I'm Vikram Jaswal.
I'm an associate professor of psychology
at the University of Virginia.
For the past three years, I've been teaching this two semester
seminar called the Science and Lived Experience of Autism.
We try to explore the tension between what the science says
about autism and what the lived experience of autism is like.
We work as a class of about 16 students
with a partner cohort of non-speaking autistic
individuals.
They don't use spoken language reliably
or, in some cases, at all.
And something that happens as these guys are spelling out
their responses is that the non-autistic participants,
we all learn to slow down.
What we do is we come prepared with a reading or maybe
a video clip that we've all watched.
And then we spend the entire day kind of digging
into what we got out of it, both from a neurotypical perspective
and an autistic perspective.
They basically show that there was no significant eye fixation
difference between the two groups, which
is a very surprising finding.
A-C-T. I find the obsession with eye contact--
N-G-- to be annoying.
M-A-L. I believe it is about NTs wanting us to look normal.
One of the goals is to get students to think about,
what do you do when the science doesn't
match the lived experience?
It's a really wide misconception that, if you're not displaying
interest in a neurotypical way, if you're not,
for instance, making eye contact or you're not verbalizing
something that you want to verbalize,
you're just not interested in engaging.
But when you actually talk to these guys
and you spend time with them, you
find that, for many of them, nothing could be further
from the truth.
They're longing for social connection.
They want to make friends.
But their bodies just aren't able to cooperate in a way that
allows them to do it.
I think the most shocking thing continues
to be how wrong I was about what it looks like to be listening
and what it looks like to be interested.
For the most part, the educational experience
of autistic folks is one of separation
from their typically developing peers.
And I see our seminar as an example
of how we can create an inclusive educational
environment.
Part of what has to happen is for society
to make accommodations, for the neurotypical folks
to learn ways to support autistic people as they are.
If we come in with a baseline of,
let's just see what this person can
do, trust their capabilities, trust their interest,
then I think we can create way more inclusive spaces
because we don't bring in all of these preconceived notions
about what someone can and can't do.