we do know that conflating risk factors with causality is generally a bad idea, I wanted to say, but I remained polite and quiet as I didn’t want to get flagged early as a non-compliant participant and knew that there would come a time when I’d need to release the flood of thoughts I was holding in. This process of holding back can often be really uncomfortable, even traumatic for a lot of communities who think in ways that are divergent, and is part of the trauma we hold. It’s also the reason that finding community with a group of fellow autists can be so important as it’s a space where we can “infodump” and quickly get into a flow of familiar conversation safely.

After two hours of grating noise, sharp light, bodily pain, and being assaulted by the intense emotions of 20 people feeling their ordinary feelings, something had to give. I was teetering on the edge of a panic attack.

Now, for some people, this might be a cause of major concern, but I experience meltdowns on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times in a single day. My experience of repeated challenges and persistent forms of acute stress and trauma have led me to develop a sophisticated suite of coping skills. Many people who have never experienced anxiety before can find their first experience of serious anxiety, however small it may be, to be completely disabling. Like many other neurodiverse persons, I eat small forms of anxiety for breakfast. Friends and family who are not aware that I am autistic have observed that I can be unusually calm under pressure and able to handle what seem like massive amounts of stress without slowing down.

By the time we’d gotten to the lunch break, I could barely concentrate on anything much less hold a coherent conversation, so I grabbed some food and took the elevator outside to see if I could find a quiet sensory environment to collect my thoughts and prepare for the afternoon. I also, at this point paused to judge whether this particular workshop was a safe space disclose a disability around neurodivergence. It’s rare for me to find signs that a facilitator or programme, even in the best of cases, shows signs of proactive disability awareness (I’ll be doing a later blog post on how to passively signal you are an ally, so check the blog in coming weeks for more on this), but I do still scan for signs every time I start some new social interaction.

Here’s how my scan had gone: The course pack which was about mental health made no references to neurodivergence at all, outside of some very oblique references to disability justice in a section on personality disorders, which was terse and tokenistic. The facilitator had handed out a set of “standards” for conduct indicating how they hoped we could do the session together, but again, I noticed that there wasn’t really any way to challenge these without being quite open and disclosive. The facilitator had mentioned that anyone could step out at any time if they needed to, but the room arrangement required any person who did this to interrupt the session by walking in front of the entire group. The facilitator also specified that taking a break needed to be less than 5 minutes, which in my experience is not enough time to recover from a meltdown or overload and certainly not enough of a help to justify a public exit from the room. I had a sense that there was a desire to make accommodations but not a lot of thought about how these might need to work based on lived experience.

So I spent the lunch break downing some more ibuprofen, practing deep breathing and walking outside with noise cancelling headphones on and found stress levels to be coming back down. When I returned to the room, I discretely changed my seating position to be a few rows back, out of the circle. To be clear: I understand the reasons for the circle. As a (masked autistic) workshop facilitator, I’ve frequently used this configuration for sessions based on the assumption that it can instill a sense of intimacy and connection across participants. Though I knew this was unlikely, I was desperately hopeful that the facilitator would register my repeated attempts to get out of the “limelight” for what they were and leave me alone. This was not to be the case. I was again asked to move. This time I’d come prepared with a deflection, so in as unconfrontational way as I could attempt, I quietly responded by saying “I think this is what I would prefer to do right now”. This was embarrasing, but manageable, as I’d been prepared for it. And as a note to the other facilitators here, if someone seems to register discomfort, rather than see it as defiance, it may be helpful to open up access for the whole group: “…it is quite hot in here, I wonder if anyone else if feeling like it might be helpful to anyone else if we shifted our seating a bit?” Based on my hyper-awareness, I’d already noticed at least one other person in that group who had also been attempting to shift seats, but was less willing than me to engage in confrontation. After I made this statement, the facilitator verbally registered their displeasure to the whole group regarding my decision. Then, thankfully, they moved on with the session. It was humiliating, but not unexpected. At the next break, I left as continued participation was untenable. As I walked to the train, I felt jarred by the whole experience, but it was not unfamiliar. What was new was that I’d made a choice to step away and tried to register some of my needs publicly. It was disempowering to have them rebuffed and shamed, but felt like a consolidation of something important to have done it.

This is my personal experience, and I’m reluctant to suggest this is a good template for understanding the experiences of other neurodivergent colleagues here at UOB. But it gives you at least a small sample of what it’s like being covertly autistic at UOB. On one hand, there are many features of being part of academic staff here which are a dream. I’m expected to pursue my passions with tenacity and speak about them to others. I’m allowed to work flexibly, conslidating tasks to some extent in ways that work around my cognitive preference for focal attention and flow.

