In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
OnlineFirst https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613261426691
This study aimed to examine how structural ableism affects autistic learners by collecting first-person perspectives of current and former autistic students about how their school experiences shaped their ability to self-advocate. In addition, the study aimed to further highlight autistic perspectives by incorporating a community-participatory research design, which consisted of a primarily autistic research team. Participants consisted of 19 autistic adolescents and adults who represented a wide array of intersectional sociodemographic identities. Participants were engaged in a 90-min semi-structured interview to discuss their school experiences. Interviews were analyzed qualitatively and inductively through a critical constructivist approach to grounded theory. Data analysis highlighted many structural barriers to autistic self-advocacy for our participants. These barriers were described within six distinct domains which emerged as themes in our analysis: erasure, conformity, isolation, oppression, hidden expectations, and authority. This qualitative, community-participatory research study exposes the degree to which systems-level ableism exists within US K–12 systems. Specifically, our participants emphasized ableism that went beyond the individual or interpersonal level. We conclude with a series of recommendations on how to combat these manifestations of ableism in schools.
From the article:
As a whole, our participants described feeling dissatisfied with their K–12 school experiences and having trouble self-advocating at school. Our findings, in which participants expressed that their needs were largely unmet, replicated similar studies that identified significant dissatisfaction among autistic individuals with their school experiences (Brede et al., 2017; Parsons, 2014; Williams et al., 2019). In addition, the fact that our participants experienced difficulty self-advocating aligns with other findings that autistic students are less likely to self-advocate than nonautistic students at school (Santhanam & Wilson, 2023).
