January’s guest blogger is Meredith Dangel. Meredith has been a Lecturer in the First-Year Writing Program for ten years and has taught in face-to-face, hybrid, and online environments.
Online classes are perfect for students with social anxiety or social skills challenges… right? Maybe.
Students with anxiety disorders may indeed benefit from virtual writing spaces. Perhaps group discussions and peer reviewing would be more beneficial for these students if not face-to-face. I don’t know. These are matters I’d like to explore. What I do know, however, is that my assumptions about autism in the online classroom were mistaken. It is not necessarily an autistic student’s perfect choice.
During research for his 2010 dissertation “Online pedagogy: designing writing courses for students with autism spectrum disorders,” Christopher Scott Wyatt hoped to find ways to improve virtual writing courses for students with autism spectrum disorder. Wyatt himself is autistic and claims hybrid and online courses he took in college were “more frustrating than traditional classrooms,” which challenged the scholarship at the time that assumed online environments were best for autistic students (2).
Wyatt analyzed 98 web sites frequented by adults who identify as autistic and surveyed 48 adults with clinical diagnoses of autism disorders. What he found was surprising: “The results directly challenged the research propositions and require a rethinking of the delivery of online course content. Overwhelmingly, the communities analyzed and the individuals surveyed point to a need to deliver course content via e-mail, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and other purely textual methods” (iii, emphasis mine).
In other words, our attempts to be tech-savvy can be problematic for our autistic students. The temptation to recreate the traditional classroom in a virtual environment is an approach that may actually defeat our well-intentioned purpose:
A multimedia-enhanced online classroom seems to inherently assume every student is able-bodied and without special needs. […] Suddenly, the shared experience is not truly shared—and differences are emphasized, not integrated smoothly into the learning experience of students. (Wyatt 273)
Multimedia bells and whistles aren’t the only problems, though. Even on a more basic level, the online classroom is a challenge. Forum discussions and group projects online, which seem to be more and more en vogue, provide another layer of ambiguity for our students who already have difficulty mimicking social norms in “real” life.
Fortunately, the news isn’t all bleak. The online environment can provide advantages. Wyatt and his survey participants compiled recommendations for “an ‘ideal’ composition or technical writing course” in both traditional and online environments (275). As previous research has shown, the classroom accommodations we deem non-negotiable and essential for those with special needs are also valuable to the neurotypical learners. For example, Wyatt’s respondents cited the need for clear expectations, guidelines, rubrics, and samples available online; all students benefit from these.
According to the CDC, 1 in 68 US children have an autism spectrum disorder. At the time of this writing, 44 students with autism are registered with the NCSU’s Disability Services Office. Of course, this number does not include those who choose not to register or do not know they are on the spectrum, and because of our collective awareness and improved supports, we will continue to see an increase in this number. This increase in college attendees is a wonderful trend, to be sure, but one that requires more than a smile and nod. We must not neglect the responsibility of designing our courses with our disabled students in mind.
We also must not “flatten” their experience, as Melanie Yergeau articulated at the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ 2016 Conference. Yergeau, who identifies as autistic, is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan whose research explores the intersectionality of rhetoric, technology, disabilities, and neurodiversity. She argues, “UD [universal design] often assumes that all blind people experience blindness similarly, that disabled people are by default white, that a nondisabled person’s assumptions about disability constitute disability.”
We can avoid falling into this trap by continuing to educate ourselves. In the last few years, we’ve had the opportunity to learn from folks in the Disability Services Office and the Counseling Center at FYWP professional development workshops. These are a few ways I am working toward an autism-friendly online environment, which also benefit all students, with or without disability:
- Provide a clear schedule from Day 1 of the semester, with deadlines written in multiple places. If changes must occur, these changes are given in advance and in multiple formats (via email, on Moodle, in printable document – see #2).
- Provide a text-only, printable version of the syllabus (linked in Moodle). I use a Google doc.
- Allow multiple modes of completing low-stakes assignments. My students’ “daily work” does not have to be submitted via typed text. They are also allowed to upload photos of their work written by hand, scrawled on a whiteboard, mapped out with colored pencils or markers, etc.
- Don’t overwhelm with technology. Choose a few different tools/media and make sure they are accessible.