However, I’m also aware that there are colleagues who work at this University whose specific research into autism which will result in forms of oppression for my people, designing programmes of eugenics and conversion therapy (e.g. ABA). I’m regularly subjected to policies and work relationships which invite forms of surveillance and control which cause dangerous levels of stress and trauma for me. Our environments here are rarely adapted for sensory sensitivities, and often technology we use and communication channels we set up are explicitly oriented around allistic preferences (you can read a bit more on the blog for some of my thoughts around digital accessiblity and oppression).

Different kinds of neurodivergence come in for different kinds of treatment, and I won’t presume to speak for my ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenic, or personality disorder labelled colleagues. Public attitudes towards some forms of neurodivergence are less hostile, particularly if there is a sense that uncomfortable forms of difference can be dampened by medication and that those persons aren’t terribly antisocial. But I think it’s fair to say that autistic people are often placed in the category of “uncomfortable” or even dangerous. I’d encourage you to look into the Cara Lisette’s #IAmNotDangerous campaign and campaigns highlighting the disproportionate levels of incarceration and punishment directed at autistic people if you’d like to learn more. In conversations I have at least every other week, a colleague or aquaintence associates a difficult or dangerous person with autism. This makes me aware that being “out” will leave me either (1) navigating forms of implicit bias or (2) responsible for educating colleagues before we can have a basis for conversation about how I am different from them. I enjoy teaching, so this really isn’t so bad, but I do get tired sometimes of having to put a lot of my already limited energy into deconstructing stereotypes.

Colleagues in Edinburgh did a study of autistic experiences with mental health support and they came to the conclusion that people…

> were being routinely denied access to mental health support purely for being autistic, as well as being disbelieved by mental health professionals when they were in distress, and finding services just inaccessible even when they were offered support. (https://medium.com/@sonnyhallett/counselling-for-different-ways-of-being-b89730c6ca2)

This really maps onto my experience here. Of the 20 or so times I’ve shared about my autism with colleagues, or of the many more times I’ve spoken more generically about distress in the workplace, some of those times I’ve been met with disbelief or (unwitting) condescension. I have found forms of support that are putatively offered for people like me on campus to be radically inaccessible, often fine-tuned to manage the workloads of those offering support and not foremost around the vulnerability of those they are intended for. But perhaps most of all, our support policies are often designed by people who do not have lived experience of disabilities. It’s a tricky balance we’ve discussed in the ND network between trying to bring experience into the foreground to enable more careful planning and help educate eager allies (we love and are grateful for you!), whilst being careful not to drain ourselves dry psychologically.

I’ve mentioned this whole being out in public thing is quite new to me. Thankfully there are some other braver colleagues who are ahead of me on this. But if anyone here wants to chat a bit more about things I’ve raised here, or draw some representation into a committee, I am happy to have a chat and offer my perspective. If I could make one small request, it might be that before you make this kind of request, that you re-read this presentation (I’ll make it available on my blog) and also read at least one of the resources I’ve included below. Then we’ll have some shared learning we can process and discuss together, side by side.

I don’t know what my story means for this group, and I’l be eager to hear from you about your own experiences and learn together as we explore this theme today. I’m delighted that people are coming together to speak passionately about mental health on our campus and open up conversations that have been stifled for way too long. And I can also see that while that conversation is mobilising, it’s also early days for the ways we speak about and carry awareness of mental wellbeing and especially neurodivergence.

 

Some useful references:

If you’re going to be around a table, bring some options for people to fidget or an activity that uses your hands (and warn people / encourage others to do the same in advance) so there’s no need to sit around staring at one another:

  • you can do  figet toys for the entire group at the meeting (fidget toys are awesome for everyone!) or something like build legos.

Or consider changing format / venue:

  • take your meeting “on a walk,” and talk while you walk (medical research has found that ambulatory movement can be very helpful for anyone who is trying to think out a problem!)
  • find a place where it’s normal to sit side by side: some of my best conversations have been sitting next to someone enjoying a view on a bench or in side-by-side chairs drinking coffee

And generally:

  • create opportunities for people to indicate different needs or deflect without cost; one very easy one is to encourage people to have laptops with them so they can “look stuff up”. I’ll often have my laptop out while I’m listening. Somteimes I’ll use this for closed captioning audio so I can read what people are saying when it’s hard to hear. Sometimes, I’ll be chasing down ideas that are inspired by what we’re talking about in greater depth than the conversation format will allow. Sometimes I need to step away from focal attention, tuning out for 5 minutes so I can regroup and rejoin the conversation. I don’t usually lose track of the flow of conversation as I can monitor it passively rather than actively and this kind of switching from active to passive can make participation easier

But remember two things: (1) it’s ok. We’ve done this before, and this one meeting isn’t going to be the thing that ends us and (2) the worst case scenario is having someone single you out and try to plan was to meet your needs on the spot in public.