On his book See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor
Cover Interview of March 13, 2019
Lastly
I want readers to consider the advantages of a “difference”
model (not a “deficit” one) when approaching autism generally and reading
fiction specifically. In an opinion piece, I once wrote, “It’s early in the
21st century, and we still have no idea what autistic people can do.” By that I
meant: we’re only now beginning to see autistic strengths by discarding the
deeply pathological “all-deficits-all-the-time” lens, and we’re only now
beginning to recognize how plastic autistic brains are—as plastic as
non-autistic ones. Both neurotypes are capable of growing and changing in
dynamic ways. The danger of the autistics-are-good-at-math stereotype is that
it encourages us to exclude autistic young people from language arts classrooms
and, later, to steer them toward jobs in engineering, say, or computers. We
don’t have a narrow sense of nonautistic talent or potential. We don’t
categorically recommend that every nonautistic person head for one sort of
field and stay away from all others. Yes, students have natural predispositions
or proclivities, but our job as educators is not to foster them exclusively.
Rather, it is to expose students to a wide range of subjects in the hope that
they might discover an unlikely or improbable passion. When reading short
stories with Temple Grandin, I learned that her favorite course in college was
a literature course, a course that she was certain she would hate and do poorly
in. Fifty years after that class, she was still able to talk articulately about
Dante’s Inferno and to recite, from memory, lines of poetry by William
Wordsworth. Who knew? I hope that my book, which I purposefully wrote in an
accessible style, will persuade educators to think differently about autism and
literature.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
I want readers to consider the advantages of a “difference” model (not a “deficit” one) when approaching autism generally and reading fiction specifically. In an opinion piece, I once wrote, “It’s early in the 21st century, and we still have no idea what autistic people can do.” By that I meant: we’re only now beginning to see autistic strengths by discarding the deeply pathological “all-deficits-all-the-time” lens, and we’re only now beginning to recognize how plastic autistic brains are—as plastic as non-autistic ones. Both neurotypes are capable of growing and changing in dynamic ways. The danger of the autistics-are-good-at-math stereotype is that it encourages us to exclude autistic young people from language arts classrooms and, later, to steer them toward jobs in engineering, say, or computers. We don’t have a narrow sense of nonautistic talent or potential. We don’t categorically recommend that every nonautistic person head for one sort of field and stay away from all others. Yes, students have natural predispositions or proclivities, but our job as educators is not to foster them exclusively. Rather, it is to expose students to a wide range of subjects in the hope that they might discover an unlikely or improbable passion. When reading short stories with Temple Grandin, I learned that her favorite course in college was a literature course, a course that she was certain she would hate and do poorly in. Fifty years after that class, she was still able to talk articulately about Dante’s Inferno and to recite, from memory, lines of poetry by William Wordsworth. Who knew? I hope that my book, which I purposefully wrote in an accessible style, will persuade educators to think differently about autism and literature.